Invent Radium or I'll Pull Your Hair: A Memoir

Invent Radium or I'll Pull Your Hair: A Memoir by Drucker, Doris. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780226165035.

"And dont forget, once you are married to a Rothschild you can become a famous woman," Doris Schmitzs mother told her. "Be another Madame Curie and invent radium! Youll be famous!" Doris reminded her that radium had already been discovered. "Dont argue," her mother said. "Youre going to invent radium or Ill pull your hair. Youre just being negative, like your father." Rothschilds and radium were the horizons of Doriss childhood. Born in Germany in the early twentieth century, she came of age in an upper-middle-class family that struggled to maintain its bourgeois respectability between the two World Wars. Doris Drucker (she met her husband Peter—of management fame—in the 1930s) has penned a lively and charming memoir that brings to life the Germany of her childhood. Rather than focusing on the rise of Hitler, Drucker weaves history into her story of the day-to-day life of a relatively apolitical family. She chronicles here the crowds that gathered to see the Zeppelin, her attempts to negotiate her Prussian mothers plans for her (like marrying well and becoming a famous scientist), ski trips and hikes, the schools she attended, her fathers struggles to support the family, and all the stuff and drama that make up a childhood. Druckers energetic storytelling, eye for the telling detail, and sly humor draw the reader into her portrait of a way of life made forever poignant by its place in history so close to the brutalities of World War II. From the boarding school that forbade girls to look at their own legs while they bathed to the unfortunate confusion that resulted from Doriss misinterpretation of "Warsaw has fallen" as "The Waschfrau [washerwoman] has fallen," the tales recounted in Invent Radium or Ill Pull Your Hair give dimension and depth to a milieu that has been flattened by the historical events around it.