Prawer Family History & Genealogy

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, CBE Born Ruth Prawer 7 May 1927 Cologne, Germany Died 3 April 2013 (aged 85) New York City, New York, U.S. Period 1955–2013 Notable awards 1975, Man Booker Prize for Heat and Dust 1984, BAFTA for Heat and Dust 1984, MacArthur Fellowship 1987, Academy Award for A Room with a View 1993, Academy Award for Howards End Spouse Cyrus Jhabvala (m. 1951) Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, CBE (7 May 1927 – 3 April 2013) was a German-born British and American Booker prize-winning novelist, short story writer and two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter. She is perhaps best known for her long collaboration with Merchant Ivory Productions, made up of director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant. After meeting Cyrus Jhabvala in England, she married him and moved to India in 1951; Jhabvala was an Indian-Parsi architect. The couple lived in New Delhi and had three daughters. Jhabvala began then to elaborate her experiences in India and wrote novels and tales on Indian subjects. She wrote a dozen novels, 23 screenplays, and eight collections of short stories and was made a CBE in 1998 and granted a joint fellowship by BAFTA in 2002 with Ivory and Merchant. She is the only person to have won both a Booker Prize and an Oscar. Early life Ruth Prawer was born in Cologne, Germany to Jewish parents Marcus and Eleanora (Cohn) Prawer. Marcus was a lawyer who moved to Germany from Poland to escape conscription and Eleanora's father was cantor of Cologne's largest synagogue. Her father was accused of communist links, arrested and released, and she witnessed the violence unleashed against the Jews during the Kristallnacht. The family was among the last group of refugees to flee the Nazi regime in 1939, emigrating to Britain. Her elder brother, Siegbert Salomon Prawer (1925–2012), an expert on Heinrich Heine and horror films, was fellow of The Queen's College and Taylor Professor of German Language and Literature at the University of Oxford. During World War II, Prawer lived in Hendon in London, experienced the Blitz and began to speak English rather than German. Charles Dickens' works and Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind kept her company through the war years and the latter book she read while taking refuge in air raid shelters during the Luftwaffe's bombing of London. She became a British citizen in 1948. The following year, her father died by suicide after discovering that 40 members of his family had died during the Holocaust.[6] Prawer attended Hendon County School (now Hendon School) and then Queen Mary College, where she received an MA in English literature in 1951. In 1975, she won the Booker Prize for her novel Heat and Dust which was later adapted into a movie. That year, she moved to New York where she wrote The Place of Peace. Jhabvala "remained ill at ease with India and all that it brought into her life." She wrote in an autobiographical essay, Myself in India (published in the London Magazine) that she found the "great animal of poverty and backwardness" made the idea and sensation of India intolerable to her, a "Central European with an English education and a deplorable tendency to constant self-analysis." Her early works in India dwell on the themes of romantic love and arranged marriages and are portraits of the social mores, idealism and chaos of the early decades of independent India. Writing of her in the New York Times, novelist Pankaj Mishra observed that "she was probably the first writer in English to see that India's Westernizing middle class, so preoccupied with marriage, lent itself well to Jane Austenish comedies of manners." Life in the United States Jhabvala moved to New York in 1975 and lived there until her death in 2013, becoming a naturalised citizen of the United States in 1986. She continued to write and many of her works including In Search of Love and Beauty (1983), Three Continents (1987), Shards of Memory (1995) and East Into Upper East: Plain Tales From New York and New Delhi (1998) portray the lives and predicaments of immigrants from post-Nazi and post-World War Europe. Many of these works feature India as a setting where her characters go in search of spiritual enlightenment only to emerge defrauded and exposed to the materialistic pursuits of the East. The New York Times Review of Books chose her Out of India (1986) as one of the best reads for that year. In 1984, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2005 she published My Nine Lives: Chapters of a Possible Past with illustrations by her husband and the book was described as "her most autobiographical fiction to date". Her literary works were well received with C. P. Snow, Rumer Godden and V. S. Pritchett describing her work as "the highest art", "a balance between subtlety, humour and beauty" and as being Chekhovian in its detached sense of comic self-delusion. Salman Rushdie described her as a "rootless intellectual" when he anthologised her in the Vintage Book of Indian Writing while John Updike described her an "initiated outsider". Jhabvala was initially assumed to be an Indian among the reading public because of her perceptive portrayals of the nuances of Indian lifestyles. Later, the revelation of her true identity led to falling sales of her books in India and made her a target of accusations about "her old-fashioned colonial attitudes". Jhabvala's last published story was "The Judge's Will", which appeared in The New Yorker on 25 March 2013.

Joseph J Prawer was born on December 28, 1919, and died at age 23 years old on April 28, 1943. Joseph Prawer was buried at Long Island National Cemetery Section J Site 16206 2040 Wellwood Avenue, in Farmingdale, Ny. Family, friend, or fan, this family history biography is for you to remember Joseph J Prawer.

Toyo Y Prawer of Omaha, Douglas County, NE was born on March 17, 1930, and died at age 80 years old on August 11, 2010.

Herman Prawer of Saint Paul, Ramsey County, Minnesota was born on January 10, 1907, and died at age 63 years old in January 1970.

Ethel Prawer of Saint Paul, Ramsey County, MN was born on December 26, 1909, and died at age 79 years old on February 4, 1989.

William A Prawer of Saint Paul, Ramsey County, MN was born on July 21, 1931, and died at age 67 years old on November 18, 1998.

Donald David Prawer of Saint Paul, Ramsey County, Minnesota was born on August 27, 1935, and died at age 74 years old on December 24, 2009.

Jack Prawer of Saint Paul, Dakota County, Minnesota was born on April 16, 1910, and died at age 75 years old in November 1985.

Aba Prawer of Springfield, Union County, New Jersey was born on January 1, 1922, and died at age 88 years old on February 20, 2010.

Genia Prawer of Elizabeth, Union County, NJ was born on May 15, 1917, and died at age 79 years old on June 10, 1996.

Syma Prawer of Springfield, Union County, NJ was born on December 23, 1923, and died at age 84 years old on February 4, 2008.

Murray H Prawer of Glen Rock, Bergen County, NJ was born on November 9, 1951, and died at age 50 years old on August 20, 2002.

Pinkus Prawer of Hillside, Union County, NJ was born on January 14, 1908, and died at age 69 years old in March 1977.

Eva Prawer of Roselle, Union County, NJ was born on June 15, 1902, and died at age 78 years old in January 1981.

Alex Prawer of Rochester, Monroe County, NY was born on February 15, 1900, and died at age 89 years old on December 11, 1989.

Dora Prawer of Suffern, Rockland County, NY was born on August 16, 1924, and died at age 86 years old on January 13, 2011.

Walter Prawer of Millville, Worcester County, MA was born on December 25, 1908, and died at age 74 years old in February 1983.

Iona A Prawer of Palm Beach, Palm Beach County, FL was born on July 15, 1905, and died at age 97 years old on January 7, 2003.

Sam Prawer of Palm Beach, Palm Beach County, FL was born on January 18, 1903, and died at age 82 years old in January 1985.