Evelyn Juers’s wide-ranging and suggestive study of Heinrich Mann (older brother of Thomas) and his second wife, Nelly Kroeger-Mann, opens with a vivid extended anecdote, recounting a meeting between the couple and Bertolt Brecht at a fruit market in Los Angeles, in the summer of 1944. Members of the community of European exiles in Los Angeles had flocked to the market because a farmer ‘was selling berries … Not just strawberries, blueberries … [but] also … gooseberries’. Jokingly translating the English word into Gaensebeeren (the actual German is Stachelbeeren), Brecht is caught handing out ‘a great mound of amber fruit’, giving Heinrich and Nelly ‘a translucent gem to taste’, and wittily punning ‘that he was no gooseberry fool’.
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