by BRONKA SCHNEIDER
edited by ERIKA BOURGUIGNON and BARBARA HILL RIGNEY
The Ohio State University Press, 1998
Paper: 978-0-8142-5008-2 | eISBN: 978-0-8142-7913-7 | Cloth: 978-0-8142-0808-3
Library of Congress Classification D804.196.S34 1998
Dewey Decimal Classification 940.5318092

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK

Bronka Schneider and her husband, Joseph, were two of the thirty thousand Austrian Jews admitted as refugees to Great Britain between March 1938 and 2 September 1939. It was not until 1960, however, that Schneider wrote her memoir about the year she spent as a housekeeper, with Joseph as a butler, in a Scottish castle.

Schneider tells of daily encounters—with her employers, the English lady and her husband, a retired British civil servant who had spent many years in India; the village locals; other refugees; and a family of evacuees from the slums of Glasgow.

The editors have divided this memoir into chapters, adding headlines from the London Times as epigraphs. These headlines, reporting the escalating events of World War II, are in stark contrast to daily activities of the residents of this isolated region of Scotland. A commentary by Erika Bourguignon provides historical, political, and cultural background of this period.