The Lost Café Schindler

Starred review from August 1, 2021

By all accounts, Kurt Schindler was a charismatic swindler, a failed businessman who spent his adult life dragging himself and his family through debt and litigation. Upon his death in 2017, this memoir's author--Kurt's estranged daughter--discovered in his papers and scrapbooks some of the reasons for his erratic and unpredictable behavior, as well as a previously unknown and tragic family history. As assimilated Austrian Jews, the Schindler family ran a successful distillery and restaurant in Innsbruck, Austria, for decades before Hitler's rise to power. Working outwards from personal memorabilia, and inwards from Austrian, German, and British archives, books, and museums, the author (an attorney by profession) builds a case that explores a past fraught with upheaval and sadness. The result is a skillfully crafted narrative interweaving one family's story with larger events while also considering complex themes of memory, guilt, and accountability. The author's fast-paced writing reads like a novel, and she includes family recipes and photographs that add a personal touch to an already intimate story. VERDICT A must-read work of narrative nonfiction that's highly recommended for readers of memoirs or 20th-century European history.--Linda Frederiksen, formerly at Washington State Univ. Lib., Vancouver

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September 17, 2021
Her father's death in 2017 compelled Schindler, a London-based lawyer, to write this extensively researched and vividly rendered memoir documenting her remarkable family's dramatic and tragic history. The Schindlers were among a small population of Jews in Innsbruck, Austria, where they ran the immensely popular Caf� Schindler. The extended family included Alma Schindler, who was married to Gustav Mahler, and a doctor who treated Hitler's mother. As the author traces their lives, her primary mission is to try to understand the behavior of her enigmatic father, Kurt Schindler. "Whenever he was brought face to face with his own problems, they were always someone else's fault; he was a child of the war and that accounted for everything that went wrong." Schindler's gathering of facts and incidents pertaining to her father and other relatives and their accomplishments over the course of two world wars leads inexorably to an account of the horrific Nazi occupation of Austria, the Schinders' loss of their celebrated caf�, and the deaths of loved ones in the Holocaust. Schindler seamlessly weaves together the historical and personal, offering fresh revelations.

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Starred review from August 15, 2021
A powerful account of the divergent fortunes of a prominent Austrian Jewish family. In her impressively researched debut, attorney Schindler offers a sprawling, haunted narrative about a personal quest that was sparked by the passing of her father, long embittered by an "addiction to litigation in pursuit of what, he felt, he and the family were still owed because of the disruptions of war." In the 19th century, the Schindlers, Tyrolean Jews, found success as distillers while riding out waves of antisemitism. Their civic-mindedness was epitomized by the author's great uncle, who served in the Austro-Hungarian military during World War I. In the 1920s, the family opened a cafe that became central to the cultural life of Innsbruck. Things changed drastically in the 1930s, culminating in a vicious attack on Schindler's grandfather during Kristallnacht in 1938 (which she discovered her father only pretended to have witnessed). After this, most family members fled to England or elsewhere, though several were murdered during the Holocaust. A local Nazi official took over the family villa, and the cafe was turned into "the most important Nazi watering hole in town." Beyond the compelling personal details, the author chillingly documents how the livelihoods of Austrian Jews were destroyed, "systematically stripped of their assets, at bargain-basement prices." Schindler brings the faded figures of her forebears to life via extensive archival research, but by returning to her misanthropic father's presence, she also unearths fascinating digressions. His most outlandish claims proved accurate--e.g., regarding one uncle who received unlikely protection after providing medical care to a teenage Hitler's mother. "Nothing accords with the father I knew--except for the troubling absence of truth," writes the author. "But then again, these were such times of dislocation for millions, and of trading old identities for new ones in the post-war world." Throughout, Schindler writes vividly about representation, memory, and the aftermath of atrocity. A significant addition to the literature on the Holocaust.

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