How to Be a Refugee: The gripping true story of how one family hid their Jewish origins to survive the Nazis

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'A lyrical, fascinating, important book. More than just a family story, it is an essay on belonging, denying, pretending, self-deception and, at least for the main characters, survival.' Literary Review 'Simon May's remarkable How to Be a Refugee is a memoir of family secrets with a ruminative twist, one that's more interested in what we keep from ourselves than the ones we conceal from others.' Irish Times How to Be a Refugee is Simon May's gripping account of how his mother and his two aunts - who, like their parents, had converted to Christianity - grappled with their Jewish heritage in Hitler's Germany. To escape this lethal inheritance, the sisters denied their Jewish origin to the point of erasing almost all consciousness of it. Their very different trajectories included fleeing to London, securing 'Aryan' status with high-ranking help from inside Hitler's regime, and marrying into the German aristocracy. Even after Hitler had been defeated, they were still in flight from that heritage. May, too, was raised a Catholic and forbidden to identify as Jewish or German or British. May's haunting quest to uncover the lives of the three sisters, as well as the secrets of a grandfather he never knew, forcefully illuminates the extraordinary lengths to which people will go to survive.

Simon May was born in London, the son of a violinist and a brush manufacturer. Visiting professor of philosophy at King's College London, his books include Love: A New Understanding of an Ancient Emotion; Love: A History; Nietzsche's Ethics and his War on 'Morality'; The Power of Cute; How to Be a Refugee and Thinking Aloud, a collection of his own aphorisms. His work has been translated into ten languages and regularly features in major newspapers worldwide. For many years he has intended to move 'back' to Berlin, but has yet to do so.

A lyrical, fascinating, important book. More than just a family story, it is an essay on belonging, denying, pretending, self-deception and, at least for the main characters, survival. -- Julia Neuberger * Literary Review * Simon May's remarkable How to Be a Refugee is a memoir of family secrets with a ruminative twist, one that's more interested in what we keep from ourselves than the ones we conceal from others . . . May's large cast of characters shows with dizzying variety the human ability to live in a state of constant flight from horror, long after the shooting stops. His broad and intriguing book suggests that these survivors were exiled not just from time and place, but also from themselves. -- John Phipps * Irish Times Weekend * Gripping family memoir . . . a delight. -- Constance Craig Smith * Daily Mail * Simon May was raised in Britain as a Catholic, but was forbidden to identify as British. Neither was he allowed to identify as Jewish or German, despite his family's origins. After one of his aunts reveals the truth about his father's death, May embarks on a quest to uncover his family's true history: a story of steadfast denial of their Jewish heritage through extraordinary means in order to escape the fate of Jewish people living in Hitler's Germany. -- Hannah Beckerman * Observer * A poignant tale of three sisters who buried their Jewish roots to survive in a hostile world. -- Neil Fisher * The Times * In this engrossing and poignant memoir, philosophy professor and author Simon May examines the roots of his confused sense of identity and provides a new perspective on some of the 20th century's darkest days . . . A fascinating, moving and troubling read. -- Dan Brotzel * Irish News * A passionate and eloquent account of a lost world of German Jews, cosmopolitan, sophisticated and cultured - and, so often, assimilated. -- Jenni Frazer * Jewish Chronicle * The paradoxes of identity so brilliantly explored in this memoir are intriguing and absurd, as well as tragic. -- Jane O'Grady * Oldie * In this engrossing and poignant memoir, philosophy professor and author Simon May examines the roots of his confused sense of identity and provides a new perspective on some of the 20th-century's darkest days . . . a fascinating, moving and troubling read. * Bristol Post * A meditation on his own family inheritance and that strange historical entity that was the German Jew - so in love with the fatherland's cultural forms and ideals that its killing politics grew nigh invisible - Simon May's memoir is both deeply felt and profoundly thought. It is also beautifully conceived - propelling us from the innocence of childhood when questions are hard to put through to the realities of age. This is a superb book. -- Lisa Appignanesi, author of Everyday Madness: On Grief, Anger, Loss and Love. A deeply moving and perceptive memoir of a family caught in the jaws of a terrible history, May shows how individual lives and relationships reflect the larger tragedies, the losses, hopes and loves, of oppressive and destructive times. It is a powerful story beautifully told, and at the same time a significant document in the record of the twentieth century. -- A. C. Grayling Gripping . . . May is at his best when he writes about his own experience of loss and displacement . . . a beautifully told story of a second-generation refugee coming to terms with his family's German past. -- David Herman * AJR Journal *