Around the World in Eleven Years

Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1936. Hardcover. Good/No Dustjacket . Written by an 11-year-old Patricia Abbe and her two younger brothers, the children of an ex-Ziegfield Follies performer and a professional roving photographer. James Abbe became famous for doing shots of Stalin and 1930's Berlin during the changeover to Nazism. He was paid erratically and was a very bad businessman, but as time went by, clearly the mother and the three children were living quite well in hotels and eating in restaurants, while their father James would go off some weeks at a time to earn money. The book is so funny to read because it tells what it is really like, as a child, to live in one rented house or shack at a time, and the people they meet there, complete with their grandmother in their earliest years. They are little pitchers with big ears, and repeat what they hear, weaving in the expressions of the 1930's American and British English into their commentary. You can see them in photos as they were stationed in Berlin, going to school with the German children, boys wearing lederhosen shorts and girls with braided hair. They were not allowed to join the Hitler Youth because they were foreigners. They picked up the different languages such as French, German and Russian, immensely easily. The whole dialogue is fetching and amusing and became a bestseller amongst adults in the USA.