{"product_id":"double-vision-a-selfportrait-9780679418689","title":"Double Vision: A Self-Portrait","description":"\u003cp\u003eDoes one ever escape from the family? How much do we understand about our own past? How do we come to be who we are?  Walter Abish  the internationally acclaimed author of How German Is It  examines these questions through the prism of his own experience  and confronts and encapsulates the historic upheavals of the mid-twentieth century in this brilliant  deceptively simple  and quietly wrenching account of his two journeys.  The first begins in Vienna  where Abish was born in the 1930s in the Jewish  but not-too-Jewish  household of a prosperous perfumer. Then it ricochets around the world as his parents flee first to France (his mother had to sneak alone across the Italian border)  then to war-torn Shanghai under Japanese occupation  just ahead of Maos army  then to Israel.  Incapable of understanding his familys desperate situation  Abish as a boy creates his own private world  filtering out precarious and terrifying realities.  Abish describes fantastic events in the coolest tones. In precise  haunting detail  he records the perceptions of a child who registers and remembers what he will only later understand. He writes of the day in the park when a stranger suddenly screams Jews out! and he and his frail grandmother run for the exit in a panic as the other children and grandmothers stand and watch; the day his father is released by the Gestapo because a man in the room owes him money that he has never tried to collect and says  Let Abish gohes okay; of the time his father speaks to him about inheriting his perfume business  as they stand on the deck of a ship bound for China. The first journey recounts the flight; the second journey chronicles the return: Abish writes about how  in the 1980s  he went on a tour to Germany to launch the translation of his award-winning novel How German Is Ita book he wrote without ever having set foot there  deliberately  because he wished to elicit the idea of Germanness in what was a fantasy of Germany. This tour of what to him is an unfamiliar society includes a side trip to Vienna  where he glimpses the life he might have experienced and has the horrifying feeling that he never left.  Double Vision is a book that cuts to the quick. With unflinching candor  humor  and affection  Abish re-creates the way it feels to be a child and to look at your parents and wonder who they are. To be an adult and catch them in every corner of your personality. To look back on the world of your youth and realize both what you noticed and what you missed. It is a stunning achievement.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45789750820917,"sku":"ByrdShop_0679418687","price":29.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780679418689.jpg?v=1784696455","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/double-vision-a-selfportrait-9780679418689","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}