Publisher's Synopsis
"Only monuments remind us today of the golden age of Czernowitz, once the lively capital of the Bukovina, the easternmost region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Even after the once-mighty empire crumbled in 1918, Czernowitz remained a haven of multicultural coexistence, peopled by Jews, Ruthenes, Bessarabians, Germans, Turks, Poles, and Armenians and animated by a proudly Austrian culture. That culture, literary and cosmopolitan, has vanished from this corner of Europe. Local fascists, the Nazis and the Holocaust, and the region's absorption into the Soviet Union ensured that the past has here been lost irretrievably. Now the Bukowina is part of Ukraine, where history is being made again. Otto Appenzeller is a child of prewar Czernowitz, where he absorbed its culture even as the storm clouds gathered. He was born there in 1927; his father was an architect and professor and his mother an accountant. He and his parents escaped the horror
