Peter Singer's Pushing Time Away is a rich and loving portrait of the author's grandfather, David Oppenheim, from the turn of the twentieth century to the end of his life in a concentration camp during the Second World War. Oppenheim, a Jewish teacher of Greek and Latin living in Vienna, was a contemporary and friend of both Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler. With his wife, Amalie, one of the first women to graduate in math and physics from the University of Vienna, he witnessed the waning days of the Hapsburg Empire, the nascence of psychoanalysis, the grueling years of the First World War, and the rise of anti-Semitism and Nazism. Told partly through Oppenheim's personal papers, including letters to and from his wife and children, Pushing Time Away blends history, anecdote, and personal investigation to pull the story of one extraordinary life out of the millions lost to the Holocaust. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Peter Singer, including rare photos from the author's personal collection.
"Pushing Time Away is suffused with the melancholy fog of Vienna on a winter afternoon. It has all the power of a great novel. Written in calm, understated prose, it is resonant of The Reader by Bernhard Schlink or An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro. . . . An extraordinary work."
The New York Times
"Fascinating . . . Singer's moving book, haunted from the beginning by its terrible end, constitutes a revolt against the anonymity of the Holocaust's grim statistics."
The New Yorker
"A beautifully written and deeply moving personal document by one of our preeminent contemporary philosophers."
