Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance

Dunthorne, Joe

ISBN 10: 1982180757 / ISBN 13: 9781982180751

Published by Scribner, NY, 2025

About this Item

First American Edition, First printing w/DJ wrapped in mylar. Features: Bibliography, Illustrated, Index, Price on Product. Physical Info: 1.0" H x 8.5" L x 5.6" W (0.7 lbs) 240 pages. Price covers extra shipping weight & secure ship in box w/track #. "In the tradition of When Time Stopped and The Hare with Amber Eyes, this extraordinary family memoir investigates the dark legacy of the author's great-grandfather, a talented German-Jewish chemist specializing in radioactive household products who wound up developing chemical weapons and gas mask filters for the Nazis. When novelist and poet Joe Dunthorne began researching his family history, he expected to write the account of their heroic escape from Nazi Germany in 1935. Instead, what he found in his great-grandfather's voluminous, unpublished, partially translated memoir was a much darker, more complicated story. "I confess to my descendants who will read these lines that I made a grave error. I betrayed myself, my most sacred principles," he wrote. "I cannot shake off the great debt on my conscience." Siegfried Merzbacher was a German-Jewish chemist living in Oranienburg, a small town north of Berlin, where he developed various household items, including a radioactive toothpaste called Doramad. But then he was asked by the government to work on products with a strong military connection-first he made and tested gas-mask filters, and then he was invited to establish a chemical weapons laboratory. Between 1933 and 1935, he was a Jewish chemist making chemical weapons for the Nazis. While he and his nuclear family escaped safely to Turkey before the war, Siegfried never got over his complicity, particularly after learning that members of his extended family were murdered in Auschwitz. Armed only with his great-grandfather's rambling, 2,000-page deathbed memoir and a handful of archival clues, Dunthorne traveled to Munich, Ammendorf, Berlin, Ankara, and Oranienburg-a place where hundreds of unexploded bombs remain hidden in the irradiated soil-to reckon with the remarkable, unsettling legacy of his family's past"-- Provided by publisher.

Seller Inventory # 17704

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance
• Publisher: Scribner, NY
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1982180757
• ISBN 13: 9781982180751
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition.
• Condition: New
• Dust Jacket Condition: New
• Weight: 0.11 pounds
• Seller catalogs:
  • New Book

About this title

Synopsis

In the tradition of The Hare with Amber Eyes, this "profound...comic...[and] unconventional" (The New York Times) family memoir investigates the dark legacy of the author's great-grandfather, a talented German-Jewish chemist who wound up developing chemical weapons and gas mask filters for the Nazis.

When Joe Dunthorne began researching his family history, he expected to write the account of their harrowing escape from Nazi Germany in 1935. What he found in his great-grandfather Siegfried's voluminous, unpublished, partially translated memoir was a much darker, more complicated story.

Siegfried was an eccentric Jewish scientist living in a small town north of Berlin, where he began by developing a radioactive toothpaste before moving on to products with a more sinister military connection--first he made and tested gas-mask filters, and then he was invited to establish a chemical weapons laboratory. By 1933, he was the laboratory's director, helping the Nazis to "improve" their poisons and prepare for large-scale production. "I confess to my descendants who will read these lines that I made a grave error," he wrote. "I cannot shake off the great debt on my conscience."

Armed only with his great-grandfather's rambling, nearly two-thousand-page deathbed memoir and a handful of archival clues, Dunthorne traveled to Munich, Ammendorf, Berlin, Ankara, and Oranienburg--a place where hundreds of unexploded bombs remain hidden in the irradiated soil--to uncover the sprawling, unsettling legacy of Siegfried's work. Seeking to understand one "jolly grandpa" with a patchy psychiatric history, Dunthorne confronts the uncomfortable questions that lie at the heart of every family: Can we ever understand our origins? Is every family story a work of fiction? And if the truth can be found, will we be able to live with it?

"A galvanizing and revelatory saga" (Booklist) and "a slippery marvel" (The Observer, London), Children of Radium is a deeply humane and endlessly surprising meditation on inheritance that considers the long half-life of trauma, the weight of guilt, and the ever-evasive nature of the truth.

About the Author

Joe Dunthorne is the author of Children of Radium, The Adulterants, O Positive: Poems, Wild Abandon, and Submarine, which was translated into fifteen languages and made into an award-winning film. His work has been published in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, The Paris Review, McSweeney's, Granta, The Guardian, and The Atlantic. He was born in Wales and lives in London.