The Empress of Weehawken: A Novel

The Empress of Weehawken has ratings and 70 reviews. ·Karen· said: I This was a horrible story based on the life of the author's grandmother. What I.
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Most helpful customer reviews on Amazon. Written in the voice of the author's grandmother, Elisabeth Rother, this funny, unrestrained, tell-it-like-it-is, often irreverent memoir opens in s Germany, breezily detailing the narrow escape of the narrator's Jewish husband from the Nazis in the nick of time the reader learns, in passing, that the family he leaves behind is subsequently exterminated in the Holocaust.

Doktor Rother sails for New York, where his proudly Catholic wife eventually joins him. There is a veracity about Frau Professor Doktor Rother's descriptions of their life in post-war hardscrabble New York, the land of opportunity, yes, but, more significant at the time as a sanctuary teeming with war refugees.

As one who grew up in New York City during the '60s, I can say that Dische masterfully captures the vibe of the days when New York's vibrant ethnic neighborhoods such as my own "Germantown" on the Upper East Side with their sprawling tenements and modest shops ruled. Dische's writing style, incisive at times, is virtuoso in its fluidity, and brimming with clever turns of phrase.

A Home in Weehawken

The quirky nature of her characters, their unexpected choices, and the lively turns and twists in the plot make this book a delicious read; in short, almost an Eloise for grown-ups. It is a tale of survivors, of mothers and daughters tossed about at the whim of fate over the decades, characters who exude resilience and chutzpah in the face of adversity, but, most important, hope and joy and a burning devotion to one another, which, as the reader learns from Elisabeth at the end, lives on. I found The Empress of Weehawken to be a thoroughly engaging and refreshing read.

The Empress of Weehawken

Frau Doktor Rother has an opinion on everything, whether she is asked for it or not. She gets her immediate family out of Nazi Germany and into the US with nothing but her bloody-mindedness. She continues her imperious oversight of her slightly deranged family in Weehawken, New Jersey and then from the World to Come. I read this book a few months ago and some sentences still stick in my mind. This book has a wicked sense of humor. It is mostly a character study of a highly dysfunctional family beginning just prior to the start of WWII in Germany and following the family as it flees to the United States to start a new life.

The characters are well-rounded and full of life but not terribly likeable. A brilliant scientist but a deeply dysfunctional human being, the Jewish Dische is barely tolerated by the Rothers and merely a marginal presence in the lives of Irene and Little Carl.


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Renate, a coroner, parents sporadically and incompetently. Little Carl is a child genius and bookish recluse. Through it all, Elisabeth recounts the foibles and follies of her American descendants through befuddled but canny Old World eyes.

Paperback Editions

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  • Lady Elizabeths Comet (The Conway Series Book 2).
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