Description

Anne Hand visits Gibson's Bookstore to share her new memoir, Austrian Again: Reclaiming a Lost Legacy. One morning, in the summer of 2020, Anne was casually reading The Guardian when she saw a headline that would change her life: “Austria offers citizenship to the descendants of Jews who fled the Nazis.” In her memoir, Austrian Again, she chronicles the ensuing months and years during which she grappled with the decision to apply for Austrian citizenship—something of which she wasn’t even sure her proudly Viennese, but staunchly forward-looking, grandfather would have approved—and navigated the country’s bureaucratic reparation citizenship process. But this is not merely the story of a legal pursuit. While trying to unearth information that would support her eligibility, Anne waded through fragments of familial stories and dozens of ancestral documents, eventually uncovering a gap that revealed her family’s hidden Holocaust history. A book that shows us what it means to both reclaim a lost heritage and gain new footing in today’s world, Austrian Again is a profound reflection on memory and identity, a joyful tribute to the power of belonging, and a much-needed reminder of our collective immigrant past.