A blend of lyrical memoir and sober history, The Glassmaker's Son recounts a son's decades-long quest to uncover the world his Jewish father left behind in Nazi Germany. A blend of lyrical memoir and sober history, The Glassmaker's Son recounts a son's decades-long quest to uncover the world his father left behind in Nazi Germany. Along the way, he makes a series of surprising discoveries about his family, who were important players in the Bavarian glassmaking industry. After his grandfather was forced to sell the family villa, for instance, the Nazis turned it into their regional headquarters before it was destroyed by American artillery in the closing days of the war. In another twist, the author recovers a pair of lost portraits of his great-grandparents that an elderly housekeeper had been guarding for more than 40 years.Using a cache of old letters found in his parents' attic and other documents, Kupfer painstakingly pieces together the details of his grandfather's deportation and murder at Theresienstadt, a concentration camp in western Czechoslavakia touted by the Gestapo as a spa town for distinguished Jews. At its core, this book is about a search for identity - the identity of the author's soft-spoken, inscrutable father and of the author himself. Prologue PART I The World Left BehindWeiden in der Oberpfalz'The Lords Are Coming' Confusion at the Cemetery PART II Starting OverGetting OutStormy WeddingMatriarchyWillow StreetBig Gert and Little BobDifferent DadMatineeShowroomDrugs, Deadheads, and Divine LightGay BoyPART III Lost Portraits The Quest Glass Dynasty A Brief History of Antisemitism in Germany Gathering Storm Daily Torment Kristallnacht and Beyond Otto's Choice A Retirement Home in BohemiaPART IV Dad's Silence On the Fence Getting CloserFinal DaysThe Good ChinaPART V Guest of the City Eduard and Fanni ReturnTerezín TouristBack to WeidenArticle 116Afterword Acknowledgments Selected Bibliography Notes Amsterdam Publishers Holocaust Library