"Born several weeks after her parents' arrival in the United States, Carol Ascher came of age in Topeka, Kansas, where her father, a Vienna-trained lay analyst, found work among the group of refugee clinicians recruited there for the Menninger Clinic. Growing up, Ascher's challenge was to reconcile the Midwestern views of her community; the irrepressible optimism of her mother and her mother's tendency to romanticize her Berlin childhood; and the more sardonic views of her father and his highly cultured emigre circle, for whom memory was both illness and cure."
