The Farm In The Green Mountains

(Paperback, Main)

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The Farm in the Green Mountains is the story of a family finding home-halfway across the world from their homeland. Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer and her husband, the playwright Carl Zuckmayer, lived at the heart of intellectual life in Weimar Germany, counting among their circle Stefan Zweig, Alma Mahler, and Bertolt Brecht. After Carl's work fell afoul of the Nazis, however, the couple and their two daughters were forced to flee Europe. Los Angeles didn't suit them and neither did New York, but then a chance stroll in the Vermont woods led them to Backwoods Farm, the eighteenth-century house where they would live for the next five years. In Europe, the Zuckmayers were accustomed to servants, in Vermont they found themselves joyfully building chicken coops and refereeing fights between unruly ducks. Despite the endless work a new farm required and brutal winters that triggered bouts of melancholy, Alice discovered that in America she had found her "native land." And her generous, surprising, and witty memoir, a best seller in postwar Germany, has all the charm of a love story with a happy ending.

Reviews

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 havent 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

Author Bio

Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer (1901 - 1991) was born in Vienna and spent her childhood there. In 1925 she married the writer Carl Zuckmayer, and when Hitler came to power in 1933, they had to flee Germany. They went first to Austria, then, five years later, took separate routes to a reunion in Switzerland. In 1939 they emigrated with their two daughters to America. Ida H. Washington and Carol E. Washington were both translators of German literature.