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    The Matriarch
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    The Matriarch
    Unavailable
    The Matriarch
    Ebook369 pages3 hours

    The Matriarch

    By G. B. Stern

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    A wonderfully gossipy novel that whisks readers through the glamorous worlds of turn-of-the-century Vienna, Paris, and London.

    The Rakonitz family - rich, cosmopolitan, and Jewish - is ruled over by the indomitable will of the matriarch, Anastasia. From her exotically furnished house in west London, Anastasia holds court over her children, grandchildren, and vast extended family. For someone must resolve the quarrels, celebrate the births, deaths, engagements, bankruptcies, artistic triumphs, and explain the only way to prepare a delicious Crème Düten.

    With the dawning of the twentieth century, a series of scandals and financial catastrophes strike the Rakonitzes, threatening the family ties and calling into question the legacy that binds them together.

    ‘There is wealth here, and gaiety. There is middle European style, and food in abundance. It is very un-English, and enormously attractive.’ - Julia Neuberger
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDaunt Books
    Release dateJun 27, 2013
    ISBN9781907970290
    Unavailable
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    Reviews for The Matriarch

    4/5

    18 ratings3 reviews

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    • 3/5
      The Matriarch is the beginning of a fictional family chronicle, centered on the Rakonitz family, a closely knit tribe of Jewish Europeans who weather reversals in fortune, family scandal, wars, travel, and generational change, while never losing faith in the ultimate importance of family.
    • 5/5
      Gladys Stern dedicated this book to John Galsworthy, and it's fitting as this is a family saga on a par with the Forsytes. Following the vast Jewish Rakonitz family - from Napoleonic times to the 1920s; from Pressburg to Vienna and ultimately London...but with offshoots all over Europe...from 'typical' Jews to those who adopt Englishness....it's staggering how the author gets so many characters into just 300 pages.But the central character is the eponymous matriarch, Anastasia, alternately charming, autocratic...utterly self sacrificing towards the family, yet ruling them with a rod of iron. And her granddaughter Toni...motivated, modern, yet deeply caught up, too, in the pre-eminence of family and the magic of her ancestry:"They needed not to be collected always on the same estate in the same land, steadfast and unmoving, like the old families of England, or the clans of Scotland. They were a tribe of nomads, and they settled and moved on again, and were legally granted other nationalities, and bought other people's houses and gardens, and left them again, and they spread and spread without rooting, and scattered and scattered without rooting; but invincibly the face survived. Just that one inspiration, br some strength and for some purpose it survived, and you could never tell where it would break through, or in whom..."Unputdownable.
    • 5/5
      A few years ago I picked up a small small book in a second-hand bookshop. It was plain, simple and unadorned, but I picked it up because I had spotted the name of a Virago author. G B Stern, and because its title made me curious. I hadn’t read any of her books before, though I had the two that were reissued as Virago Modern Classics on my shelves, but I decided it was worth taking home.I loved that book. I fell in love with her fiction, written with such intelligence and wit, and I have to tell you that her multiple memoirs – where she writes of anything and everything that has captured her interest – are sublime.I can understand why she’s still relatively obscure; because she wrote a great many books, because they are wildly diverse, because, and because – I am given to understand – some of the are not as strong as the others. I have to say though, that I have yet to pick up one of her books and not be smitten.I heard great things about ‘The Matriarch’, I read that it was inspired by the author’s own family history, I saw that she returned to the same family in a number of later books, and so when The 1924 Club arrived I took it as a sign that it was time for me to meet The Matriarch and her family.The story opens early in the 19th century, and sweeps forward and across Europe, as the fabulously wealthy Rakonitz family prospers and grows. The women of the family reign over houses and homes, where sons bring wives home to live with their mothers, grandchildren belong as much to the whole family as to their parents, and that there are other ways to live is not even contemplated. Meanwhile, the men go out to do business, and are free to indulge what ever interests they may have.The stream of names, of relationships, of conversations, of family occasions could have been overwhelming; but there was such warmth, such vibrancy that I was completely captivated. I might not have been able to tell you who was who, or what was significant, but I saw the whole picture and it was glorious.It was at the start of the 20th century, when Anastasia Rakonitz, married to her first cousin Paul, stood at the head of her family, that the story proper began. She adored her family; she was generous, she was demonstrative, she was practical, and there was nothing that she would not do for each and every one of them.But there was no way but her way; and she would not even contemplate that the family would not always live together and do things as it always had.Her word was law. Her family had everything they could ever want; except the freedom to set their own courses in life.Some of her family were oblivious; some of them were comfortable; but for some of them life was difficult.Imagine the position of a daughter who could not snare a suitable husband, and who when she did could not present her mother with a grandchild. Imagine the position of the bride of a son who had ‘married out’, who would not have the home of her own that she had anticipated, who would be trapped in a house ruled over by another woman who did things so very differently to the woman who raised hers.There were cracks, but it was a string of bad investments that swallowed the family fortune and destroyed a way of life. The big houses and the family treasures had to be sold, and simpler accommodation had to be found, and simpler ways of living established.Anastasia’s health was beginning to fail, she couldn’t entirely comprehend what her family’s crash would mean; but she fought to hold her family together, and to live by the principles that had served her and her forbearers so well or so very long.But her menfolk abandoned her; one took his own life, one fled overseas, one succumbed to ill health ….That meant that her grandchildren, no longer wealthy, no longer able to rely on family connections, had to establish themselves in a changing world. Through their efforts, the family stayed afloat. They took on more and more responsibility, but they were still treated as the children of the family.Toni, the eldest child of Anastasia’s eldest child, worked hard to establish herself as a businesswoman, and she found success and she felt pride is what she was able to achieve. But she still loved her family, she wanted to restore pride in her family, she wanted to clear the debts that ‘The Uncles’ had left behind.On one hand she was a modern woman; on the other she was the woman that Anastasia had raised and moulded.Could she reconcile the two?A wealth of stories, relationships, events and incidents, is wrapped around this central story. Some are in the foreground, some are in the background, and it feels a little messy sometimes, but it feels like life. And because the story was so well told, the details so well told, the descriptions so very vivid, I was pulled right into the homes and the lives of this colourful, exotic, suffocating family.I loved some of them, I was infuriated by others; but I believed in them all.I would have liked to learn a little more about some of the family, about some parts of the family, but there is only so much that can be fitted into a single book.The story starts slowly, but it gather pace and by the end it is utterly compelling.That G B Stern could paint such a vibrant picture of a family, on such a grand scale, with so many intriguing details to pick out, is wonderful.It works as a study of the ties that bind families together, of the way those ties can pull you back, and of why we sometimes need to loosen or escape those ties.It works as a study of the power of women; it was women who ran the home and family, and it was women who had to take charge when the family found itself in crisis, and find new ways of living for themselves, for their parents, for their children.And it works as family saga; full of wit, colour, and intelligence.I have two of the sequels – and I need to track down two more.