The Way Home: A German Childhood, an American Life

By Ernestine Bradley

Book Overview

Growing up in Bavaria during World War II, Ernestine Bradley came to know wartime dislocations and food shortages, along with the challenges of taking care of her siblings while her mother was ill. The men of her hometown were away at war, but their absence created an exciting unexpected freedom-a freedom she sought again at 21 when she became a stewardess, moved to New York and went on to marry a shy basketball star who played for the New York Knicks. Yet the paradoxes of her childhood shaped Bradley's life. Her hard-won discipline helped her maintain a full-time career as a professor while she commuted weekly to Washington and her husband's public life; and Germany's literary response to the holocaust of which she had been unaware became her scholarly passion. Cancer confronted her with a personal war, ultimately demanding a vulnerability she had never allowed herself. Frank, warm, and deeply moving, The Way Home is an inspiring American story.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1400076064
• ISBN13: 9781400076062
• Release Date: March 2006
• Publisher: Anchor Books
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.13 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

A Compelling Immigrant Life

Ernestine Schlant Bradley's memoir, The Way Home: A German Childhood, an American Life, is a personal document of the way, or road, she traveled and her changing perspectives as she lives her life. Having left her Bavarian home to settle in the US, Dr. Bradley shares many experiences with the million or more German speaking immigrants to the American continent in the postwar era. She left in April 1957 to explore the world as a hostess for Pan Am airlines and her very attractive picture from that time adorns the book's dust jacket. She then married and lived in Atlanta where her first daughter was born but soon began to take courses which led to a career as professor of comparative literature at New School University in New York. In1974, she married Bill Bradley, later the Senator from New Jersey. Ernestine clearly deserves credit as a survivor, not only of World War II and the hard post-war years, but also of an early divorce and breast cancer. The Way Home is, however, more than a memoir; it is a detailed record of the author's continuing discovery of new views of the stations along her life's road. She creates lively images of the streets of Passau and the Danube River, her playground in her carefree early youth during World War II, and of her postwar years in bombed-out Ingolstadt. As she revisits these sites, the images get more detailed and personal. This approach can almost be compared to the way an artist gradually chisels his sculpture. We learn for example how a few hours in her grandfather's garden were often the only rest from a life of chores and learning because Ernestine became responsible for the household and her substantially younger siblings during her mother's frequent illnesses. As new perspectives reveal continually greater truths, this stylistic feature also reflects her personal maturation. In the process we see how family members influenced her and how she also came to view their roles in the hard events that made for the history of Germany. As she comments in her thoughtful way on that history, we find that her approach rarely lends itself to easy quotes about this difficult time. Late in life Ernestine also discovered her own somewhat complicated family story. The fact that her mother was at the time of her birth married to a man who was not her father briefly led to accusations of misrepresentation during Bill Bradley's campaign in the 1999/2000 presidential primary. Without this public exposure she might not have been led to these personal documents in the Passau archives. By revisiting major stations on her personal road Bradley shows the reader how she, as we all do, grew in understanding, and, after all, that's what life is all about! If this "way" in the title gives the book structure, then changes for the word "home" give it depth. The reader will have to work a little when primary relationships are also frequently revisited. In the process, the meaning of the word "home" is freed from its connection to a place

An intense and compelling memoir

During this past election, many people thought that Teresa Heinz Kerry would become the first foreign-born First Lady. In fact, there had been a chance in the 2000 election, when Senator Bill Bradley ran for the Democratic nomination for president. His wife, Ernestine Schlant Bradley, impressed many observers with her intelligence, energy, and passion, and it was a shame that more Americans did not get to know her before the Bradley campaign faded in the primaries. Now they have that opportunity in this memoir, which describes her life beginning in Nazi Germany and the war years, and taking her through her emigration to America, her decision to pursue an academic career, an unsuccessful marriage in Atlanta, a new life in New York, her second marriage to the Rhodes Scholar, NBA star, and Senator from New Jersey, and finally her struggle in the 1990s with breast cancer. It is a remarkably honest, candid, and revealing account of her life, painful at times in its introspection, but deeply moving in its emotions and understanding. It was during the presidential campaign that Bradley was jolted into reexamining her past. An archivist from Passau, her German birthplace, put material on the town's web site questioning her background and family history. The material suggested she was a Hochstapler, someone presenting herself with a better pedigree than she was entitled to. Her father, the posting suggested, was not the air force officer she claimed, but a different man, a hairdresser in Passau. He was also a member of the Nazi party, and the implication was that Bradley sought to conceal this politically damaging fact. These assertions, Bradley notes, "upset me enough that I needed to go back to my roots, to gain access to documents not previously available, and to reconsider how I became who I think I am." What she discovered was a very complicated family history. Her mother had indeed become pregnant at eighteen with the man that Ernestine would later know as her father, but in order to avoid hurting his promising career, she ended up marrying a local man, "the hairdresser." He was the man listed on Ernestine's birth certificate as her father. In 1943, when Ernestine was eight years old, her mother finally divorced him and married Ernestine's real father, the air force officer, but she never had him legally adopt Ernestine. These facts proved painful to Bradley when she discovered them, especially as they bore on her relationship with her mother. Bradley's describes her mother as a woman who "did not know what to do with me, except possess and display me, and she mistook that for love," and this emotionally tangled relationship is a centerpiece of the book. As we follow Bradley's life - watching her care for her younger siblings during her mother's illnesses, seeking the education her mother didn't get, deciding to come to America - her mother remains a central element in her life. When she speaks of her mother's disappointme

The Strength of the Human Spirit

This superb volume epitomizes the value of the memoir genre. The auhtor's painstaking self-questioning produces a memorable work, as valuable for its insights as for the multi-dimensional and candid perspective of a witness to WWII from the "other" side. Dr. Bradley admirably describes a lifetime of being a survivor: of poverty, of the war, of divorce, and finally of cancer. But her book is in every sensse not merely survival but a tribute to triumph over each adversity. We glimpse not only the strength of the human spirit but the sometimes agonizing building of that inner strength and courage.It is well worth OUR journey to experience Dr. Bradley's journey home.

Deeply inspiring with moving honesty and profound insights

I read "The Way Home" with gratefulness and great interest. It is written with a forthright honesty that I treasure. I was given the gift of witnessing a remarkable life filled with meaning and integrity. I am moved by the clarity with which Ernestine Bradley realizes the traumas and problems of her childhood. I admire the courage and endurance with which she has pursued her inspiring life journey of breaking away from it. I love her definition of happiness. It touched me deeply, particularly where she writes that it "consists of constantly expanding self-knowledge, of the desire to know who you are and the imperative not to lie to yourself and others." Ernestine Schlant has overcome cancer, which she experienced as a life-enhancing gift that deepened her marriage and allowed love to be expressed freely with her children and grandchildren, and in her friendships. "The Way Home" is a deeply inspiring book, filled with profound insights and a rare, beautiful and moving truthfulness.

Journeys with Ernestine Bradley

There are some books that have such a sense of immediacy and urgency about them that when you start to read them, you just cannot put them down. They pull you in, they make you forget about eating and sleeping, they gently ask you to surrender. And if you do so, you embark on a great journey through someone else's world that suddenly becomes your world. The Way Home by Ernestine Schlant Bradley is one of those books. Weaving together in a seamless tapestry the stuff that great novels and great lives are made of-betrayal, separation, loss, defeat, triumph--Ernestine uses memory as a vehicle to initially transport her readers to the small town of Passau, Germany, where she grew up during the Nazi period and after World War II; she then flies us on her fictional magic carpet to the United States where she arrives in the fifties to escape the strictures of family and country and to begin a new life as stewardess, university student, mother, professor, wife of Senator Bill Bradley, breast cancer survivor, and perpetual commuter between her Washington home, where she spent the weekends with her daughter and senator husband, and Montclair State University, where she taught courses in German literature and culture and Comparative Literature. The many rich and complicated experiences that Ernestine lived in these different geographical and psychological worlds are the ostensible subject of The Way Home. But her memoir is much more complex than this simple description: as she uncovers and reveals countless layers of silence and truth, as she merges her personal history with a piece of both Germany history and American history, and as she views defeat as an opportunity rather than a loss, she offers us an inspiring tale that somehow speaks to all of us. Those who have longed for independence and who have struggled to separate from family will find a piece of themselves in this book as will those who have confronted confusing and distorted family histories. Those who came to this country to begin a new life will find a piece of themselves in this book as will those who learned to scrutinize their national past once they left the homeland. Those who have fallen in love and found safety and affirmation of the self in a nurturing relationship will find a piece of themselves in this book as will those who have negotiated the tremendous pulls of motherhood and career and career and marriage. Those who are cancer survivors will find a piece of themselves in this book as will those who experienced through illness a way of letting go. Finally, all of us for whom little moments of the past evoke big emotions will find countless echoes of our own lives in this memoir that is Ernestine Bradley's account of a life fully lived.