Escape home

"The memoir of architectural designer and Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice Charles Paterson (born Karl Schanzer) is a riveting tale of discovery and coming to terms with a past that casts a long shadow. Paterson was nine years old when the Nazis invaded Vienna in March, 1938. Fleeing Austria for Czechoslovakia just months later, only to witness the invasion of Hitler for a second time in Prague, the author and his sister Doris escaped to Paris to rejoin their refugee father Stefan before being adopted in Australia. When the surviving Schanzer/Paterson family reunite in America in the late 1940's, the story takes a different turn. Connecting family history with movements in Central European Modern architecture through Adolf Loos, the author's uncle, and the American Modernism of Frank Lloyd Wright, Escape Home examines how architecture is a reflection of perseverance and how it can give form to the struggle of the spirit that quests simultaneously for freedom and security. Escape Home is also the biography of a father written by his son and granddaughter with a background of family history and personal reflection. The Patersons' loving portrait of Stefan Schanzer, who shepherded his family through tribulations with grace amidst sorrow and loss, is a story to be savored and shared."--Publisher.