Dische, Irene 1952–

PERSONAL:

Born February 13, 1952, in New York, NY; daughter of Zacharias (a biochemist) and Renate (a doctor) Dische; married; children: two. Education: Attended Harvard University.

ADDRESSES:

Home— Berlin, Germany; Rhinebeck, NY.

CAREER:

Writer. Assistant to paleontologist Louis Leakey, 1970-72; research assistant.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Young People's Literature Award, Germany, for Between Two Seasons of Happiness; Jeanette Schocken Prize.

WRITINGS:

Pious Secrets(stories), German title Fromme Luegen, Viking (New York, NY), 1991.

The Jewess: Stories from Berlin and New York, Bloomsbury (London, England), 1992.

Esterhazy, the Rabbit Prince(children's book), Creative Editions (Mankato, MN), 1994.

Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz(novel), German title Ein fremdes Gefühl, Bloomsbury (London, England), 1994, Metropolitan Books (New York, NY), 1997.

Strange Traffic: Stories, Metropolitan Books (New York, NY), 1995.

Between Two Seasons of Happiness, Bloomsbury (London, England), 1998.

Ein Job, Hoffmann & Campe (Hamburg, Germany), 2000, published as The Job, Bloomsbury (London, England), 2002.

Grossmama packt aus, Hoffmann & Campe (Hamburg, Germany), 2005, published as The Empress of Weehawken(novel), Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2007.

Also author of Der Doktor braucht ein heim,1990,Die intimen Gestaendnisse des Oliver Weinstock,1994,Das zweite Leben des Domenico Scarlatti,1995, and the short-story collection,Loves, Liebe,2006. Writer and director of documentary Zacharias,1986. Contributor of articles to the New Yorker and Nation, among other periodicals. Dische's works have been translated into many languages.

SIDELIGHTS:

Irene Dische is the author of novels, short-story collections, and children's books, many of which plumb, in some manner, the German-Jewish experience, both historically and in the contemporary world. Dische, the daughter of Viennese Jews who fled the Nazis (her father is a Nobel laureate biochemist and her mother a doctor), grew up in a section of Washington Heights in New York dubbed the "Fourth Reich," according to Metroactive Arts Online contributor Jordan Elgrably, because of its high concentration of German Jews. Elgrably went on to comment that this "explains, in part, Dische's unusual world view, which sees isolated individuals living in a shadow realm of confounded cultural identities." Dische began exploring the larger world as a seventeen-year-old, when she made an around-the-world backpacking journey. Landing in East Africa, she became an assistant for a time to the British paleontologist Louis Leakey. Returning to the United States in 1972, she attended Harvard University, studying both literature and anthropology. Thereafter she became a freelance journalist. Taking a job as a research assistant to journalist Jane Kramer became a turning point in Dische's life. Her assignment took her to Germany, where she ultimately settled and has been living since the 1980s. One of her first creative efforts was the documentary film she wrote and directed,Zacharias, about her father.

Dische's first book, the novel Pious Secrets, was published in German in 1989 and in English in 1991. The stories in the collection explore aspects of Germany's Nazi past, then still a sensitive subject in that country. One of the stories from that collection, "Strange Traffic" (the title story of a later collection, as well), deals with two German Jewish converts, one from the United States and one from Germany. As Elgrably noted, "Dische depicts the Jewish characters … with all their foibles and contradictions, allowing them to be real people, not idealized models." Reviewing Dische's later collection,Strange Traffic: Stories, Elgrably concluded, "Although there is a disconcerting, almost fragmentary nature to the stories that sometimes distances the reader, Dische nevertheless manages to capture the inherent frailty and absurdity of human relationships." Reviewing that same collection, a Publishers Weekly contributor concluded, "Dische draws her international cast and their ironic tales of disillusion with distinctive strokes and sharp clarity, producing sharply individualistic, memorable portraits."

Dische worked on several other story collections before publication of her first novel,Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz, a "brittle comedy," according to New York Times Book Review writer Michael Gorra. Benedikt, Count Waller von Wallerstein, is at the center of this work that looks at the fracture lines in the newly reunited Germany. A famous mathematician whose life has been lived in mathematical order, Benedikt, terminally ill, finds new chaos when a Russian pianist and her son come into his life. Reviewing the novel in Booklist, Nancy Pearl praised the author's "quirky wit and her ability to distill emotional nuances to their purest form." However, a Publishers Weekly contributor was less impressed, citing "characters that never fully come to life … [and] a story that inches along to a pedestrian, conventionally bittersweet conclusion." Wendy Brandmark, writing in the New Statesman & Society, felt Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz is "more a parable than a full-blooded novel." Library Journal reviewer Paul Hutchison had a higher assessment, though, commenting that the novel "moves wryly toward its strangely touching conclusion."

Other novels from Dische include The Job, which deals with a Kurdish assassin in New York, and The Empress of Weehawken, a fictionalized memoir of the author's grandmother. Dische presents this generational story as a monologue of memories recounted by her Catholic grandmother who came from the German Rhineland. After she married a Jew, she and her family had to flee Nazi Germany for the United States, where she worked hard to maintain not only the survival but the comfort of her family. Frau Elisabeth Rother is the narrator of this tale, and she is much put upon to hold her family together. Her great cross to bear seems to be her daughter Renate, who falls in love with a Jewish scientist, Herr Dische, and who, marrying him, bears a granddaughter, Irene, who is equally as independent-minded as her mother. Thus, the author writes herself into this faux memoir. Critics greeted this novel with general praise. Debra Ginsberg, writing in the San Diego Union-Tribune Online, found the work "razor-sharp, desert-dry and luxuriantly ironic," further noting that though the novel is only 300 pages long, its "breadth of plot, theme and character has the layering and nuance of a much longer book." Similar praise came from Los Angeles Times critic Amy Wilentz, who observed, "The book takes the reader on a vivid, rollicking tour of Frau Rother's exterior and interior worlds, and the wonder of it is that her life in the Jersey suburbs is as full of incident as her life in Hitler's Germany," while for a Publishers Weekly reviewer The Empress of Weehawken is "a worthwhile novel that vividly illuminates the contemporary German relationship to recent history."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Belles Lettres: A Review of Books by Women, summer, 1995, review of Esterhazy, the Rabbit Prince.

Booklist, August, 1997, Nancy Pearl, review of Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz, p. 1876.

Books, August 18, 2007, Gail Caldwell, "Indomitable Women: Self-Centered but Funny Narrator Sets Tone," p. 12.

Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2007, review of The Empress of Weehawken.

Library Journal, September 15, 1995, Vicki Cecil, review of Strange Traffic: Stories, p. 95; June 15, 1997, Paul Hutchison, review of Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz, p. 96; June 1, 2007, Susanne Wells, review of The Empress of Weehawken, p. 108.

Los Angeles Times, August 5, 2007, Amy Wilentz, review of The Empress of Weehawken.

New Statesman & Society, December 2, 1994, Wendy Brandmark, review of Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz, p. 40.

New York Times Book Review, September 24, 1995, Robert Irwin, "Creepy Old Men," review of Strange Traffic; August 31, 1997, Michael Gorra, "Foreign Bodies," review of Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz.

Publishers Weekly, March 22, 1991, Sybil Steinberg, review of Pious Secrets, p. 71; August 21, 1995, review of Strange Traffic, p. 48; June 30, 1997, review of Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz, p. 66; May 7, 2007, review of The Empress of Weehawken, p. 38.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, spring, 1996, Irving Malin, review of Strange Traffic; spring, 1998, Irving Malin, review of Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz.

School Librarian, spring, 1999, review of Between Two Seasons of Happiness; summer, 1999, review of Between Two Seasons of Happiness.

Spectator, August 15, 1992, Janet Barron, review of The Jewess: Stories from Berlin and New York, p. 33.

Times Educational Supplement, September 4, 1998, review of Between Two Seasons of Happiness, p. 12.

Times Literary Supplement, February 8, 1991, Michael Hofmann, review of Pious Secrets, p. 11; July 3, 1992, review of The Jewess, p. 24; December 2, 1994, David Aberbach, review of Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz, p. 23.

ONLINE

Bloomsbury Publishers Web site,http://www.bloomsbury.com/ (November 5, 2007), "Irene Dische."

Eduhi,http://www.home.eduhi.at/ (November 5, 2007), "Irene Dische."

Forward Online,http://www.forward.com/ (October 24, 2007), Sasha Weiss, review of The Empress of Weehawken.

Metroactive Arts Online,http://www.metroactive.com/ (November 2, 1995), Jordan Elgrably, "From the Outsider: Exile and Displacement in the Stories of Irene Dische."

San Diego Union-Tribune Online,http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/ (August 5. 2007), Debra Ginsberg, review of The Empress of Weehawken.