The Vienna Paradox

Since emigrating from Vienna with her family in 1938 at the age of six-and-a-half, the former Gabriele Mintz has made a reputation for herself under the penname Marjorie Perloff. Her books (The Dance of the Intellect; The Futurist Moment, etc.) have established her as one of the major American critics of 20th century modernist and late-modernist writing. In this memoir, she traces her intellectual and social development, showing how they were shaped by her experience as a refugee from a hostile territory that she would not see again until 1955, after she was married but still before she launched her career. Though Perloff works in resonances from Vienna's modernist artists throughout her book, most of it remains a straightforward telling of who her family was and is, and of how she navigated her way from the New York City schools to Oberlin College. Not a conventional coming-of-age memoir that processes things emotionally, Perloff's story of her youth hones in on the institutions, people and places that formed her logos, by chance and by choice. In that, it is entirely successful.