“I’m the only one on the whole entire school who does and I look like I tried to crash through a fence.” There’s a truth bomb for you. She’s more concerned with why her mother continues to insist on taking Julie shopping with her when neither of them enjoy spending time with the other, or why her parents don’t get along very well, or why she has to wear braces. I won’t fault the foreshadowing for being a little on the heavy side, because that’s basically the theme of this book, but it’s actually fairly well done for being so intense.Īnyway, Sophy complains that her teacher dislikes her because she’s a Jew, and Julie says she doesn’t understand that, because she’s Jewish too and nobody really seems to mind too much. Julie is smart and witty without crossing the line into annoyingly-precocious, and she’s not any more informed about world events than you’d expect your average young teenager to be. for his lousy characterizations, this one is pretty damn good. But other than that, a lot of her problems are pretty standard-issue teenage girl-her mother doesn’t understand her, she argues with her BFF, she’s not crazy about school, etc.Īs much as I knock on B.D. Her mother has a younger sister, Julie’s Aunt Clara, who left to go to New York many years ago and no one ever talks about. At school, Julie gets top marks, puts up with irritating boys, and afterwards her irritating piano lessons, and generally the issues of your average 13-year-old girl. Her father is exceedingly busy, and her mother spends her time either fretting nervously or shopping and socializing with people, so Julie spends a lot of time with Milli instead. Her family is very, very well-off, and live in a large and fancy apartment in the centre of Vienna, complete with a dining room that seats twenty, priceless paintings, and so on. She likes to play cards with the family’s maid, Milli, and annoy her brother Max, and spend time with her best friend Sophy, and avoid practicing the piano, and so on. Julie Weiss is a wealthy girl growing up in Austria with her family, where her father is a respected physician, her mother a renowned beauty, and her older brother a snotty intellectual college student. It’s actually significantly more depressing than a book about slavery, and how awful is that? It’s far, far more depressing than the Titanic book where hundreds of people dying is the main plot! This is flat-out one of the most depressing DA books out there.
One Eye Laughing, The Other Weeping: The Diary of Julie Weiss, Vienna, Austria, to New York, 1938, Barry Denenberg, 1938.
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