Hannah Rothschild
A Journey Through the Rothschild Family History and Hannah’s Literary Career
Summary
An examination of the Rothschild family from their beginnings in Frankfurt’s Jewish ghetto to their rise to the heights of banking royalty. The stories of individual Rothschild family members will reveal a clear view of the family as a whole and their endeavors in UK, Europe, and Israel from the late 1700s through today.
Hannah Rothschild
Hannah Rothschild is a writer, filmmaker, philanthropist, and company director. Her biography, The Baroness, was published in 2012 and her first novel, The Improbability of Love (2015), won the Dillinger PG Wodehouse award for best comic novel and was runner-up to the Bailey’s Prize for fiction. The House of Trelawney was published in 2020. Hannah also writes for magazines and newspapers, including the Times, the New York Times, Vogue, Bazaar, and Vanity Fair. Her award-winning documentary features on the arts, politics, and public figures have been broadcast on major networks, including the BBC, HBO, PBS, and also at film festivals such as London, Tribeca, Tellurium, New York, and Sheffield. She serves on philanthropic trusts in the UK and abroad, including chairing her family’s Israel-based foundation Yad Hanadiv, whose current projects include building the new national library in Jerusalem. In 2018, she was made a CBE for services to literature and philanthropy.
My family were incredibly lucky in that on the whole, they managed to get out and there’s a very good story, which some of my French relations tell for example, about they holed up in Chateau Lafite which is also mentioned this morning by Trudy, which is the vineyards in France and they managed somehow to get the last boat out of Bordeaux and to America. And indeed quite a lot of them, in fact, nearly all of them did manage to get out.
I inherited a really fantastic organisation that had been brilliantly run by my father with the 45 people that work with him. So in some respects, I have to build strength on strength. So I think to keep going with what they’re doing is very, very important. Israel is clearly living through tumultuous times and I don’t think you have to look that hard to find projects that are worthy of help. But let me give you one example. So I think that what we’re doing at the moment, and this is probably top secret, I probably shouldn’t tell you, but I’m going to say, so I believe very strongly going back to Mayer Amschel’s example of the small garden that we should be creating where possible more open spaces for people of all communities and faiths to be able to congregate.