In This Dark House

October 2, 1995
In 1940, Kehoe's father, Berthold Lubetkin, a renowned Russian-born architect, abruptly abandoned his London career and retreated with his wife and three children to a remote farm in southwestern England called World's End. In this riveting memoir, Kehoe, a journalist in Massachusetts, describes the nightmare world she, her older sister and her younger brother inhabited as children. Cut off from the rest of the world, they were at the mercy of an abusive and tyrannical father who forbade them to come into contact with other children and mercilessly undermined any abilities they possessed or opinions they expressed. Although Kehoe's mother loved her children, she adored her husband and appeased him at their expense. A militant communist and atheist, Lubetkin forced his views on his family, which further alienated Kehoe from her schoolmates. After his death she discovered that her father had concealed his Jewish ancestry from everyone but his wife (who was a Christian) and was haunted by the deaths of his parents during the Holocaust. Kehoe is now a practicing Jew. An extraordinary, well-told story of a brutal childhood.