The Burgdorf Cycle by Ursula Hegi (Boxed Set #01-4)
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 1.4 MB
Overview: URSULA HEGI was born in 1946 in Düsseldorf, Germany, a city that was heavily bombed during World War II. Her perception growing up was that the war was avoided as a topic of discussion despite its evidence everywhere, and The Holocaust was a particularly taboo topic. This had a strong effect on her later writing and her feelings about her German identity. Hegi’s first books were set in the United States. She set her third, Floating in My Mother’s Palm, in the fictional German town of Burgdorf, using her writing to explore her conflicted feelings about her German heritage.
Hegi’s numerous awards include an NEA Fellowship and five PEN Syndicated Fiction Awards. She won a book award from the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association (PNBA) in 1991 for Floating in My Mother’s Palm. She has also had two New York Times Notable Book mentions.
Genre: Fiction > General Fiction/Classics
1. Stones from the River
Trudi Montag is a Zwerg — a dwarf — short, undesirable, different, the voice of anyone who has ever tried to fit in. Eventually she learns that being different is a secret that all humans share — from her mother who flees into madness, to her friend Georg whose parents pretend he’s a girl, to the Jews Trudy harbors in her cellar.
Ursula Hegi brings us a timeless and unforgettable story in Trudi and a small town, weaving together a profound tapestry of emotional power, humanity, and truth.
2. Floating in My Mother’s Palm
The compelling and mystical story of Hanna Malter, a young girl growing up in 1950’s Burgdorf, the small German town Ursula Hegi so brilliantly brought to life in her bestselling novel Stones from the River. Hanna’s courageous voice evokes her unconventional mother, who swims during thunderstorms; the illegitimate son of an American GI, who learns from Hanna about his father; and the librarian, Trudi Montag, who lets Hanna see her hometown from a dwarf’s extraordinary point of view. Although Ursula Hegi wrote Floating in My Mother’s Palm first, it can be read as a sequel to Stones from the River.
3. The Vision of Emma Blau
The luminous epic of a bicultural family filled with passion and aspirations, tragedy and redemption. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Stefan Blau, whom readers will remember from Stones from the River, flees Burgdorf, a small town in Germany, and comes to America in search of the vision he has dreamed of every night. The novel closes nearly a century later with Stefan’s granddaughter, Emma, and the legacy of his dream: the Wasserburg, a once-grand apartment house filled with the hidden truths of its inhabitants both past and present. Ursula Hegi creates a fascinating picture of immigrants in America: their dreams and disappointments, the challenges of assimilation, the frailty of language and its transcendence, the love that bonds generations and the cultural wedges that drive them apart.
4. Children and Fire
The story of a single day that will forever transform the lives of the townspeople. At the core of this remarkable novel is the question of how one teacher – gifted and joyful, passionate and inventive – can become seduced by propaganda during the early months of Hitler’s regime and encourage her ten-year-old students to join the "Hitler-Jugend" with its hikes and songs and bonfires. Membership, she believes, will be a step toward better schools, better apprenticeships.
How can a woman we admire choose a direction we don’t admire? So much has changed for the teacher, Thekla Jansen, and the people of Burgdorf in the year since the parliament building burned. Thekla’s lover, Emil Hesping, is sure the Nazis did it to frame the communists. But Thekla believes what she hears on the radio, that the communists set the fire, and she’s willing to relinquish some of her freedoms to keep her teaching position. She has always taken her moral courage for granted, but when each silent agreement chips away at that courage, she knows she must reclaim it.
Hegi funnels pivotal moments in history through the experiences of individual characters: Thekla’s mother, who works as a housekeeper for a Jewish family; her employers, Michel and Ilse Abramowitz; Thekla’s mentally ill father; Trudi Montag and her father, Leo Montag; Fraulein Siderova, midwife to the dying; and the students who adore their young teacher. As Ursula Hegi writes along that edge where sorrow and bliss meet, she shows us how one society – educated, cultural, compassionate – can slip into a reality that’s fabricated by propaganda and controlled by fear, how a surge of national unity can be manipulated into the dehumanization of a perceived enemy and the justification of torture and murder.
Gorgeously rendered and emotionally taut, Children and Fire confirms Ursula Hegi’s position as one of the most distinguished writers of her generation.
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