Description
Book SynopsisA Scholar's Quest for Home and Identity
Experience the remarkable story of a Romanian-born, Hungarian-speaking Jewish professor. From Vienna to Columbia and Harvard, he navigates a life marked by rootlessness, seeking comfort and purpose. His journey unfolds against the backdrop of five decades, two continents, and significant political and cultural changes.
As we follow his pursuit of a home, we gain insight into the critical developments of post-1945 Europe and America. Markovits's emigration experiences, first from Romania to Vienna and later from Vienna to New York, shed light on the challenges he faced.
His journey offers a panoramic view of the forces shaping the latter half of the 20th century. Despite America's flaws, he finds it a beacon of academic excellence, intellectual openness, cultural diversity, and religious tolerance—qualities that Europe lacked.
Explore the complexities of identity, culture, and the universal search for belonging in this captivating narrative.
Trade Review"The great Jewish historian Salo Baron defined the “lachrymose school of Jewish historiography,” that long litany of suffering and persecution that for many defines Jewish life and history. Andy Markovits’s memoir is the anecdote to that school: a sunny, optimistic, and uplifting read. It doesn’t gloss over the sadness of post-War Europe, but it shows how that lost world could produce a vital future and how a stateless, rootless person could nonetheless turn that condition into a fulfilled life." https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/book/the-passport-as-home-comfort-in-rootlessness
-- Martin Green * Jewish Book Council *
"Perhaps the best that one may hope for sometimes is the richness of a life lived without such a destructive set of emotions, the worth of work that is grounded on logic and evidence, the support of people (as the author generously attests to in this memoir) from whom one can learn and with whom one can share insight and understanding. It is this record and these experiences, perhaps above all, which shine brightest out of this evocative memoir."
-- Philip Spencer * Fathom *
Table of ContentsForeword by Michael Ignatieff
Preface and Acknowledgements
Chapter One
Origins: The Virtues of Rootlessness
Chapter Two
A Paean to Tante Trude (Who Might or Might Not Have Been a Nazi)
Chapter Three
Four Friendships: Discovering America in Vienna
Chapter Four
Daphne Scheer, Real Madrid and Internazionale Milano (Inter Milan): The Personal Meets the Political
Chapter Five
The Rolling Stones Play Vienna (Resulting in Bodily Harm to the City’s Jews)
Chapter Six
Arrival in New York: The Dream Meets the Reality
Chapter Seven
Columbia 1968: How the World – and Andy – Changed in a Single Year
Chapter Eight
Kiki: Big Politics and Little Andy
Chapter Nine
The Grateful Dead: My American Family
Chapter Ten
Harvard’s Center for European Studies: The Interloper Finds a Home
Chapter Eleven
Dogs: The Rescuer Rescues Himself
Chapter Twelve
Germany: Admiration for the Bundesrepublik, Discomfort with Deutschland
Epilogue
