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Freud's Sister
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Barbara Rosenblat
- Length: 9 hrs and 22 mins
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Summary
The award-winning international sensation that poses the question: Was Sigmund Freud responsible for the death of his sister in a Nazi concentration camp?
The boy in her memories who strokes her with the apple, who whispers to her the fairy tale, who gives her the knife, is her brother Sigmund.
Vienna, 1938: With the Nazis closing in, Sigmund Freud is granted an exit visa and allowed to list the names of people to take with him. He lists his doctor and maids, his dog, and his wife's sister, but not any of his own sisters. The four Freud sisters are shuttled to the Terezín concentration camp, while their brother lives out his last days in London.
Based on a true story, this searing novel gives haunting voice to Freud's sister Adolfina - "the sweetest and best of my sisters" - a gifted, sensitive woman who was spurned by her mother and never married. A witness to her brother's genius and to the cultural and artistic splendor of Vienna in the early 20th century, she aspired to a life few women of her time could attain.
From Adolfina's closeness with her brother in childhood, to her love for a fellow student, to her time with Gustav Klimt's sister in a Vienna psychiatric hospital, to her dream of one day living in Venice and having a family, Freud's Sister imagines with astonishing insight and deep feeling the life of a woman lost to the shadows of history.
Critic reviews
“Stunning... Bold and unexpected... It dares to provide a kind of shadow biography of Freud that is highly critical of the ‘great man.’... Sure to be provocative.” (Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books)
“Freud’s Sister is that rare artistic achievement that is more than the sum of its parts - informative but also wise, insightful and deeply moving.... Like Tolstoy, Smilevski chooses to use simple words, but to connect them eloquently so that they build to create powerful and complex images, ideas and feelings.... [A] heart-breaking book.” (The Jewish Daily Forward)
“Startling and daring... A book that is ultimately less a Holocaust novel than a celebration of the subtlety and complexity of what comprises every human life... [Adolfina] is gifted with acute perception, deep insight and a grand eloquence, all of which is on rich display through this remarkable book.” (The Jewish Journal)