SOURCE: Rosenfeld, Alvin H. “The Story of a Poisoning.” New Leader 81, no. 13 (30 November 1998): 15–16.

In the following review, Rosenfeld offers a positive assessment of My German Question, describing it as “gripping reading.”

When the eminent American historian Peter Gay left his native Berlin in 1939, his name was Peter Joachim Israel Fröhlich. “Israel” was a gift from the Nazis, a symbolic brand imposed on Jewish males under the racial laws that singled out the Jews and set them apart. If not for those laws and the ultimate repudiation they represented, the Fröhlich family would have been content to blend into the mainstream of German society. “My parents were modern liberals,” Gay tells us [in My German Question]. They manifested an “uncompromising rejection of any tribal identification,” he explains. “The idea of attachment to a social community or a common heritage was virtually meaningless. … Jewish awareness? Jewish identity? These...