The charming, return-to-the-land memoir of a refugee family who flees
Nazi Germany and finds their true home in the backwoods of rural
Vermont
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, 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 in spite of 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.
