The Passport as Home: Comfort in Rootlessness

Andrei S. Markovits

Published by Central European University Press 2021

The Passport as Home

Comfort in Rootlessness

Andrei S. Markovits
Preface by: Michael Ignatieff

https://doi.org/10.1515/9789633864227

Overview
Contents

About this book

Challenging an entire tradition, Markovits explores through his life story the ups and downs of post-1945 Europe and America offering a panoramic view of key currents that shaped him.

Author / Editor information

Markovits Andrei S. :

Andrei S. Markovits is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies; Professor of Political Science; Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures; Professor of Sociology at the The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Ignatieff Michael :

Michael Ignatieff served as President and Rector of CEU between 2016 and 2021. He now is a professor in CEU's history department. Ignatieff comes to CEU after serving as Edward R. Murrow Professor of Practice of the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Reviews

Steven Lukes:
"Markovits says his passport is his home. Yet there is an unmistakable warmth with which he describes the various academic institutions that have welcomed and supported him. He also describes the pleasures of discovering a new form of Jewish identity and learning to express that identity in ways that were unavailable in the Timişoara of his childhood. The 'un-belonging' he values does not seem to be the right description for his adult condition. Nor perhaps is 'rootlessness,' which suggests the lack of something life-giving and generative. Maybe we should see his story as one of gaining a new grounding in institutions and social bonds that could afford him the very independence and agency—in short, the freedom—he had long prized."

Philip Spencer:

"Perhaps the best that one may hope for sometimes is the richness of a life lived without such a destructive set of emotions, the worth of work that is grounded on logic and evidence, the support of people (as the author generously attests to in this memoir) from whom one can learn and with whom one can share insight and understanding. It is this record and these experiences, perhaps above all, which shine brightest out of this evocative memoir."

Martin Green:

"The great Jewish historian Salo Baron defined the “lachrymose school of Jewish historiography,” that long litany of suffering and persecution that for many defines Jewish life and history. Andy Markovits’s memoir is the anecdote to that school: a sunny, optimistic, and uplifting read. It doesn’t gloss over the sadness of post-War Europe, but it shows how that lost world could produce a vital future and how a stateless, rootless person could nonetheless turn that condition into a fulfilled life." https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/book/the-passport-as-home-comfort-in-rootlessness

Heiko Beyer:

“This book offers a substantial and decisive contribution to the study of the social, political, and cultural developments of the second half of the twentieth century in the vein of similar biographical works such as Tony Judt’s Thinking the Twentieth Century (2012) and George L. Mosse’s Confronting History: A Memoir (2000). By telling the story of his life Andrei Markovits not only describes under which circumstances he achieved the role of a popular transatlantic intellectual and successful academic, but he gives us a personal yet also analytical insight into the theoretical and emotional complexity of events of both Jewish and universal history after Auschwitz. Additionally, the text provides a fine comparative study of America and Europe by being a fundamentally transatlantic endeavor which sheds light on the cultural similarities and differences between both continents.”

Dagmar Herzog:

“This evocative memoir takes us from boyhood in a multicultural neighborhood in communist Timișoara and adolescence in Vienna to the tumult of ‘1968’ at Columbia and thence to the magical margins of Harvard and finally the leafy streets of Ann Arbor, with many more transatlantic crossings and serendipitous chance encounters in between. A comparativist political sociologist unique in his attunement to cultural dynamics both high and low, Andrei Markovits lays unabashed claim to the identity of ‘rootless cosmopolitan.’ The book pays moving tribute to remarkable mentors, and captures with special sensitivity the distinctive perspectives of those extraordinary interlinked cohorts of intellectuals hailing from Central Europe who were either survivors themselves or had lost—as Markovits has—entire branches of family trees to the maws of Auschwitz. Most powerful, however, is Markovits’ emphatic, infectiously joyous argument for the values of open-heartedness, empathy, curiosity, and compassion.”

Margaret Levi:

“Andy Markovits reminds us of all that is best about America. As a Jewish emigre from Central Europe, he embodies its better traditions while rejecting its problematic ones. He layers his past into a rich pastry of multiple and diverse ingredients drawn from his U.S. education, his influential scholarship into European worker politics, his innovative research on and love of sports, his commitment to dog rescues, and his general enthusiasm about the world. We hear both the Grateful Dead and the great operas as the background music to this beautifully written adventure of discovery of people and ideas.”

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Table of Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Foreword Michael Ignatieff Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Preface and Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
CHAPTER ONE Origins: The Virtues of Rootlessness Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
CHAPTER TWO A Paean to Tante Trude (Who Might or Might Not Have Been a Nazi) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	47
CHAPTER THREE Four Friendships: Discovering America in Vienna Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	61
CHAPTER FOUR Daphne Scheer, Real Madrid and Internazionale Milano (Inter Milan): The Personal Meets the Political Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	93
CHAPTER FIVE The Rolling Stones Play Vienna (Resulting in Bodily Harm to the City’s Jews) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	103
CHAPTER SIX Arrival in New York: The Dream Meets the Reality Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	113
CHAPTER SEVEN Columbia 1968: How the World—and Andy—Changed in a Single Year Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	131
CHAPTER EIGHT Kiki: Big Politics and Little Andy Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	167
CHAPTER NINE The Grateful Dead: My American Family Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	199
CHAPTER TEN Harvard’s Center for European Studies: The Interloper Finds a Home Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	213
CHAPTER ELEVEN Dogs: The Rescuer Rescues Himself Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	257
CHAPTER TWELVE Germany: Admiration for the Bundesrepublik, Discomfort with Deutschland Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	265
EPILOGUE Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	305

Language: English
Publisher: Central European University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 328
Keywords: Memoir; Emigration; Identity; Central Europe; Intellectual life; US; Popular culture; Jewish culture

eBook

Published: August 10, 2021
ISBN: 9789633864227