The Traveling Years By Elisabeth Freundlich, Translation and Afterword by Elizabeth Pennebaker

These memoirs begin with a description of the author's childhood against the backdrop of the final decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the turbulent years of the First Republic and Austrofascism. The second section concerns the family's flight from Vienna after the Anschluss, which took them first to Paris, then over the Pyrenees to Lisbon, and finally to New York. Freundlich relates with modesty, humor, and empathy her experiences as a refugee and her encounters with such figures as Otto Heller, Friedrich Adler, and Bertolt Brecht, concluding with a description of the difficulties she faced upon her return to Vienna in the early 1950s.