"The Last Palace: Europe's Turbulent Century in Five Lives and One Legendary House" by Norman Eisen is a captivating and illuminating exploration of the tumultuous history of Europe through the lens of one iconic building. Through meticulous research and vivid storytelling, Eisen traces the remarkable journey of the Graf Palace in Prague, from its origins as a symbol of aristocratic privilege to its role as a witness to the seismic events of the 20th century. At the heart of the book are the stories of five individuals whose lives intersected with the palace at key moments in history. Eisen introduces readers to a diverse cast of characters, including a Jewish banker, a Nazi diplomat, a communist secret police chief, a Cold War dissident, and a U.S. ambassador, each of whom left their mark on the palace and the world around them. Through their stories, Eisen provides readers with a multifaceted portrait of Europe's turbulent century, exploring themes such as war, revolution, occupation, and resistance. He delves into the complexities of power, ideology, and identity, shedding light on the forces that shaped the destiny of nations and individuals alike.

Rich history of the Petschek Palace in Prague, detailing its construction in the 1920s to its present day status as the residence of the US Ambassador to the Czech Republic. It was the dream of Otto Petschek, who wanted a career in music but under family pressure, he became a lawyer, and then entered the coal and banking businesses. Otto wanted to create a miniature Versailles, and his designs called for wooden paneling, priceless marble, a grand staircase, turrets, columns, porticos, and patterned floors all to create the perfect backdrop to entertain on a impressive scale. The project took seven years, and bankrupted Otto, which required him to borrow from his brothers. He and his family moved into the palace in June 1931, but the family did not have many joyful years in the residence. Otto became ill soon after they moved in, and with his death in 1934, his wife and and children left for America. To escape the anti-semitism that was infecting Europe. By May 1938, the whole extended Petschek family had departed , and in 1941, Wehrmacht General Rudolf Toussaint, moved in and protected the palace. He was followed by the Soviets, whose lack of respect for the artistry, caused excessive damage. After the war, the US was able to negotiate with the Soviets, and obtained the palace as the residence for the US Ambassador. The portrayal of Ambassador Shirley Temple Black shows her intelligence and the depth of her humanity.
The palace is the main character in the book, but it serves as the backdrop for the region's political history, the policies of the US ambassadors, Communism in Eastern Europe, and the personal histories of the residents. This monumental tribute was based on interviews with the palace's long tenured caretaker, as well as archival research, diaries, and architectural details.

REVIEW:
Are you interested in architecture (one of the last palaces built in the twentieth century), Czechoslovakia, Shirley Temple Black, World War II or the Cold War?

These are just a few of the topics impeccably touched upon and researched in Norman Eisen’s newly released book entitled The Last Palace: Europe’s Turbulent Century in Five Lives and One Legendary House.

Eisen lived in the Last Palace—the Petschek Palace in Prague—for three years as U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic beginning in 2011. He is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

The palace is now a US Embassy and its construction was begun almost 100 years ago at the end of World War I. A Jewish banker named Otto Petschek decided to build for himself a palace in the middle of Prague.

He spared no expense in carrying out his vision for his new home. It was to be a miniature Versailles. It was meant to celebrate the promise of a newly independent Czechoslovakia, whose future seemed as bright as Petschek’s who came from a successful and prominent Prague family.

What made the Petschek family and the Palace’s history especially intriguing to Eisen was the fact that his feisty and elderly mother, Frieda Grunfeld Eisen, came from Czechoslovakia. She survived Auschwitz, only to flee her Czech homeland as the Communists consolidated power after the war.

Eisen’s unfolding of his mother’s story, as well as the story of those who lived in the Palace after the Jewish Petschek family fled at the beginning of World War II—from Nazis to American ambassadors—reflects the history of Czechoslovakia. His fascinating book brings together new interviews, diaries, letters, archival research and freshly declassified documents.

Here is a section of the book in which Eisen tells his mother about his appointment:

“Maminka?” I asked, using the Czech diminutive for Mother, “are you there?”
“Yes,” she answered, clipping the word short, her voice suddenly flat.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“You don’t sound very excited.”
“Hmm.”
“Mom, what is it?”
More silence.
Finally she spoke.
“I’m scared.”
“Of what?”
“That they will kill you.”
I was stunned.
“Who will?” I asked.
She paused before answering.
“You know what happened to us there.”

In 1944, the Nazis deported my mother and her family from their small town of Sobrance to a ghetto, and then to Auschwitz. There her parents, most of her other family, and almost everyone she knew from her village, were murdered. She had survived, eventually making her way to the United States and starting a new life.

I knew that her scars had never completely healed. But she loved and longed for all that she had lost, and I had been sure that she would see the president’s offer as I did: vindication. Coming full circle. An American success story.

I said as much.

“I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to you,” she whispered.

I silently cursed myself. I should have seen this coming. But I had been so caught up in my own excitement that it hadn’t occurred to me that she might react like this.

I had learned from our lifetime together—the hard way—that arguing with my mother was not effective when her anxieties flared. I had another idea. “Mom, guess where the ambassador lives?”
“Where?”
“Otto Petschek’s palace.”
“Ohhh,” she gasped. “Really?”

My mother may have been the poorest Czechoslovak Jew and Otto Petschek the richest. Otto and his family were famous among their fellow Czechs—the local equivalent of the Rothschilds or Rockefellers. Their Prague home was a Beaux-Arts masterpiece that conjured Versailles, with more than one hundred rooms—so many that no one seemed to agree on an exact count. It was chockablock with antiques, old-master paintings, rare books, and other precious objects that Otto had collected and that remained in the house. The mansion spread out across a lush garden compound the size of an American city block. Erected after World War I, it had been called “the last palace built in Europe”—a final monument to a gilded era that definitively ended in 1938. President Obama had joked with me that I would be getting a nicer house than he had.”

One of my favorite sections is the one about Shirley Temple Black, who, as ambassador beginning in the late 1980s, witnessed the end of communism.

If you think Black was only an endearing child movie star, think again. She had a stellar career in government.

In 1968, the year of the Prague Spring and the Soviet Invasion, Black was visiting Czechoslovakia when the Soviet Invasion happened!

From the book:

“By the middle of the day, it had been almost twenty-four hours since Shirley had eaten her last full meal in the serene air of Otto’s palace. She was suddenly ravenous—invasion or no invasion. The hotel dining room was open for lunch, and she went in. “A large cardboard sign had been erected behind the buffet, with ‘Dubcek’ written twice, first in Czech and underneath in Russian [Cyrillic]. Outside, the machine-gun fire continued.”

The waiter stood very straight, but his eyes gave him away. He looked as if he had been crying “as he presented a platter of meats and fresh vegetables arranged like the crown jewels. ‘The veal is very good today, madame,’ he said.” His tears began to flow again from eyes as pink and raw as the cuts of meat on his tray.

From the nearby square came the jolt of machine guns. “A heavyset man who had forgotten to shave pressed his transistor radio to his ear. ‘Poor Radio Prague. They say tanks are firing into the building. When they play the national anthem, it will mean the Russians have entered the studio.’ Then he wandered back out again.” The improbability of Shirley’s circumstances struck her. She and the other guests were “eavesdroppers on history.”

As she cupped her warm coffee mug in her hands, in rushed a tourist from the Netherlands, bringing news from outside. Scores of Czechs had gathered in Wenceslas Square. They carried posters of Dubček and taunted the Soviet soldiers, and then someone had fired into the crowd. “One boy had ripped off his shirt and, drenching it in the blood of a fallen comrade, waved it overhead, shouting, ‘Free Czechoslovakia!’ ”

Shirley returned to the lobby, where “the talk got around to telephoning out or in—both were problems.” The room phones were only for local calls. Long distance was handled in the five public booths in the lobby, but those phones were not working. The hotel switchboard couldn’t offer any relief: the two operators attended to their board day and night, performing heroically, but outgoing calls seemed impossible, and incoming calls were jammed up.

It was early morning in California, and Shirley’s family would be waking up to news of the invasion. She badly wanted to call home, feeling sure that her husband, Charlie, would be attempting to reach her. Not that he would be unduly worried: a World War II combat vet, preternaturally calm, he was not easy to rattle. And he trusted her as he would a comrade in arms. So strong was his confidence in her quick-wittedness and instinct for self-preservation that he had let her wave him off and deal with that crazed armed man at their front door on Clay Drive while he called the police. Still, he would want to talk to her, to know she was safe, as would the rest of her family.

She spotted a bulky brown house phone on a glass-topped table near the hotel’s main entry. It was totally dead. “If you look through the glass table,” she was told, “you may note that the phone has a cord but no place to plug into.” It was Communism in a nutshell.”

And slightly further in the chapter:

“Later that night, an abrupt burst of gunfire sounded outside the hotel entrance, causing Shirley and the others still downstairs to start. Shirley recalled, “A woman nearby, more daring than I, bolted outside and cried, ‘Someone’s been shot!’ ” Shirley tentatively followed her out onto the cobblestone street. To her horror, she saw the lifeless body of another woman, crumpled before them in a crimson pool of blood. It seemed that she had shaken a clenched hand in anger at the invaders and taken a bullet in the stomach. A Soviet armored vehicle was already trundling away on Štěpánská Street. It was too late to help.

“Look,” said another guest, a heavyset tourist from Miami, holding something in her hand. “It’s a bullet! Wait until they see this back home!” Shirley turned away, sickened by this callous aside. She slowly walked up the stairs to her room, “exchanged evil glances” with the pair of strange men still sitting at the entrance to the floor, and locked her door behind her.”

In 1969 she was one of the US delegates to the United Nations where her knowledge impressed Henry Kissinger. In 1974, she became US Ambassador to Ghana where she did an excellent job.

To quote the book:

“Shirley pioneered a State Department orientation course for new ambassadors in 1981. She had too much energy to simply sit at home. By the time Bush was elected in 1988, she had trained virtually every American ambassador of the previous eight years. She sent hundreds of them on their way, including to Prague. Although it was considered a hardship posting because of the surveillance and harassment by the totalitarian Czechoslovak government, it had its compensations—not least the glorious property that she had visited in 1968, where the ambassador lived. The Petschek palace had become famous throughout the foreign service. As one of her Prague-bound ambassadorial students put it, the palace was “prime, prime property for Ambassadors.” Otto would have enjoyed the praise, though he surely would have been surprised to learn that US envoys and not future generations of Petscheks were scrubbing themselves in his green-tiled thousand-stream shower.

In February 1989, Shirley was on a business trip to Seattle when she received a call in her hotel room. It was the White House. Would she hold for the president? Her heart leaped. Then she was on the line with her Ford-era swearing-in buddy, the newly inaugurated President Bush. After a warm hello, he got right to the point. Would she agree to serve as ambassador to Czechoslovakia?

“I said yes so quickly and so loudly,” she later told a reporter, that her startled husband exclaimed, “What have you agreed to?” To her surprise, Bush had no inkling of her history with Prague—that her experience in 1968 had triggered her career in international relations. He just recognized that she was smart and tough and that her charm (and still potent fame) might help accelerate change in the stubbornly brutal regime. Her husband laughed as Shirley got off the phone and began to jump up and down with glee. She was celebrating her return to a police state, one of the most repressive in the world, and one where she had been traumatized, to boot. Nonetheless, she was thrilled to be able to do something to make things better in the country that had set her on her destined path.”

I highly recommend this extremely well written book and its examination of many of the important events of the twentieth century.

Thank you Crown Publishing and NetGalley for the Advanced Reader’s Copy of this book and for allowing me to review it.

*THE LAST PALACE: Europe’s Turbulent Century in Five Lives and One Legendary House* by Norman L. Eisen tells us the story of the castle built in Prague by a wealthy Jewish man, Otto Petschek, after WWI. This is his story as well as the story of some of its previous occupants. This is also the story of Norman's mother, a holocaust survivor born in Czechoslovakia, who grew up poor.

After accepting the role of U.S. Ambassador to Prauge, the author gets to live in Otto Petschek's palace as it is the house purchased by the U.S. for the ambassador to live in. While there he starts to uncover bits about the house and determines to learn more about it and its previous occupants, such as why there are swastikas on furniture around the house.

This book was written from collections of correspondence, letters, interviews with the author, as well as the authors personal experience and that of his mother's to show us how its occupants really lived as well as Europe's past.

I highly enjoyed this book. It wasn't dry or boring. It was written as narrative nonfiction and I loved it. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in opulent houses or history in general.

I would like to thank Netgalley and the Publisher for providing me with a copy of this book. This is my honest and unbiased opinion of it.

My husband's uncle once described Prague as "the most beautiful city." Once I finally got there, I had to agree. But I never got to see the Last Palace, Otto Petshek's home which was finished in 1931. Ultimately it became the US Ambassador's residence.

This book, written by a half-Czechoslovakian former US Ambassador to the Czech Republic is the story of this amazing house, the man who built it, the people who lived in it, and the amazing story of Czechs in the last hundred years or so.

Much of the research for the book, which is as exciting as a novel, isn't well known. Eisen spoke to many people and did extensive research to tell his compelling stories.

I loved it, it shows a deep understanding of events, great sympathy with the folks who made this house their home, and an engaging style.

i'm so glad I read this book.

Thanks to NetGalley and Crown Publishing for the read of Norman Eisen’s The Last Palace.

I really found this book interesting. It was fascinating reading about Prague’s past through the history one of its surviving architectural palaces.

If you like history, you’ll enjoy this book.

3.5 stars
The Last Palace is a book covering the politics of Prague in the most recent century through the eyes of the residence of Otto Petschek's magnificent palace: Otto Petschek himself, Rudolf Toussaint the German who tried to keep himself clean of Nazi crimes while in the army, Laurence Steinhardt the rescuer of the Palace from Soviet hands, Shirley Temple Black the ambassadress during the Velvet Revolution, and the author another ambassador from the US. It also includes two chapters about the author's mother, a Czechoslovak Jew who survived the camps. The most interesting chapters for me were those of the author himself as he details his time in Prague and those with his mother because they felt a little closer to the author and more personal, though the time of Ambassadors Steinhardt and Black were certainly interesting as well. Funnily enough, the section about Otto Petschek was the most boring, probably because the author went into too much detail about the Palace and every single room and construction detail. The single most irksome thing to me was the author affected description of the magical Prague people who love their city as the Watchers of Prague (this is what I understood Watchers to mean). He mentions that he coined the phrase himself, but I don't understand the reading behind it and because he uses it everywhere to describe the people who I guess hope for freedom, it made me cringe every time. It made the author seem pretentious. The title is a little misleading in that the Palace, though it is discussed regularly, isn't the star of the book, the subtitle being more accurate in describing the book. It was also nice to see the author's slight patriotism for Czechia come out in the way he was so optimistic for it, especially in comparison to his mother. Toussaint was treated very evenhandedly, I think, for even though he work for the Nazis, Eisen points out his small ways of rebellion and discusses the fact that he was a silent bystander and the moral problems of culpability, though not in a way as to be tangential. The book is incredibly well-researched with the majority of the information coming from the author's interviews and diplomatic papers of the various residents. Even though this book was a little slow at times, it is a decent history of Prague/Czechoslovakia given in a very human way.

A copy of this book was given to the reviewer through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I received an ARC of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Beautifully written book describing an estate and the history of its inhabitants.

Houses are great witnesses to history, if they survive. This is the tale of the survival of one of the great architectural palaces of Prague and of its residents. The story begins with its construction in the early 20th century by prominent Jewish businessman, Otto Petschek. In the following years it is occupied by Germans, Russians, and then Americans. Eventually, it is purchased to be the American embassy in Prague where it bears witness to the Soviet invasion of 1968 and the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Shirley Temple Black is one of the ambassadors who lived there (yes, she was just as plucky in real life as she was in her films). Adding a personal touch the author intersperses the story of his mother whose life parallels that of the palace. I especially enjoyed this part.
This is an enjoyable way to dip into history.

Super interesting book! I never knew much about the subject but I found this biography incredibly engaging and interesting

Excellent story of palace built by a man who made a family fortune in the coal industry during WWI. Describes the many years he took to bring his creation to fruition, how he lost it when his family had to leave Prague during WWII because they were Jewish. Years later it becomes the home of the American Embassy. Told by an American Embassador to Prague. Well documented and researched volume.

Norm Eisen's The Last Palace is a fascinating look at 20th century Europe. This history unfolds through the inhabitants of a singular palace in Prague, built after World War I by a Jewish banker and industrialist, confiscated by the Nazis during WWII, then lived in by three consequential American diplomats--Eisen among them. When I turned the page after reading through the first three fascinating people, I expected number four to be a boring placeholder until we get to Eisen; imagine my surprise when it turned out to be former child star-turned diplomat Shirley Temple Black. Her chapters were perhaps the most interesting of all to me.

Through reading this book, I learned a great deal about Prague and Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) and, by extension, Europe over the last century. I was equally impressed how well-written this history is, since Eisen is an attorney and diplomat (now a Brookings Institution fellow), not a professional writer. The chapters on fascism's and communism's slow creep into government were especially poignant, given what's going on right now in the world and the US.

I can't recommend this book highly enough. Eisen even brings the building to such life that in a coincidental upcoming trip to Prague, I plan to seek out this palace. (It's the American ambassador's private residence, so he may be surprised to find me sneaking around!)

(I received a free copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.)

This is the biography of a palace and the history of a nation in the twentieth century. The story of Otto Petschek is fascinating. His father sought to keep a low profile, but not Otto. Building himself a palace proved to be folly for him, estranging his children, bringing himself to the edge of ruin, and fueling dissent against him. And he only lived there for four years. Especially interesting to me was Shirley Temple Black’s association with the palace and Czechoslovakia. Remarkable book.