Runaway Waltz: A Memoir from Vienna to New York

by Frederic Morton

The revered Austrian author of Thunder at Twilight recounts his childhood idolatry of Fred Astaire, his family's forced immigration to New York City on the eve of World War II, and his subsequent achievements as a writer. 17,500 first printing.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, History

224 pages, Hardcover

First published May 24, 2005

About the author

Frederic Morton (born Fritz Mandelbaum) was a Jewish Austrian writer who emigrated to the United States in 1940. Born Fritz Mandelbaum in Vienna, Morton was raised as the son of a blacksmith who had specialised in forging imperial medals. In the wake of the Anschluss of 1938 his father was arrested but later released again. In 1939 the family fled to Britain, and the following year they migrated to New York. Morton said that back in 1940 his father decided, with a heavy heart, to change their family name to Morton in order to join an anti-Semitic labor union. Frederic Morton first worked as a baker but from 1949 studied literature. In 1951 he visited Austria again for the first time after the war, and in 1962 he returned, this time to Salzburg, to marry his fiancée, Marcia, whom he had met at college. From 1959, Morton worked as a columnist for several American periodicals including The New York Times, Esquire, and Playboy . He died in Vienna ,at the age of ninety, on April 2015