Thursday's Child Has Far To Go: A Memoir of the Journeying Years

This is the story of a young man who, against considerable odds, was a survivor. Born in Breslau, which was then in Germany, to a family with roots in both Western Europe and Russia, Walter Laqueur describes with precision and deep involvement the days of his youth during one of the most fascinating periods of modern times - the last years of the Weimar Republic and the first years of the Nazi era. In a remarkable personal account, he re-creates a world that no longer exists - Nazi Germany - and tells what it meant to grow up there. Thursday's Child Has For to Go is not about high politics but about families of yesteryear, early friendships, school, "the group," the fears and hopes of an adolescent uprooted from his native country, a young wanderer through various worlds. Laqueur then shifts to Palestine on the eve of World War II, and describes his life as an agricultural laborer in a kibbutz, the joys of guard duty in the fields, and cowboy life among Bedouins and Arab herdsmen. As the war ends, we follow the author to cosmopolitan Jerusalem and Cairo. Unencumbered by formal education and academic degrees, he enters the world of journalism; as a political journalist he covers the critical years prior to the establishment of the state of Israel. These are memoirs of peace and war in yet another world that no longer exists, of the uneasy coexistence of Jews, Arabs, and British in Palestine. It is the record of living through yet another war in which survival was not a foregone conclusion. The memoir ends with the impressions of a postwar grand tour of Europe and the Soviet Union that led the young man from the provinces to London, to Left Bank Paris, and to the wild mountains of the Caucasus. This journey was a belated apprenticeship for a subsequent career as one of the leading historians of Europe and an internationally known and widely respected commentator on world affairs. Here is an extraordinarily moving account, told with honesty and skill. It is writte