"Moritz explores his family’s experiences of dislocation in this stellar sociopolitical history and memoir. Moritz's own sense of both mixed and lost identity are woven into a compelling tapestry shot through with old letters and documents, family photos, questions he regrets leaving unasked during his parents’ lifetimes, and limpid, even poetic, prose."
Description
A deeply moving and intimate story that reveals how the ravages of history that tore one family apart echo across continents nearly a century later.
"A memoir which ranks alongside The Hare with Amber Eyes."—The Times (London)
"Brilliant."—The Economist
Sorting through papers and photographs after his mother's death, Michael Moritz uncovers the history of close family members murdered by the Nazis. Exploring their journey takes him into a past of tragedy, grief and the dark shadows cast on Jewish life by the Holocaust.
Leaving Germany as child refugees, Moritz's parents escape to London before settling in Cardiff, Wales, after the war. But the idea of being a stranger or outsider—Ausländer—haunts the family; running through Moritz's childhood and resurfacing in his adopted home of California, where he has become one of Silicon Valley's most celebrated investors.
"As the shadows of Trump lengthened, the refrain I had heard from my parents rang ever more loudly ... 'If it did happen somewhere, it can happen here.'"
By turns disturbingly relevant and a haunting elegy to his family heritage, Ausländer shows what can happen to anyone, anywhere, when ordinary people hand licence to despots.
Reviews
"When Michael Moritz was diagnosed with a genetic disease, it launched him on a bracingly honest search into his heritage. It's an inspiring and unsettling family and religious tale, but also something larger: a guide to how we all struggle to figure out what we must embrace and what we want to banish from our past."
"Sir Michael Moritz’s brilliant memoir traces his parents’ journey and his own. He has a novelists's sensitivity and patience. An outstanding examination of how tragedy reverberates across generations."
"The best memoirs are deeply personal but connect to the universal. By not straying far from an emotional centre, they can illuminate the present with a far greater urgency than more sweeping accounts. Ausländer, a family memoir from Silicon Valley investor Michael Moritz, more than meets this mark. Thanks in no small part to Moritz’s brilliance as a writer, Ausländer's emotional power and broader relevance reverberate long after the final page."
