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The Farm in the Green Mountains
The Farm in the Green Mountains is the story of a family finding home halfway across the world from their homeland.
Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer and her husband, the playwright Carl Zuckmayer, lived at the heart of intellectual life in Weimar, Germany, counting among their circle Stefan Zweig, Alma Mahler, and Bertolt Brecht. After Carl's work fell afoul of the Nazis, however, the couple and their two daughters were forced to flee Europe. Los Angeles didn't suit them and neither did New York, but then a chance stroll in the Vermont woods led them to Backwoods Farm, the eighteenth-century house where they would live for the next five years. In Europe, the Zuckmayers were accustomed to servants; in Vermont, they found themselves joyfully building chicken coops and refereeing fights between unruly ducks. Despite the endless work a new farm required and brutal winters that triggered bouts of melancholy, Alice discovered that in America she had found her native land.
Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer and her husband, the playwright Carl Zuckmayer, lived at the heart of intellectual life in Weimar, Germany, counting among their circle Stefan Zweig, Alma Mahler, and Bertolt Brecht. After Carl's work fell afoul of the Nazis, however, the couple and their two daughters were forced to flee Europe. Los Angeles didn't suit them and neither did New York, but then a chance stroll in the Vermont woods led them to Backwoods Farm, the eighteenth-century house where they would live for the next five years. In Europe, the Zuckmayers were accustomed to servants; in Vermont, they found themselves joyfully building chicken coops and refereeing fights between unruly ducks. Despite the endless work a new farm required and brutal winters that triggered bouts of melancholy, Alice discovered that in America she had found her native land.
242 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1949
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November 6, 2021
The Farm in the Green Mountains is a charming emigrant story. Alice and Carl Zuckmayer, a German couple, fled Nazi persecution in 1939 and moved to the United States with their daughters. There they found an unexpected ‘native land’ on a farm in Vermont.
Part memoir, part diary, this book was based on a series of letters Alice wrote after World War II to her parents-in-law in Germany who had survived the bombing and were awaiting their safe return. Alice provided a vivid account of their new life in unfamiliar climes. It was fascinating for a non-American city dweller like me who live in the tropics to read about rural life in Vermont in the 1940s. Vermont was described as the Green Mountain State where ‘winters are long and unimaginably cold.’ I marveled at how Alice and Carl who were used to having their own servants start a farm and wrestle daily with demands they never had to encounter in their previous careers as actor and playwright, respectively.
The Zuckmayers bought the eighteenth-century Backwoods Farm. Life was hard as ‘there was no plumbing, no sewer, no electricity, no telephone, no stoves.’ Winter was brutal: “We sat imprisoned in a cold, damp cave of a mount, and heard time drip.” And yet, for this brave couple, “It was as if we had come into an enchanted, bewitched wood, in which every shape had been transformed, over which even the moon hung in a different corner.” They had to share a phone line with eight other families. Imagine being able to listen in on other folks’ phone conversations. What interested them were not sensational news but ‘the everyday things: conversations about recipes, illnesses, weather disasters, weddings, auto accidents, cattle sales, and deaths.’ That way, Alice became acquainted with her new neighbors and established friendship ties.
They reared chickens, ducks, geese, and goats. So much affection was attached to the animals, some of which had names, and were not to be sold, butchered, or eaten. Snippets of Alice’s description of the animals reminded me faintly of Gerald Durrell’s Corfu Trilogy where the chickens or ducks were imbued with their own unique personality. Declaring war on rats and fighting red dysentery in their poultry kept the Zuckmayers on their toes. It was backbreaking labor.
One of my favorite chapters described Alice’s trips to the library in the university town miles away from the farm. The arduous journey to get there, especially in winter on bad roads, rendered Alice’s anticipation very palpable. In her words: “Here is then the library: my rock, my refuge, my cloister. When I sit in my cell, no goat bleats, no chicken cackles, no pig grunts, no duck quacks, no goose honks, no rooster crows.” Bliss.
Another historical chapter described the founding of Dartmouth College in Connecticut and the vision of its founder, Eleazar Wheelock, to extend tertiary education to Native Americans.
At the beginning of this book, Alice recalled of her first five weeks in New York: “We saw everything, we went everywhere, but never found ourselves.” It was wonderful to know that at the end of seven years and post their return to Europe, the Zuckmayers had found a true home in the Green Mountains. How grand to learn that for them eventually, “The ties to the new land are as strong as if we had always lived there.”
I have to admit that parts of this memoir plodded from sheer detail attached to the day-to-day discoveries of the Zuckmayers. Their sojourn amongst the Green Mountain interested me sufficiently and was for the most part pleasurable reading. I would have loved to read it by a toasty fireplace in the heart of winter.
Part memoir, part diary, this book was based on a series of letters Alice wrote after World War II to her parents-in-law in Germany who had survived the bombing and were awaiting their safe return. Alice provided a vivid account of their new life in unfamiliar climes. It was fascinating for a non-American city dweller like me who live in the tropics to read about rural life in Vermont in the 1940s. Vermont was described as the Green Mountain State where ‘winters are long and unimaginably cold.’ I marveled at how Alice and Carl who were used to having their own servants start a farm and wrestle daily with demands they never had to encounter in their previous careers as actor and playwright, respectively.
The Zuckmayers bought the eighteenth-century Backwoods Farm. Life was hard as ‘there was no plumbing, no sewer, no electricity, no telephone, no stoves.’ Winter was brutal: “We sat imprisoned in a cold, damp cave of a mount, and heard time drip.” And yet, for this brave couple, “It was as if we had come into an enchanted, bewitched wood, in which every shape had been transformed, over which even the moon hung in a different corner.” They had to share a phone line with eight other families. Imagine being able to listen in on other folks’ phone conversations. What interested them were not sensational news but ‘the everyday things: conversations about recipes, illnesses, weather disasters, weddings, auto accidents, cattle sales, and deaths.’ That way, Alice became acquainted with her new neighbors and established friendship ties.
They reared chickens, ducks, geese, and goats. So much affection was attached to the animals, some of which had names, and were not to be sold, butchered, or eaten. Snippets of Alice’s description of the animals reminded me faintly of Gerald Durrell’s Corfu Trilogy where the chickens or ducks were imbued with their own unique personality. Declaring war on rats and fighting red dysentery in their poultry kept the Zuckmayers on their toes. It was backbreaking labor.
One of my favorite chapters described Alice’s trips to the library in the university town miles away from the farm. The arduous journey to get there, especially in winter on bad roads, rendered Alice’s anticipation very palpable. In her words: “Here is then the library: my rock, my refuge, my cloister. When I sit in my cell, no goat bleats, no chicken cackles, no pig grunts, no duck quacks, no goose honks, no rooster crows.” Bliss.
Another historical chapter described the founding of Dartmouth College in Connecticut and the vision of its founder, Eleazar Wheelock, to extend tertiary education to Native Americans.
At the beginning of this book, Alice recalled of her first five weeks in New York: “We saw everything, we went everywhere, but never found ourselves.” It was wonderful to know that at the end of seven years and post their return to Europe, the Zuckmayers had found a true home in the Green Mountains. How grand to learn that for them eventually, “The ties to the new land are as strong as if we had always lived there.”
I have to admit that parts of this memoir plodded from sheer detail attached to the day-to-day discoveries of the Zuckmayers. Their sojourn amongst the Green Mountain interested me sufficiently and was for the most part pleasurable reading. I would have loved to read it by a toasty fireplace in the heart of winter.
June 15, 2023
FROM THE BLURB:
I really enjoyed this memoir. It triggered wonderful memories of snail mail letters, often chapters of unpublished books, as they were so thick and packed with news. I recount a letter from Vermont, addressed to me in my remote little world in the mountains, from the real nun who married Captain Von Trapp in The Sound Of Music. In her own handwriting, she wrote to me from her Vermont home and had me almost passed on from anaphylactic shock when I opened the letter and realized where it came from. Several years ago a penfriend in New Jersey picked up on my love for that movie, traveled to Vermont, met the nun, and told her about me. I received a book, autographed by her, with several family photos(not publicity pics) of the children and the personal written letter. Can you imagine my surprise!?
Since then I always had this dream to one day visit Vermont myself. Alas, that dream might never happen, but in the meantime, some other treats can make up for that loss. After reading Diane's review of this memoir, I decided to read it. Partly because of Vermont, but also because it was one of those books that slipped through the grit of pop lit. And of course, I live in an even more remote location, where it takes two hours and three mountain passes just to reach the nearest tar road with a four-wheel drive, high-powered vehicle! We cannot drive Ferraris, they're simply not convertibles. They cannot be converted into chicken pens or U-boats. We have to cross the river 35 times to the nearest tar road. When said river is in flood, these four-by-four vehicles need to be converted into U-boats!
Another reason why I wanted to read this memoir, was The Egg and I (Betty MacDonald Memoirs, #1) by Betty MacDonald, which had a similar theme. Another remote farm and an equally inexperienced urbanite who took on the romance of living on a remote farm and making chickens a secondary family, with often the same funny results. However, The Farm in the Green Mountains had a serious tone and a different approach to the challenges that kept this German family away from everything they ever loved and treasured. They were immigrants and emigrants. They had a tough time learning a new language and settling down in America.
Alice Zuckmayer took on everything. From the bitterly cold winters which made their ears hurt, to the ever-present Drude(depression) that waited for any opportunity to invade their home in the long dark freezing days.
Drude, Drude, come tomorrow, I can wait to borrow sorrow.
In between they had animals with psychological problems; a duck with an identity crisis; a long road through the woods to walk to the nearest road; bears, foxes, rats, and other creatures which insisted on sharing their space, and the non-stop labor which left their hands blistered and bloodied. Farm life turned out to be a never-ending cascade of chores. Back-breaking, spirit-bending labor. With the bulletins from the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) they did the unthinkable. They became farmers.
But the laughter was always present. Alice made every hardship an opportunity, found in every setback a gift, in every unforeseen problem an adventure, and in every new obstacle a good story to tell in her letters to friends in Germany. These letters became this book.
The translator says in the introduction:
A wonderful, deeply moving, and inspiring read.
The Farm in the Green Mountains is a story of a refugee family finding its true home—thousands of miles from its homeland.
Alice and Carl Zuckmayer lived at the center of Weimar-era Berlin. She was a former actor turned medical student, he was a playwright, and their circle of friends included Stefan Zweig, Alma Mahler, and Bertolt Brecht. But then the Nazis took over and Carl’s most recent success, a play satirizing German militarism, impressed them in all the wrong ways. The couple and their two daughters were forced to flee, first to Austria, then to Switzerland, and finally to the United States. Los Angeles didn’t suit them, and neither did New York, but a chance stroll in the Vermont woods led them to Backwoods Farm and the eighteenth-century farmhouse where they would spend the next five years.
In Europe, the Zuckmayers were accustomed to servants; in Vermont, they found themselves building chicken coops, refereeing fights between fractious ducks, and caring for temperamental water pipes “like babies.” But despite the endless work and the brutal, depressing winters, Alice found that in America she had at last discovered her “native land.”
This generous, surprising, and witty memoir, a best seller in postwar Germany, has all the charm of an unlikely romantic comedy.
I really enjoyed this memoir. It triggered wonderful memories of snail mail letters, often chapters of unpublished books, as they were so thick and packed with news. I recount a letter from Vermont, addressed to me in my remote little world in the mountains, from the real nun who married Captain Von Trapp in The Sound Of Music. In her own handwriting, she wrote to me from her Vermont home and had me almost passed on from anaphylactic shock when I opened the letter and realized where it came from. Several years ago a penfriend in New Jersey picked up on my love for that movie, traveled to Vermont, met the nun, and told her about me. I received a book, autographed by her, with several family photos(not publicity pics) of the children and the personal written letter. Can you imagine my surprise!?
Since then I always had this dream to one day visit Vermont myself. Alas, that dream might never happen, but in the meantime, some other treats can make up for that loss. After reading Diane's review of this memoir, I decided to read it. Partly because of Vermont, but also because it was one of those books that slipped through the grit of pop lit. And of course, I live in an even more remote location, where it takes two hours and three mountain passes just to reach the nearest tar road with a four-wheel drive, high-powered vehicle! We cannot drive Ferraris, they're simply not convertibles. They cannot be converted into chicken pens or U-boats. We have to cross the river 35 times to the nearest tar road. When said river is in flood, these four-by-four vehicles need to be converted into U-boats!
Another reason why I wanted to read this memoir, was The Egg and I (Betty MacDonald Memoirs, #1) by Betty MacDonald, which had a similar theme. Another remote farm and an equally inexperienced urbanite who took on the romance of living on a remote farm and making chickens a secondary family, with often the same funny results. However, The Farm in the Green Mountains had a serious tone and a different approach to the challenges that kept this German family away from everything they ever loved and treasured. They were immigrants and emigrants. They had a tough time learning a new language and settling down in America.
And their memories of "the plague" ruling Germany? ...we had unconsciously put our memories away in safe places and protected them from our feelings because we had to...
...We have emigrated from there, we no longer belong there. Here we are immigrants, but we don’t belong here yet. Will they distrust us here, because we come from the land in which the plague reigns? Will they quarantine us in camps, the way they did in France, or deport us, the way it happened in England? “This is the end. Emigration and immigration are the same as death and birth. I have not yet been born again.”
Alice Zuckmayer took on everything. From the bitterly cold winters which made their ears hurt, to the ever-present Drude(depression) that waited for any opportunity to invade their home in the long dark freezing days.
Drude, Drude, come tomorrow, I can wait to borrow sorrow.
In between they had animals with psychological problems; a duck with an identity crisis; a long road through the woods to walk to the nearest road; bears, foxes, rats, and other creatures which insisted on sharing their space, and the non-stop labor which left their hands blistered and bloodied. Farm life turned out to be a never-ending cascade of chores. Back-breaking, spirit-bending labor. With the bulletins from the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) they did the unthinkable. They became farmers.
But the laughter was always present. Alice made every hardship an opportunity, found in every setback a gift, in every unforeseen problem an adventure, and in every new obstacle a good story to tell in her letters to friends in Germany. These letters became this book.
The translator says in the introduction:
There is a hilariously cranky, bossy old woman on their party line. There is a transgender house cat, an infertile chicken, an antisocial duck, and a naughty dog. There are misadventures and horror stories and always, always there is more work to be done. The intricacies of their days, the ins and outs of life on the farm as it is learned and lived by these unlikely inhabitants, this is superficially what The Farm in the Green Mountains is about. On a deeper level, it’s a story of perseverance, protection, everyday heroism, and joy.
A wonderful, deeply moving, and inspiring read.
August 15, 2017
I sorely needed a quiet, peaceful read after my last book, which was intense. This one gave me that, a brief respite from the horrors of the world we live in right now.
This one began with the author and her family leaving the horrors of Nazi Germany, not because they were Jews, but because her husband had been critical of the Hitler regime, both vocally and in print. They found themselves sitting out the war on an isolated farm in Vermont, where they raised chickens and goats, struggling to make ends meet in a country in which they were not only foreign, but from a country with which the U.S. was at war. It is written with humor, with love for America, and for the town and people of Bernard, Vermont. A straight-forward account of their difficulties, and also the blessings they received along the way. I liked their philosophy: You will always be happy if you don't expect much, but are satisfied with people and things as they are.
I was reading happily along toward the end, when they returned to Europe to see what was left of the world they had fled, when this passage hit me like a sledgehammer. It was written in 1949.
"We found enemies again, too. They were unchanged. A few had been destroyed. Others sit behind bars. Many have assumed straight-jackets of de-nazification to convince people that they are normal again, but they are just waiting for a new era of insanity, when crimes will again be legally permitted and the mentally ill will again achieve power and honor."
Wow! I guess nothing ever really changes, does it?
This one began with the author and her family leaving the horrors of Nazi Germany, not because they were Jews, but because her husband had been critical of the Hitler regime, both vocally and in print. They found themselves sitting out the war on an isolated farm in Vermont, where they raised chickens and goats, struggling to make ends meet in a country in which they were not only foreign, but from a country with which the U.S. was at war. It is written with humor, with love for America, and for the town and people of Bernard, Vermont. A straight-forward account of their difficulties, and also the blessings they received along the way. I liked their philosophy: You will always be happy if you don't expect much, but are satisfied with people and things as they are.
I was reading happily along toward the end, when they returned to Europe to see what was left of the world they had fled, when this passage hit me like a sledgehammer. It was written in 1949.
"We found enemies again, too. They were unchanged. A few had been destroyed. Others sit behind bars. Many have assumed straight-jackets of de-nazification to convince people that they are normal again, but they are just waiting for a new era of insanity, when crimes will again be legally permitted and the mentally ill will again achieve power and honor."
Wow! I guess nothing ever really changes, does it?
December 3, 2021
One of those books I never would have read, because I had not heard of it, but for a GR friend of mine who did read it and liked it.
What a nice book! 😊😊 😊
The author, her husband, a famous German playwright Carl Zuckmayer, and their two children emigrated to the US in 1939 because of Hitler’s reign of terror (Zuckmayer had written a play satirizing German militarism, and was not in the good graces of the Nazis). The family rented out a farm in Barnard, Vermont, and this book is the author’s description of life on the farm while they were there. She was also an academic scholar, and she would take occasional trips into Hanover, NH to go the library on the grounds of Dartmouth College.
One of the main take-aways from this book was I do not want to be a farmer when I retire. I always thought it would be sorta nice to be a farmer…to be outside every day except in the winter when I could just huddle in the farmhouse and read a good book for hours and days on end. Boy, this memoir put me on the clue train real fast! From dawn to dusk they worked. And even before dawn. The father had to wake up at 3 am and put wood in the fireplace, otherwise the pipes would burst in the frigid Vermont winter. And I thought it would be idyllic if there was a lot of snow in the winter to go with my dreams of reading by the fireplace in my farmhouse. Wrong-o, again. Not when the snow was threatening to collapse roofs of buildings on your property because of the sheer volume of it.
Oh yes, and let’s have some chickens and ducks and geese and other fowl. Nope, at least when it comes to roosters. If I got two roosters, based on what I read in this book, one would probably peck the other one to death. Oh, and rats would carry the chickens away to eat them in their burrows. And if the rats didn’t kill the chickens, parasites that enter their bloodstream would.
So here I am in the winter in a farmhouse with burst water pipes and no chickens to watch over, no eggs to eat cuz no chickens…and let’s not forget on top of being bummed out about all that there would be Seasonal Affective Disorder addling my brain (she had a very interesting chapter on that called ‘Drude’). So I guess I could call a friend and maybe the friend can cheer me up. That is fine, if the other 8 people on the ‘party line’ will get off the phone!!! (I forgot all about party lines!!! I am old enough that when I was a kid, I would pick up the phone, and somebody from God-knows-where was yacking away. We only shared a party line with another house…not with 8 other houses!!!)
Green Acres is not for me!!! Give me the city life where I can go to a supermarket and obtain my food much more easily. 😊
She had a wonderful chapter on the library at Dartmouth College — Baker Library (now Baker-Berry Library). If you were on faculty there (or I guess had special credentials like she apparently had) you could have access to a little room all your own to read and work in peace and quiet. Surrounded by stacks and stacks and aisles and aisles of books and journals, etc. And there was a great room in the library with a fireplace and you could sit in comfortable chairs and drink coffee. Ooo-la-la.
The author apparently never intended for this to be published. She sent letters to her in-laws In Germany that contained pieces of this book, and apparently an editor of a newspaper read the letters and thought this stuff was so good, he was publishing them in a Munich newspaper, New Zeitung. And so the original book was published in 1949 in Germany and sold many copies. In 1987 The New England Press published the translated work (translated by Ida H. Washington and Carol E. Washington). I read from that version. The New York Review of Books re-issued it in 2017 with an Introduction by Elisa Albert (introduction is also in the Paris Review…a very fine Introduction I might add: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2.... This book is so good I might order a copy for my own library.
Review:
• https://beyondedenrock.com/2017/08/24...
What a nice book! 😊😊 😊
The author, her husband, a famous German playwright Carl Zuckmayer, and their two children emigrated to the US in 1939 because of Hitler’s reign of terror (Zuckmayer had written a play satirizing German militarism, and was not in the good graces of the Nazis). The family rented out a farm in Barnard, Vermont, and this book is the author’s description of life on the farm while they were there. She was also an academic scholar, and she would take occasional trips into Hanover, NH to go the library on the grounds of Dartmouth College.
One of the main take-aways from this book was I do not want to be a farmer when I retire. I always thought it would be sorta nice to be a farmer…to be outside every day except in the winter when I could just huddle in the farmhouse and read a good book for hours and days on end. Boy, this memoir put me on the clue train real fast! From dawn to dusk they worked. And even before dawn. The father had to wake up at 3 am and put wood in the fireplace, otherwise the pipes would burst in the frigid Vermont winter. And I thought it would be idyllic if there was a lot of snow in the winter to go with my dreams of reading by the fireplace in my farmhouse. Wrong-o, again. Not when the snow was threatening to collapse roofs of buildings on your property because of the sheer volume of it.
Oh yes, and let’s have some chickens and ducks and geese and other fowl. Nope, at least when it comes to roosters. If I got two roosters, based on what I read in this book, one would probably peck the other one to death. Oh, and rats would carry the chickens away to eat them in their burrows. And if the rats didn’t kill the chickens, parasites that enter their bloodstream would.
So here I am in the winter in a farmhouse with burst water pipes and no chickens to watch over, no eggs to eat cuz no chickens…and let’s not forget on top of being bummed out about all that there would be Seasonal Affective Disorder addling my brain (she had a very interesting chapter on that called ‘Drude’). So I guess I could call a friend and maybe the friend can cheer me up. That is fine, if the other 8 people on the ‘party line’ will get off the phone!!! (I forgot all about party lines!!! I am old enough that when I was a kid, I would pick up the phone, and somebody from God-knows-where was yacking away. We only shared a party line with another house…not with 8 other houses!!!)
Green Acres is not for me!!! Give me the city life where I can go to a supermarket and obtain my food much more easily. 😊
She had a wonderful chapter on the library at Dartmouth College — Baker Library (now Baker-Berry Library). If you were on faculty there (or I guess had special credentials like she apparently had) you could have access to a little room all your own to read and work in peace and quiet. Surrounded by stacks and stacks and aisles and aisles of books and journals, etc. And there was a great room in the library with a fireplace and you could sit in comfortable chairs and drink coffee. Ooo-la-la.
The author apparently never intended for this to be published. She sent letters to her in-laws In Germany that contained pieces of this book, and apparently an editor of a newspaper read the letters and thought this stuff was so good, he was publishing them in a Munich newspaper, New Zeitung. And so the original book was published in 1949 in Germany and sold many copies. In 1987 The New England Press published the translated work (translated by Ida H. Washington and Carol E. Washington). I read from that version. The New York Review of Books re-issued it in 2017 with an Introduction by Elisa Albert (introduction is also in the Paris Review…a very fine Introduction I might add: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2.... This book is so good I might order a copy for my own library.
Review:
• https://beyondedenrock.com/2017/08/24...
May 19, 2017
May 2017 NYRB selection.
So wow. Herdan-Zuckmayer's memoir about her time on a farm in Vermont is wonderful. You meet her goats. More importantly, are the wonderful descriptions of the surrondings as well as mediations on the difference between European and American cultures - in particular trains, women, and libraries.
Wonderful.
Especially about the gander and his duck groupies.
So wow. Herdan-Zuckmayer's memoir about her time on a farm in Vermont is wonderful. You meet her goats. More importantly, are the wonderful descriptions of the surrondings as well as mediations on the difference between European and American cultures - in particular trains, women, and libraries.
Wonderful.
Especially about the gander and his duck groupies.
August 24, 2017
This book is based on letters that the German author sent home from America during the World War II, and that when she went home after the war she re-worked for a newspaper column. Not long after that they were collected in book form, and some years later they were translated and an English language edition of the book was published.
(I love the translation by Ida H Washington and Carol E Washington, and the clever way they used English that was perfectly correct but not quite the way a native speaker would speak.)
Alice and Carl Zuckmayer, and their two daughters left Germany at the start of World War II. Zuck was a playwright, his most recent play had satirised the militarisation of Germany, and the couple were concerned that the authorities were taking the satire very seriously. They moved to Austria, then to Switzerland, before finally deciding to settle in the USA.
This book is an account of the years they spent living in an eighteenth-century farmhouse in the Vermont countryside.
It is clear that Alice – I call her Alice because I feel that I know her very well after reading her book – did a great deal of reworking of her material. The book had a beginning and an ending, there is some progression, but most of the chapters are written around a particular theme rather than a particular period of time; and it is clear that she has thought back over her years in America, adding more memories and more consideration of what she has to say.
Alice fell in love with her new home at first sight.
‘There were mountains wooded with firs, spruce, pine, beech, birch, elm and maple trees. In the woods there were weasels, marteens and foxes. It was a landscape that resembled the one at home even in details, and yet it was totally unfamiliar and foreign. It was as if we had come onto an enchanted, bewitched wood in which every shape had been transformed, over which even the moon hung in a different corner.
The farmhouse was run down, but the landlord was pleased to have tenants and organised all of the work needed to make it habitable. Then Alice and Zuck had to work out how best to support themselves, and after a thorough investigation of the possibilities open to them they decided that their best option was to become poultry farmers.
They took that very seriously, they clearly worked very hard, and they came to love what they were doing. The chapters about the farm birds are wonderful, they recognised that those birds had their own distinctive characters and their own society, and that makes the chapters that stories about them a joy to read.
They were practical and thoughtful – they worked out how to help sick birds logically and scientifically – but they were unsentimental and they didn’t lose sight of the fact that they were farmers – only birds that were not destined for slaughter would be given names.
Alice was very impressed by the USA.
‘It is a new world, and everything that happened in the old one is forgotten and not chalked up against on you the big board of the new world, but it isn’t written up to your credit either. It is called starting from the beginning. “To start all over again,” is one of the most meaningful sayings which America has produced … ‘
You see, she really thinks about things!
She devotes a whole chapter to the USDA, which she describes as ‘this powerful support system, this unique institution’, she appreciates the community around her, and it is clear that she thinks of the farmhouse not as a temporary refuge but as a proper home.
I loved her voice; it was warm and witty. I loved her thoughtfulness and her practicality; her readiness to work hard and her readiness to enjoy whatever life in America could offer her.
‘Great tree trunks stand in front of the town hall, driven a yard deep in the earth, and powerful lumberjacks stand by the trees and wait for the signal to compete in felling the trees with their axes. Blow follows blow until one tree after another falls …
Then it is the women’s turn. A piece of tree trunk too big to fit in the highest and widest fireplace must be cut through with a two-person saw. Now our Miss Perkins walks on to the scene, seventy-nine years old, and saws with Miss Patenaude, who is only seventy-six years old. And while they are sawing, precisely and powerfully, you catch a vision of the age of the pioneers. When they win and receive the first prize, you realise why women in America are not inferior to men. What wonderful things are the American celebrations.’
The book is firmly focused on the couple’s life and farm. Their daughters are only mentioned in passing, America coming into the war is only referenced because they have to register with the authorities, and when Alice mentions that a former farm hand who has come from the war in Japan considerably changed she doesn’t stop to wonder why.
I loved the chapter about the telephone – a party line shared with eight other households!
‘With the telephone we could find out how out neighbours were living, what they were thinking, when they were doing laundry, what was happening to them; from their voices we could tell if they were sad and out-of-sorts or happy and optimistic.’
I adored the chapter about the library – Alice’s love of the place, of books, of learning really shines – but I can’t quote it because it works so very well as a whole.
The book doesn’t end with a war.
Germany will always be home, but returning is difficult.
'We found enemies again, too. They were unchanged. A few had been destroyed. Others sit behind bars. Many have assumed straight-jackets of de-nazification to convince people that they are normal again, but they are just waiting for a new era of insanity, when crimes will again be legally permitted and the mentally ill will again achieve power and honour.'
A return to Vermont stirs happy memories and brings reunion with friends and neighbours, but the couple has the wisdom to know that they have to move on. The world is changing and the passing of the years means that they couldn’t put in the work that the farm needed and do the other things that they wanted to do.
I am so glad that Alice wrote those letters home, that she re-worked them, and that they were compiled and translated so that I could read this lovely book.
(I love the translation by Ida H Washington and Carol E Washington, and the clever way they used English that was perfectly correct but not quite the way a native speaker would speak.)
Alice and Carl Zuckmayer, and their two daughters left Germany at the start of World War II. Zuck was a playwright, his most recent play had satirised the militarisation of Germany, and the couple were concerned that the authorities were taking the satire very seriously. They moved to Austria, then to Switzerland, before finally deciding to settle in the USA.
This book is an account of the years they spent living in an eighteenth-century farmhouse in the Vermont countryside.
It is clear that Alice – I call her Alice because I feel that I know her very well after reading her book – did a great deal of reworking of her material. The book had a beginning and an ending, there is some progression, but most of the chapters are written around a particular theme rather than a particular period of time; and it is clear that she has thought back over her years in America, adding more memories and more consideration of what she has to say.
Alice fell in love with her new home at first sight.
‘There were mountains wooded with firs, spruce, pine, beech, birch, elm and maple trees. In the woods there were weasels, marteens and foxes. It was a landscape that resembled the one at home even in details, and yet it was totally unfamiliar and foreign. It was as if we had come onto an enchanted, bewitched wood in which every shape had been transformed, over which even the moon hung in a different corner.
The farmhouse was run down, but the landlord was pleased to have tenants and organised all of the work needed to make it habitable. Then Alice and Zuck had to work out how best to support themselves, and after a thorough investigation of the possibilities open to them they decided that their best option was to become poultry farmers.
They took that very seriously, they clearly worked very hard, and they came to love what they were doing. The chapters about the farm birds are wonderful, they recognised that those birds had their own distinctive characters and their own society, and that makes the chapters that stories about them a joy to read.
They were practical and thoughtful – they worked out how to help sick birds logically and scientifically – but they were unsentimental and they didn’t lose sight of the fact that they were farmers – only birds that were not destined for slaughter would be given names.
Alice was very impressed by the USA.
‘It is a new world, and everything that happened in the old one is forgotten and not chalked up against on you the big board of the new world, but it isn’t written up to your credit either. It is called starting from the beginning. “To start all over again,” is one of the most meaningful sayings which America has produced … ‘
You see, she really thinks about things!
She devotes a whole chapter to the USDA, which she describes as ‘this powerful support system, this unique institution’, she appreciates the community around her, and it is clear that she thinks of the farmhouse not as a temporary refuge but as a proper home.
I loved her voice; it was warm and witty. I loved her thoughtfulness and her practicality; her readiness to work hard and her readiness to enjoy whatever life in America could offer her.
‘Great tree trunks stand in front of the town hall, driven a yard deep in the earth, and powerful lumberjacks stand by the trees and wait for the signal to compete in felling the trees with their axes. Blow follows blow until one tree after another falls …
Then it is the women’s turn. A piece of tree trunk too big to fit in the highest and widest fireplace must be cut through with a two-person saw. Now our Miss Perkins walks on to the scene, seventy-nine years old, and saws with Miss Patenaude, who is only seventy-six years old. And while they are sawing, precisely and powerfully, you catch a vision of the age of the pioneers. When they win and receive the first prize, you realise why women in America are not inferior to men. What wonderful things are the American celebrations.’
The book is firmly focused on the couple’s life and farm. Their daughters are only mentioned in passing, America coming into the war is only referenced because they have to register with the authorities, and when Alice mentions that a former farm hand who has come from the war in Japan considerably changed she doesn’t stop to wonder why.
I loved the chapter about the telephone – a party line shared with eight other households!
‘With the telephone we could find out how out neighbours were living, what they were thinking, when they were doing laundry, what was happening to them; from their voices we could tell if they were sad and out-of-sorts or happy and optimistic.’
I adored the chapter about the library – Alice’s love of the place, of books, of learning really shines – but I can’t quote it because it works so very well as a whole.
The book doesn’t end with a war.
Germany will always be home, but returning is difficult.
'We found enemies again, too. They were unchanged. A few had been destroyed. Others sit behind bars. Many have assumed straight-jackets of de-nazification to convince people that they are normal again, but they are just waiting for a new era of insanity, when crimes will again be legally permitted and the mentally ill will again achieve power and honour.'
A return to Vermont stirs happy memories and brings reunion with friends and neighbours, but the couple has the wisdom to know that they have to move on. The world is changing and the passing of the years means that they couldn’t put in the work that the farm needed and do the other things that they wanted to do.
I am so glad that Alice wrote those letters home, that she re-worked them, and that they were compiled and translated so that I could read this lovely book.
June 10, 2023
This is a pleasant little memoir of war years spent by Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer and her husband, Zuck, on a farm in Vermont. They were exiles from Austria, took up farming (skills that they learned along the way, not skills they arrived with), and came to love America and feel a part of the Vermont community in which they settled. After the war, they returned to Europe, but never forgot their heart-felt attachment to America.
I love these first-hand accounts of what life was like during the war, and this one was unique in that it came from the eyes of an exile. It made good nightly reading before bedtime and an interesting diversion from the novels I generally read.
I love these first-hand accounts of what life was like during the war, and this one was unique in that it came from the eyes of an exile. It made good nightly reading before bedtime and an interesting diversion from the novels I generally read.
June 7, 2023
I think I came to this book with the wrong expectations; perhaps I imagined more charm, more lyricism, more philosophy. It’s possible my issues with the writing style may be ascribed to the translation, for this was originally written in German. To me it read a bit like a laundry list, though that’s not entirely fair because it gives all the details (all) of life in a particular place and time and is interesting on that level.
The author and her husband, Zuck, are driven out of Europe by the Nazis because Hitler took against a play Zuck has written. They are more or less refugees, though they seem to have some limited resources and are not as destitute as some refugees. After living for a short time in New York they wind up renting a farm outside a small Vermont village. The place has almost no amenities and is rendered remote by roads that are challenging at the best of times and downright impassable for much of the year.
They know nothing of farming but obtain handbooks from the USDA and follow the advice therein. It’s wartime so they have only sporadic and unreliable help. What follow are years of extraordinarily grueling toil, feeding animals, cleaning up after them, nursing them, slaughtering them for market, fighting off freezing temperatures, rats, and hopelessness. All is detailed with a clear eye and a refusal to give in or give up. Both the author and her husband try to continue to have some sort of intellectual life around the edges of the physical labor, and they develop friendships as well as a deep appreciation for the character of their adopted country and sturdy New England neighbors.
The book was chiefly interesting to me for its historical value. Though set in the 1940s it felt more like a pioneer narrative; I was struck by the primitiveness of the living conditions, the roads, the daily challenges of life. Throughout the winter they couldn’t drive to and from their house and had to hike through the snowy woods, sometimes for hours, to get to a passable roadway. What a difference a few decades has made in our sense of the comfort and ease we are entitled to! I was also struck and saddened by how much the American character has changed: she writes of people at all economic levels who value hard work and modesty, have a willingness to help one another and support neighbors without question, friendly and nonjudgmental. Part of that might be due to the rural setting, but overall the tone of community life was very different. We’ve changed, and not for the better.
The author and her husband, Zuck, are driven out of Europe by the Nazis because Hitler took against a play Zuck has written. They are more or less refugees, though they seem to have some limited resources and are not as destitute as some refugees. After living for a short time in New York they wind up renting a farm outside a small Vermont village. The place has almost no amenities and is rendered remote by roads that are challenging at the best of times and downright impassable for much of the year.
They know nothing of farming but obtain handbooks from the USDA and follow the advice therein. It’s wartime so they have only sporadic and unreliable help. What follow are years of extraordinarily grueling toil, feeding animals, cleaning up after them, nursing them, slaughtering them for market, fighting off freezing temperatures, rats, and hopelessness. All is detailed with a clear eye and a refusal to give in or give up. Both the author and her husband try to continue to have some sort of intellectual life around the edges of the physical labor, and they develop friendships as well as a deep appreciation for the character of their adopted country and sturdy New England neighbors.
The book was chiefly interesting to me for its historical value. Though set in the 1940s it felt more like a pioneer narrative; I was struck by the primitiveness of the living conditions, the roads, the daily challenges of life. Throughout the winter they couldn’t drive to and from their house and had to hike through the snowy woods, sometimes for hours, to get to a passable roadway. What a difference a few decades has made in our sense of the comfort and ease we are entitled to! I was also struck and saddened by how much the American character has changed: she writes of people at all economic levels who value hard work and modesty, have a willingness to help one another and support neighbors without question, friendly and nonjudgmental. Part of that might be due to the rural setting, but overall the tone of community life was very different. We’ve changed, and not for the better.
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February 28, 2025Thank you Dominika for recommending this book! I'm not going to rate it because it defies rating. It's such a funny mix of a book. It's the story of Alice and her husband Zuck fleeing the horrors of Nazi Germany and trying (and succeeding amazingly well) to make America home for an unknown amount of time. It's the story of them falling in love with rural Vermont and becoming farmers without having any experience of farming. The book is full of Alice's amusing stories about their years on the farm: party line phones, the intensity of winter, the history of Dartmouth College where Alice would spend precious hours reading and studying, and the legions of animals with their whims and diseases. Towards the end of the book, Alice recounts their return to Europe after the war and how much it had changed and how much they had changed by adjusting to America for five intense years. They belonged in two lands and felt their hearts pulled in two directions. It's quite a poignant ending and captures the 1940s so well. In Europe, it was a time of immense upheaval. In America, it was a time before upheaval of a different kind: before highways and modern ways of living that changed rural America beyond recognition. The widely different narratives of Europe and America take on oddly parallel elements that show just how much WWII shaped history, no matter where you lived or were from.
Lest you think this is all poignant, it is also sooo funny. And so worth a read! I highly recommend it.
Lest you think this is all poignant, it is also sooo funny. And so worth a read! I highly recommend it.
July 31, 2017
An unusual memoir of Austrian refugees escaping to Vermont and starting a farm. Unusual in that it has chapters on USDA and their help with novice farmers and chapters in the Dartmouth library the author used extensively. Also has bits about their chicken houses, stoves and fireplaces , country stores etc. very nice read. An nyrb 2017 book.
December 10, 2024
I'm suffering through a cold right now and needed an undemanding book. This was just the perfect thing to read especially by the glow of the Christmas tree. Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer's voice is elegant, humorous, and often poignant. I also started looking up farms for sale in Vermont while reading...a lady can dream.
July 15, 2021
Die fünf Sterne haben eventuell nicht so viel mit dem Buch zu tun, meine letzte Lektüre liegt schon wieder ein paar Jahre zurück. Aber ich habe es zuerst als Kind und danach noch mehrmals gelesen und würde es jederzeit wieder tun. Wenn man Bücher über das Erlernen von Landwirtschaft aus Broschüren und Schuhcreme essende Ziegen grundsätzlich unseriös findet, wird man leicht übersehen, dass hier stilistisch interessante Dinge passieren, das geht mich aber nichts an, denn ich mag bereits Schuhcreme essende Ziegen. Es ist schade, dass ihr Mann so viele Bücher geschrieben hat und sie so wenige.
March 21, 2012
I cannot believe nobody rated this book...
Simply a delight ! One of the best in this genre.
Simply a delight ! One of the best in this genre.
April 9, 2024
Alles andere als 5 Sterne ist respektlos, es geht halt um das alltägliche Leben auf der Farm in den grünen Bergen !!
July 1, 2017
I read a bit of this book every night before bed. It carried me away to an old-fashioned farm tucked away in the Green Mountains of Vermont. I have never been to Vermont in real life, and perhaps it isn't just like the descriptions in this book any longer, but it was a wonderful place to visit through this author's commonsense accounts from the early 1940s. She and her husband and two daughters had been upper class intelligentsia in Germany before World War II. In the late 1930s, they had to flee after Hitler came to power. Her husband (whom she always called "Zuck") had written satirical plays about the Nazis which were not at all appreciated by Hitler. They came by ship to Hoboken from Rotterdam. (I thought it was fascinating that the ship traveled slowly enough that the crew announced every night that the clock would be set ahead by one hour. No jet lag there!--- just a sane advance of time, one hour per day.) They considered settling in New York or Los Angeles, but after a visit to Vermont, decided to stay there. They rented a farm and researched what sort of animals were best for a small operation such as theirs. Interestingly, they got most of their farming information from USDA pamphlets. This book was actually written after the war and originally published in German in 1949. The author based her accounts on letters she had written for family back in Europe. For such a fraught time, it is interesting that she never once mentions Hitler or politics. It is as though her family lived in a little bubble, raising their animals, battening down during brutal winters, reading and studying when time allowed. Imagine---their lives had been upended, yet they rose to the challenges at hand without complaints, but with a steady determination to meet each new task as it arose. At one point, as the family sat around a fire, they did reminisce about the fact that they had had four servants plus a nanny for the children in their former life, but now they toiled at the farm with only themselves to see to the endless chores. In fact, they seemed to gain a sense of satisfaction in learning to handle the crises with animals and weather. There was a sort of stoic fortitude about their response to where life had led them. In later years, after the war and a return to Europe, the author had a certain nostalgia for that time and place. But don't we all think back fondly to a time when we were younger and stronger and managed to overcome whatever life threw in our paths? They did in fact come back to Vermont later, but found they couldn't continue the farm life and have time for her husband to write, which was his profession and source of income. The children were grown and the house too much for her to handle. Besides that, in the 1950s, the interstate highway system was being built and it apparently completely changed the rural nature of the land around their farm. Her memories, as rendered here, are a moment in time in which we , the readers, are allowed to dwell with her family in that time and place. We can stand by as they diagnose (once again, with the help of USDA pamphlets) and treat strange diseases in their poultry, as they battle rats, as they work to winterize their house and prevent frozen pipes. The beauty in this writing is the descriptive, "you are there" quality. It is also interesting to compare life in the USA then to now. They could take trains (albeit not as comfortable as European ones, as she notes) to tiny rural towns. Getting to town in winter was quite an undertaking. She describes in great detail her visits to the library at Dartmouth College. You library aficionados may swoon at her descriptions. You can almost feel the hushed reverence for the printed word (although reading that the library designated three areas for smoking really dates the description!).
This book is part of the New York Review of Books Classics series. I am so glad they chose to reissue it!
This book is part of the New York Review of Books Classics series. I am so glad they chose to reissue it!
October 23, 2017
While browsing in the bookstore (always a dangerous proposition) I stumbled across this title. As a native Vermonter who grew up in farm country, I knew I had to read it. Once I discovered it is her memoir of living on a farm in Vermont with her husband and two girls after being expatriated from Germany just before the War, I giggled with delight. My best friend and her mother (also both avid readers) came to America from Germany not long after the War, and so I bought 2 copies so we could discuss the book.
In Germany, the Zuckermans enjoyed their place in society - Zuck (as Alice's husband is called) was a successful and popular playwright, and they enjoyed having a couple of live-in servants in their home. One of Zuck's plays offended the political leaders, and they fled to Austria. When they were asked to there as well, they soon docked in New York where they had friends. While living in New York, their friends arranged for them to take a vacation in the village of Barnard - a quaint town in Vermont. They loved Barnard, and vacationed there a few times while Zuck tried to find writing success in New York and in Los Angeles. They did not enjoy living in either city. Longing for the peace they felt in Barnard, they decided to live on a farm in Vermont.
The farm they found was in a remote location, with beautiful views of the Green Mountains and a direct view of the summit of Mt. Ascutney. It was quiet and peaceful - exactly as they had hoped to find. They quickly acquired some animals, often more than planned. Chickens, ducks, pigs, and goats filled their barns. It was the picture of real Vermont.
The Zuckermans weren't prepared for life on a farm in rural Vermont, however. There was so much work to do - feed and care for the animals, repairs on the barn and coops, fighting against pest infestations, housework, cooking, keeping the fire going, shoveling, making sure the pipes didn't freeze, trekking a mile through deep snow just to get the mail or to get supplies out of the car - the list goes on and on. Zuck had imagined a quaint life where he could sit at his typewriter and enjoy a little bit of farmwork; instead there is little time for him to write as there is no such as a little bit of work on a farm.
While it would be easy to express frustration over the political situation that led to their exile, this is hardly ever mentioned in the book. Instead, her focus is on what their life was like in Vermont - the good, the bad, the ugly, and the amusing. It is a story about a determined woman who naturally approaches her new circumstances with a positive attitude. Her perseverance is inspiring.
She focused on a topic in each chapter; kind of like a series of essays on life on their farm and how they met each challenge with which they were presented. The Zuckermans would still recognize their Vermont today, although of course, some things are quite different. One of the first chapters is about telephone etiquette - they shares a party line with 9 neighbors, and often they would listen in on others' conversations, learning one neighbor was sick or getting a recipe for apple crisp. I remember party lines - my grandparents were on one at their camp on Lake Bomoseen - and I was always confused about the different rings. Today party lines are gone, but still Vermont lags behind much of the country. Cellular coverage in rural parts of Vermont is spotty at best, so many Vermonters still have wired phone service in their homes.
Alice also talks at length about the information she received from the USDA, about her trips to Dartmouth College to study at the library, and about the experience of buying their supplies (a particularly arduous trip in the winter). She delves into the history of many of the entities she discusses.
I ate this book up, and my German friends habe not started it quite yet. Reading about life on a small Vermont farm 75 years ago made me nostalgic about my Vermont life - which of course was more recent, but the Vermont values have not changed all that much. A true Vermonter is fiercely independent, hard-working, ready to help their neighbor, persevering, and humble about what they do. This book captures that picture so very well, and Alice and Zuck earn the elusive title of real Vermonters.
In Germany, the Zuckermans enjoyed their place in society - Zuck (as Alice's husband is called) was a successful and popular playwright, and they enjoyed having a couple of live-in servants in their home. One of Zuck's plays offended the political leaders, and they fled to Austria. When they were asked to there as well, they soon docked in New York where they had friends. While living in New York, their friends arranged for them to take a vacation in the village of Barnard - a quaint town in Vermont. They loved Barnard, and vacationed there a few times while Zuck tried to find writing success in New York and in Los Angeles. They did not enjoy living in either city. Longing for the peace they felt in Barnard, they decided to live on a farm in Vermont.
The farm they found was in a remote location, with beautiful views of the Green Mountains and a direct view of the summit of Mt. Ascutney. It was quiet and peaceful - exactly as they had hoped to find. They quickly acquired some animals, often more than planned. Chickens, ducks, pigs, and goats filled their barns. It was the picture of real Vermont.
The Zuckermans weren't prepared for life on a farm in rural Vermont, however. There was so much work to do - feed and care for the animals, repairs on the barn and coops, fighting against pest infestations, housework, cooking, keeping the fire going, shoveling, making sure the pipes didn't freeze, trekking a mile through deep snow just to get the mail or to get supplies out of the car - the list goes on and on. Zuck had imagined a quaint life where he could sit at his typewriter and enjoy a little bit of farmwork; instead there is little time for him to write as there is no such as a little bit of work on a farm.
While it would be easy to express frustration over the political situation that led to their exile, this is hardly ever mentioned in the book. Instead, her focus is on what their life was like in Vermont - the good, the bad, the ugly, and the amusing. It is a story about a determined woman who naturally approaches her new circumstances with a positive attitude. Her perseverance is inspiring.
She focused on a topic in each chapter; kind of like a series of essays on life on their farm and how they met each challenge with which they were presented. The Zuckermans would still recognize their Vermont today, although of course, some things are quite different. One of the first chapters is about telephone etiquette - they shares a party line with 9 neighbors, and often they would listen in on others' conversations, learning one neighbor was sick or getting a recipe for apple crisp. I remember party lines - my grandparents were on one at their camp on Lake Bomoseen - and I was always confused about the different rings. Today party lines are gone, but still Vermont lags behind much of the country. Cellular coverage in rural parts of Vermont is spotty at best, so many Vermonters still have wired phone service in their homes.
Alice also talks at length about the information she received from the USDA, about her trips to Dartmouth College to study at the library, and about the experience of buying their supplies (a particularly arduous trip in the winter). She delves into the history of many of the entities she discusses.
I ate this book up, and my German friends habe not started it quite yet. Reading about life on a small Vermont farm 75 years ago made me nostalgic about my Vermont life - which of course was more recent, but the Vermont values have not changed all that much. A true Vermonter is fiercely independent, hard-working, ready to help their neighbor, persevering, and humble about what they do. This book captures that picture so very well, and Alice and Zuck earn the elusive title of real Vermonters.
September 13, 2017
This is a rather lovely book. And I choose this somewhat old-fashioned accolade deliberately, as Herdan-Zuckmayer's mémoire itself comes from another era: A time when books and libraries where considered to be of enormous importance, when during difficult times depression was kept at bay by keeping ones hands busy - baking cakes, chopping wood or darning socks –, when self-knowledge and self-depreciation went hand in hand. And when authors still excelled in crisp and precise formulations, I am tempted to add.
I can see why Margitte compared this book in her wonderful review with Betty MacDonald's "The Egg and I" and with Maria Augusta Trapp's "Trapp Family" – both books I grew up with and love too. Yet I do prefer Herdan-Zuckmayer's somewhat more down to earth and self-reflective attitude: She was a Communist and in the 1920s shared a flat in Berlin with her small daughter Michi and Helene Weigel (Bert Brechts later wife), after her first husband had died. So she definitely was neither a nun nor politically naive.
This small volume well deserves to be read, especially during the times of Trump, Erdogan and Putin, and shortly before federal elections in Germany will probably show shocking wins for the extremist right wing party AfD : "Da haben wir auch die Feinde wiedergefunden. Sie sind unverändert, wenige sind vertilgt worden, einige sitzen hinter Schloß und Riegel, viele haben sich in Zwangsjacken gezwängt, um vorzutäuschen, dass sie wieder normal sind, und harren auf eine neue Zeit des Wahnsinns, in der Verbrechen wieder erlaubt und Gesetz werden und Geisteskranke wieder zu Macht und Ehren gelangen können."
I can see why Margitte compared this book in her wonderful review with Betty MacDonald's "The Egg and I" and with Maria Augusta Trapp's "Trapp Family" – both books I grew up with and love too. Yet I do prefer Herdan-Zuckmayer's somewhat more down to earth and self-reflective attitude: She was a Communist and in the 1920s shared a flat in Berlin with her small daughter Michi and Helene Weigel (Bert Brechts later wife), after her first husband had died. So she definitely was neither a nun nor politically naive.
This small volume well deserves to be read, especially during the times of Trump, Erdogan and Putin, and shortly before federal elections in Germany will probably show shocking wins for the extremist right wing party AfD : "Da haben wir auch die Feinde wiedergefunden. Sie sind unverändert, wenige sind vertilgt worden, einige sitzen hinter Schloß und Riegel, viele haben sich in Zwangsjacken gezwängt, um vorzutäuschen, dass sie wieder normal sind, und harren auf eine neue Zeit des Wahnsinns, in der Verbrechen wieder erlaubt und Gesetz werden und Geisteskranke wieder zu Macht und Ehren gelangen können."
June 24, 2021
A good reminder that despite the heavy romanticism surrounding farm life and homesteading (ahem cottagecore) this lifestyle requires so much physical and emotional labour. The chapter titled "Drude" was written so beautifully, it made me cry. I knocked off a star simply because I skimmed the chapters about Dartmouth college. Overall, it was a really gentle and lovely book.
August 10, 2017
Seriously so WOW. I wish I had the words to describe what I feel after reading this marvelous book. Witty, funny, serious, human nature -- the writing (translation) is beautiful and the perspective of an "outsider" describing Rural America is wonderful.
February 19, 2025
Loved this one so much. All the stars.
"It is called starting from the beginning. 'To start all over again' is one of the most meaningful sayings which America has produced. In Europe it would be 'to start from the bottom.'"
"The practical skills were easily learned, but the imponderables and accidents were incomprehensible and innumerable."
"My America has no place for sentimental gratitude...But there is something else, a factor which we had never before encountered. That is the experience of a 'native land,' a place in which one is reborn through a second childhood. In America we learned anew to walk, listen, touch, smell, and taste. Of course we could not speak the language correctly and had a foreign accent, but people understood us, and we knew what they were saying."
"It is called starting from the beginning. 'To start all over again' is one of the most meaningful sayings which America has produced. In Europe it would be 'to start from the bottom.'"
"The practical skills were easily learned, but the imponderables and accidents were incomprehensible and innumerable."
"My America has no place for sentimental gratitude...But there is something else, a factor which we had never before encountered. That is the experience of a 'native land,' a place in which one is reborn through a second childhood. In America we learned anew to walk, listen, touch, smell, and taste. Of course we could not speak the language correctly and had a foreign accent, but people understood us, and we knew what they were saying."
April 26, 2025
I'm a fan of books about people who go unprepared into farm life and stick it out, even for just a while. Add in the fact that these folks were from Austria, in Vermont, during WWII, and there was a lot to be interesting. Unfortunately I found the style eventually just felt dull, (translator issues?) and I realized I didn't want to finish. Others may feel differently, and I might perhaps come back some day and try again. But for now I'm just not interested enough to continue.
November 13, 2022
I hardly know how to describe this most peculiar book. It's at once both sophisticated in expression and impossibly naïve in the manner in which Ms. Herdan-Zuckmayer relates her experiences. On the one hand lyrical and on the other hand entirely earthbound, it's above all an uncompromisingly personal document, the work of a totally urban European woman who finds herself operating a primitive little backwoods farm at the end of a frequently impassable road in the mountains of Vermont. The place scarcely qualifies as a hobby farm. She starts out having not the first knowledge of anything having to do with farming, animals or the grim realities of winter in the highlands of Vermont. And she is a person who has been accustomed to having servants to deal with everyday household chores, never mind the joys of slaughtering and dressing chickens or dealing with frozen water pipes. The manner in which she adapts to such a vastly different world accounts for much of the book's appeal.
She deftly conveys the emigrant's dilemma — finding oneself never again quite settled and "at home" again, either in the new world or the one left behind which inevitably changes drastically during the emigrant's absence abroad.
There's much more I could say, many highlights; but perhaps most delightful would be her account of her periodic trips to the Dartmouth College Library, a journey that today would be accomplished in less than an hour but which, in the late 1940s, might easily take a full day or more for just one way — and in some weather conditions could not be undertaken at all.
A pervasive sense of longing haunts this book, a longing for home. Zuckmayer whimsically quotes an expression that many an emigrant will understand: "Everyone loves his native land, whether he was born there or not."
It would be difficult to imagine a person less well suited to have undertaken the marginal farm life that Ms. Zuckmayer embraced — and yet I can scarcely think of any writer better suited to the telling of it.
She deftly conveys the emigrant's dilemma — finding oneself never again quite settled and "at home" again, either in the new world or the one left behind which inevitably changes drastically during the emigrant's absence abroad.
There's much more I could say, many highlights; but perhaps most delightful would be her account of her periodic trips to the Dartmouth College Library, a journey that today would be accomplished in less than an hour but which, in the late 1940s, might easily take a full day or more for just one way — and in some weather conditions could not be undertaken at all.
A pervasive sense of longing haunts this book, a longing for home. Zuckmayer whimsically quotes an expression that many an emigrant will understand: "Everyone loves his native land, whether he was born there or not."
It would be difficult to imagine a person less well suited to have undertaken the marginal farm life that Ms. Zuckmayer embraced — and yet I can scarcely think of any writer better suited to the telling of it.
October 24, 2021
2019 bk 104. This is a memoir of the 1940's, during and immediately after World War II. Alice Zuckmayer's husband was a famous playwright in Germany. He did not espouse the ideals of Hitler. Alice was a medical student and the Nazi's did not like the idea of women in the professions. The two were proscribed, loosing their home in Germany, their vacation home in Austria, and after living in Switzerland for a time, managed to get visas and tickets to the United States. Here, they tried their hand at Hollywood and New York, and finally after visiting a friend in Vermont, settled on the idea of renting a small, isolated farm. A farm where her husband might be able to find his voice and writing style again. Alice, raised as an upper class German lady, with servants to help her, found herself turning into a Vermont farmer, raising ducks, chickens, geese, goats, and pigs. Her savior was the Department of Agriculture brochures. The local agent, seeing someone who needed help, gave her far more than the limit of ten brochures. For the next three years, the couple came to love the farm and the community they had settled in, all along being able to continue their writing and research (Alice - middle ages) in a town at war. There is a postscript that briefly follows their life after the war. This was an enjoyable read - and particularly the two chapters of praise for the Dartmouth College Library that was close by.
June 4, 2017
A gentle read, surprisingly apolitical. The memoir of an intellectual made to emigrate to the US during WWII, and the life of her family as aristocrats that lose the ground from beneath them. I appreciate her dedication to looking out instead of in: some of the most interesting chapters were about libraries, cooking, snow, and tending to the farm life adopted by her and her husband as respite from the war. The most boring chapter was definitely the one about the USDA. A fresh look of what it means to be an American.
August 13, 2017
Short, oddly cheerful essays about farming in Vermont in the 1940s. The author and her husband were part of bohemian, creative Weimar Berlin -- until he wrote a play satirizing Hitler's militarism. Their escape led them to Austria, Hollywood, New York, and finally, Vermont, where they learned farming the hard way -- by doing it, and with guidance from kind neighbors and USDA pamphlets. I loved it!
September 20, 2017
I really enjoyed this book. The author recounts the struggles of a family who fled the Nazis in 1940 and moved to a farm in Vermont, where Carl Zuckmayer hopes to find the quiet he needs to continue his writing. Their animals soon became like family members, local people came to their aid, and they learn to deal with difficulties unlike any they had experienced.
I recommend the book as well-written, quiet reading.
I recommend the book as well-written, quiet reading.
February 20, 2016
A quick one-day read for a school assignment I may or may not have forgotten about ...
I was kind of dreading to start it at first but it turned out to be a really good book, I enjoyed it a lot! (:
I was kind of dreading to start it at first but it turned out to be a really good book, I enjoyed it a lot! (:
July 31, 2017
What a fascinating book. I didn't think I would like it and it was slow going at times but overall I would recommend it.
March 24, 2018
This book is what I wanted The Egg and I to be, with the added delight of being translated non-fiction. An insightful look at 1940s rural America through the eyes of an immigrant.
August 28, 2022
"We named the river ducks Solvejg and Eleonora. We couldn't find a name for the fat one and didnt really want to because she promised to be a tender roast."
Favourite read of the year so far. This is a true account of a couple who ended up on a farm in Vermont for five years, after having to flee from the Nazi's in Germany.
One of the best features of Herdan-Zuckmayer's writing is her wittiness, which she deftly infuses throughout her story even when circumstances were less than pleasant. Her humour is heartwarming and made me laugh out loud frequently.
I am amazed at her exceptional skill in using imagery, which really opened my eyes to interesting and different ways of viewing the scenes and ideas she described. I think that is the hallmark of great writing: the ability to make the reader see things in a different perspective.
She also doesnt shy away from reflecting on her anxieties living as an immigrant during the war and on the frustrations of farm life, with it's often sense of isolation and never-ending lists of work to do.
Her victory over her past struggles and her determination to survive the present, especially during the harsh winters, has instilled in me a tenderness and a small flame of hope, showing me that the road ahead of us is not as untrodden and deserted - not as lonely and as far-removed from the experiences of other people as one might be inclined to think.
"Are you looking forward to Christmas?" Zuck asked me.
"No," I said. "I cannot look forward to it. I can at best try not to be afraid of it."
#thefarminthegreenmountains #nyrb #aliceherdanzuckmayer
Favourite read of the year so far. This is a true account of a couple who ended up on a farm in Vermont for five years, after having to flee from the Nazi's in Germany.
One of the best features of Herdan-Zuckmayer's writing is her wittiness, which she deftly infuses throughout her story even when circumstances were less than pleasant. Her humour is heartwarming and made me laugh out loud frequently.
I am amazed at her exceptional skill in using imagery, which really opened my eyes to interesting and different ways of viewing the scenes and ideas she described. I think that is the hallmark of great writing: the ability to make the reader see things in a different perspective.
She also doesnt shy away from reflecting on her anxieties living as an immigrant during the war and on the frustrations of farm life, with it's often sense of isolation and never-ending lists of work to do.
Her victory over her past struggles and her determination to survive the present, especially during the harsh winters, has instilled in me a tenderness and a small flame of hope, showing me that the road ahead of us is not as untrodden and deserted - not as lonely and as far-removed from the experiences of other people as one might be inclined to think.
"Are you looking forward to Christmas?" Zuck asked me.
"No," I said. "I cannot look forward to it. I can at best try not to be afraid of it."
#thefarminthegreenmountains #nyrb #aliceherdanzuckmayer
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