Description

---

A powerfully moving family memoir of loss, exile and self-concealment in Nazi Germany.

The most familiar fate of Jews living in Hitler’s Germany is either emigration or deportation to concentration camps. But there was another, much rarer, side to Jewish life at that time: denial of your origin to the point where you manage to erase almost all consciousness of it. You refuse to believe that you are Jewish.

How to Be a Refugee is Simon May’s gripping account of how three sisters—his mother and his two aunts—grappled with what they felt to be a lethal heritage. Their very different trajectories included conversion to Catholicism, marriage into the German aristocracy, securing "Aryan" status with high-ranking help from inside Hitler’s regime, and engagement to a card-carrying Nazi.

Even after his mother fled to London from Nazi Germany and Hitler had been defeated, her instinct for self-concealment didn’t abate. Following the early death of his father, also a German-Jewish refugee, May was raised a Catholic and forbidden to identify as Jewish or German or British.

In the face of these banned inheritances, May embarks on a quest to uncover the lives of the three sisters as well as the secrets of a grandfather he never knew. His haunting story forcefully illuminates questions of belonging and home—questions that continue to press in on us today.

About the Author

---

Simon May was born in London, the son of a violinist and a brush manufacturer. Visiting professor of philosophy at King’s College London, his books include Love: A New Understanding of an Ancient Emotion; Love: A History; Nietzsche’s Ethics and his War on ‘Morality’; The Power of Cute; and Thinking Aloud, a collection of his own aphorisms. His work has been translated into ten languages and regularly features in major newspapers worldwide. For many years he has intended to move "back" to Berlin, but has yet to do so.

Praise For…

---

"May's compelling quest to uncover his family's hidden history illuminates topical questions about exile and belonging." Bookseller

"As identity politics become more important worldwide, and people identify more by faith group than by nationality or political allegiance, by tribe more than profession, this book comes as an enormous shock. . . . There are many stories of what happened to those who left, and many Holocaust memoirs. But we rarely read about those who stayed and survived. This book is important, not only for the story it tells, but because it demonstrates that you can deny who you really are and believe the lie — as May’s mother and aunts did. But that denial will not last down the generations."  Jewish Chronicle

"A meditation on his own family inheritance and that strange historical entity that was the German Jew – so in love with the fatherland’s cultural forms and ideals that its killing politics grew nigh invisible – Simon May’s memoir is both deeply felt and profoundly thought. It is also beautifully conceived – propelling us from the innocence of childhood when questions are hard to put through to the realities of age. This is a superb book.' - Lisa Appignanesi, author, Mad, Bad, and Sad

"A deeply moving and perceptive memoir of a family caught in the jaws of a terrible history, May shows how individual lives and relationships reflect the larger tragedies, the losses, hopes and loves, of oppressive and destructive times. It is a powerful story beautifully told, and at the same time a significant document in the record of the twentieth century." -A. C. Grayling, author, The History of Philosophy

'Gripping . . . May is at his best when he writes about his own experience of loss and displacement . . . a beautifully told story of a second-generation refugee coming to terms with his family's German past.' - David Herman, AJR Journal

'Simon May was raised in Britain as a Catholic, but was forbidden to identify as British. Neither was he allowed to identify as Jewish or German, despite his family’s origins. After one of his aunts reveals the truth about his father’s death, May embarks on a quest to uncover his family’s true history: a story of steadfast denial of their Jewish heritage through extraordinary means in order to escape the fate of Jewish people living in Hitler’s Germany.' - Hannah Beckerman, Observer