Growing up in Bavaria during World War II, Ernestine Bradley came to know wartime dislocations and food shortages, along with the challenges of taking care of her siblings while her mother was ill. The men of her hometown were away at war, but their absence created an exciting unexpected freedoma freedom she sought again at 21 when she became a stewardess, moved to New York and went on to marry a shy basketball star who played for the New York Knicks.Yet the paradoxes of her childhood shaped Bradleys life. Her hard-won discipline helped her maintain a full-time career as a professor while she commuted weekly to Washington and her husbands public life; and Germanys literary response to the holocaust of which she had been unaware became her scholarly passion. Cancer confronted her with a personal war, ultimately demanding a vulnerability she had never allowed herself. Frank, warm, and deeply moving, The Way Home is an inspiring American story.From the Trade Paperback edition.