1 1

The Farm in the Green Mountains

The Farm in the Green Mountains

by Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer, introduction by Elisa Albert, translated from the German by Ida H. Washington and Carol E. Washington

$17.95
$0.00 $17.95
Available as E-Book Biography & Memoir German Literature Reading Group Guide
Format
This title can be purchased from your favorite e-book retailer,
including  many independent booksellers.

Buy on Amazon   Buy on iBooks   Buy on Barnes&Noble

The Farm in the Green Mountains is a story of a refugee family finding its true home—thousands of miles from its homeland.

Alice and Carl Zuckmayer lived at the center of Weimar era Berlin. She was a former actor turned medical student, he was a playwright, and their circle of friends included Stefan Zweig, Alma Mahler, and Bertolt Brecht. But then the Nazis took over and Carl’s most recent success, a play satirizing German militarism, impressed them in all the wrong ways. The couple and their two daughters were forced to flee, first to Austria, then to Switzerland, and finally to the United States. Los Angeles didn’t suit them, neither did New York, but a chance stroll in the Vermont woods led them to Backwoods Farm and the eighteenth-century farmhouse where they would spend the next five years. In Europe, the Zuckmayers were accustomed to servants; in Vermont, they found themselves building chicken coops, refereeing fights between fractious ducks, and caring for temperamental water pipes “like babies.” But in spite of the endless work and the brutal, depressing winters, Alice found that in America she had at last discovered her “native land.” This generous, surprising, and witty memoir, a best seller in postwar Germany, has all the charm of an unlikely romantic comedy.

The Farm in the Green Mountains Reading Group Guide

Download the Reading Group Guide for The Farm in the Green Mountains.

herdan-zuckmayer

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781681370743
Pages: 256
Publication Date:

Praise

These literate glimpses of rural America make good stand-alone chapter reads: raising chickens, meeting reticent New England neighbors, marveling at the mysterious USDA pamphlets or the Sears, Roebuck catalog, journeying to the Dartmouth library, etc...This volume will be of special regional and historical interest as well as of general interest in public libraries where anecdotal essays are popular.
—Booklist

The Zuckmayers’ courage and strength is an inspiration to all who may be set in unfamiliar surroundings, even in their own country.
—Publishers Weekly

The book offers readers an interesting historical perspective of Vermont during the war years, as well as an inspiring narrative on the indomitable human instinct to survive….The contemporary reader will come away feeling inspired by the Zuckmayers’ perseverance and with renewed gratitude for all of the amenities (like heat) which we now take for granted.
— Jennifer Falvey, Vermont Standard

Part memoir, part diary, part fascinating account of rural life in 1940s Vermont...these are things that haven’t changed at all in the last century in Vermont...The sounds an old post-and-beam farmhouse makes when it gets cold, for instance, or the way the snowplow rattles the windowpanes at 4am....
—Emily Abroad Blog

View full details

  • Shopping for someone else but not sure what to give them? Give them the gift of choice with a New York Review Books Gift Card.

    Gift Cards 

  • A membership for yourself or as a gift for a special reader will promise a year of good reading.

    Join NYRB Classics Book Club 

  • Is there a book that you’d like to see back in print, or that you think we should consider for one of our series? Let us know!

    Tell us about it