The interwar years pass quite quickly in the book; the first Word War has depleted businesses and countries, and they recover in patches, but the seeds of further conflict have been sown. There is a civil war in Austria, but the pro-german Austrian Nazis are defeated after a failed coup. The Ephrussi family is still rich, but not quite so rich; the family is dispersed: marriages to Spaniards, emigration to the USA, and of course the Austro-Hungarian empire has disappeared.
The antisemitism that has been such a strong theme finally erupts into the family's life. The anschluss in 1938 means that a rabid populace is given free reign to inflict its violence on theJewish population. The Ephrussi family house is broken into, their furnishings are smashed, their belongings stolen, they are spat on and abused. The book really gives this sense of a dammed undercurrent of Nazism / antisemitism just waiting to be unleashed.
It makes me think of all the readers of the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, in this country, ignorant fuckers who, given a false sense of power, would be those brown shirted rabble - probably attacking and looting Muslim people here because they are visible, but I can see old fault lines cracking and there would be another antisemitic undertow as well. It is a frightening thought. The mad and the bad, UKIP, the BNP, small as they are, tuck themselves into that little corner of racism and intolerance that still exists, but isn't expressed, is kept under cover.
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