Irene Dische

Irene Dische (born February 13, 1952) is an American-German author and journalist who has written several international bestsellers.

Irene Dische at the 2017 Frankfurt Book Fair

Biography

Daughter to Jewish refugees, scientist Zacharias Dische and doctor Maria Renate Dische, Dische was born and raised in the Washington Heights district of New York City. As a teenager, she fled the regime of her stepfather Sig, only to end up in Libya during Col. Gaddafi's revolution. From there, Dische backpacked to Kenya, where she worked for famed paleontologist Louis Leakey. She returned to the United States in 1972. Back in her home country, she enrolled at Harvard University, majoring in Literature and Anthropology. After graduation, Dische worked as a freelance journalist, publishing in The New Yorker and The Nation. In the early 1980s, Dische moved to Berlin, Germany, a place where she still spends a considerable amount of time.

In 1986, Dische produced the documentary film Zacharias (1986). The film was based on her own script about her father, a Jew from Lemberg, who – having grown up in Vienna – fled to America through France to become one of the most distinguished biochemists of his generation. It was broadcast on the ZDF.[1]

In 1989, Dische published her first novel Pious Secrets. The book became a bestseller throughout Europe and was translated into fifteen languages. In 1993, Dische made her first appearance as a children's author alongside co-writer Magnus Enzensberger, publishing Esterhazy, the tale of a hare searching for love in the Berlin of the late 1980s. Her next children's book, Zwischen zwei Scheiben Glück (1997; Eng. Between Two Seasons of Happiness, 1998) tells the tale of a young Jewish boy who, following Kristallnacht, was sent into exile by his father, to stay with his seemingly stern grandfather in Hungary. The novel was awarded the German Young People's Literature Award and was also released as an audio book. Dische's most recent novel was also her most successful. The Empress of Weehawken, Dische's autobiography told from the point of view of her grandmother, was released in 2005 to significant critical acclaim.

This book does a number of things beautifully, even brilliantly. It looks at the America of the 1950s and 1960s from a European refugee's point of view, in all the infant superpower's naivete, self-importance and glistening material success, as the refugees struggle to make the dream work for them too. It explains how life can appear to a person who is both a believer and a painfully practical realist. It also shows how character is inherited yet subtly altered over the generations.

The real grandeur of The Empress of Weehawken, however, lies in the narrator's voice. Pure as a bell, always unerringly true to character, Frau Rother is drawn as accurately as the slice of a surgeon's scalpel. And that's what the author is doing here, performing autopsies on the characters of her family. The writer is the real medical examiner.[2]

The book was also a notable commercial success, selling over half a million copies in Germany alone. In 2007, she released a collection of short stories, entitled Loves.

With Hans Magnus Enzensberger she wrote the libretto for Aulis Sallinen's fifth opera The Palace.[3]

In 2008 her book The Job was made into the German television movie, Ein Job starring Vanessa Redgrave.

Personal life

Dische divides her time between Berlin and New York. She is married to German lawyer Nicolas Becker and has two children.

gollark: I mean, sure, but to continue making somewhat unrelated meta-level claims, almost regardless of how much that's actually happening there'll still be a few people complaining about it.
gollark: The important thing is probably... quantitative data about the amounts and change of each?
gollark: Regardless of what's actually happening with news, you can probably dredge up a decent amount of examples of people complaining about being too censored *and* the other way round.
gollark: With the butterfly-weather-control example that's derived from, you can't actually track every butterfly and simulate the air movements resulting from this (yet, with current technology and algorithms), but you can just assume some amount of random noise (from that and other sources) which make predictions about the weather unreliable over large time intervals.
gollark: That seems nitpicky, the small stuff is still *mostly* irrelevant because you can lump it together or treat it as noise.

References
  1. "Irene Dische". literaturfestival.com.
  2. Wilentz, Amy (2007-08-05). "'The Empress of Weehawken' by Irene Dische". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 2008-04-29.
  3. "Some Thoughts on The Palace by Aulis Sallinen, 1995. At the Music Finland site". Archived from the original on 2016-01-22. Retrieved 2014-12-24.
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