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 freedom–a 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 Bradley’s life. Her
hard-won discipline helped her maintain a full-time career as a
professor while she commuted weekly to Washington and her husband’s
public life; and Germany’s 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.