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    The Astor Orphan: A Memoir
    The Astor Orphan: A Memoir
    The Astor Orphan: A Memoir
    Audiobook5 hours

    The Astor Orphan: A Memoir

    Written by Alexandra Aldrich

    Narrated by Tavia Gilbert

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Alexandra Aldrich, a direct descendant of the famous Astor dynasty, grew up in the servants' quarters of Rokeby, the forty-three-room Hudson Valley mansion built by her ancestors. Her childhood was one of bohemian neglect and real privation. But it was fairly stable until the summer of her tenth year, when her father took up with an alluring interloper, Giselle.

    Alexandra idolized her father, Rokeby's charismatic lord of misrule, who had attended elite private schools as a child but inherited only landed property, not money. To him, she says, "poverty was amusing, a delightful challenge." All of the family's resources—emotional and financial—went to the maintenance of the Astor house and legacy. If the family had sold the house and its 450 acres, they all would have been able to live comfortably. Instead, Alexandra and her parents lived precariously in the grand house, scavenging for the next meal. Her mother, an icy Polish artist, disguised her maternal indifference by extolling the virtues of independence. Relatives preyed on Alexandra's low status in the household. Once her father got involved with Giselle, Alexandra's only stalwart was her affectionate grandmother (whose great-great-grandfather, Nicholas Fish, was a close friend of Alexander Hamilton's and an executor of his estate). Grandma Claire held Alexandra's life together with family dinner parties, rides to violin lessons, and snacks after school. But as she grew progressively more debilitated by alcohol, she soon became too frail to provide a safe haven for her granddaughter.

    Determined to impose order on her anarchic world and prove her worth, Alexandra awoke promptly at six thirty each morning, adhering to a strict personal regimen of exercise, grooming, and intensive violin practice. With money borrowed from the owner of the local gas station, she did the grocery shopping, occasionally setting aside four dollars to buy herself clean white socks. The betrayal of her father's flagrant affair, however, ignited a series of familial feuds that shook her hard-won stability and set her on a path toward escaping the Astor legacy.

    Reaching back to the Gilded Age, when that legacy first began to come undone, Alexandra has written an unflinching, mordantly funny account of neglect and class anxiety amid the ruins of a once prominent family. More than an insider's look at a decaying American institution, The Astor Orphan is the debut of a thrilling new voice able to render the secret pains and glories of childhood afresh.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateMay 14, 2013
    ISBN9780062292735
    Author

    Alexandra Aldrich

    Alexandra Aldrich lived at Rokeby, the house at the heart of this story, until she left to attend boarding school at the age of fourteen. She later moved to Poland, where she studied violin and history, and then back to the United States, where she taught high school English and converted to Orthodox Judaism.

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    Reviews for The Astor Orphan

    3.5/5

    12 ratings5 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Alexandra Aldrich begins her memoir with a brief Astor history, concentrating on Astor orphans (the last Astor family descendants to reap the benefits of the estate).Margaret Astor Ward (1838–1875), married 1856 John Winthrop Chanler (1826–1877)Margaret Chanler died of pneumonia in December 1875John W. Chanler died at his "Rokeby" estate also of pneumonia, on October 19, 1877.Their 10 children were raised at their parents' estate in Rokeby located at Barrytown in Dutchess County, New York.They were the original eccentrics of the family, leaving their descendants "the house, its history and contents, and a sense of entitlement and superiority"Alexandra's father, "despite an Ivy League education and five languages acquired while traveling in Eastern Europe (where he met his wife), could not hold a steady job."Her mother was a bohemian polish fiber artist, who thought she was marrying into a wealthy family.Aldrich states, “money was the only thing we hadn’t inherited.”Her memoir is concise and pertinent...sometimes distressing and painful and often humorous.As the memoir ends at age 14, she leaves for boarding school and the reader feels , with some reservation, that there is progress to follow.Will we have a sequel?The NY Observer has an interesting comment"Ms. Aldrich’s first book, reads like a cross between Jane Eyre and Running with Scissors"★ ★ ★
    • 4/5
      Am interesting story well told
    • 2/5
      So boring that I could not finish it.
    • 4/5
      I read this in one day. It's a quick read and interesting to hear about the Astor family. It made me search other sources.
    • 3/5
      I bought this memoir thinking I would learn something about the descendants of John Jacob Astor and I did but not in the way I expected. This is the poor, bohemian offspring of the Astor orphans, William Backhouse Astor, Sr.'s eleven grandchildren who were orphaned when their parents died of pneumonia within a short time of each other. They were raised by family in the enormous mansion called Rokeby in the Catskills. The author's great grandmother bought out her siblings to be sole owner of Rokeby, but after she died in 1963 the place began to deteriorate. Eventually the estate of some 400+ acres was co-owned by brothers Harry and Ted Aldrich. Ted's only child Alexandra is the author of this memoir.Since Harry had a job as a civil servant in Albany, Ted ran the estate and rented out cottages and other outbuildings. He also supposedly kept the place in good repair. Actually he rented to various oddball friends and artists who drove staid Harry and his wife up the wall. They lived in the main part of the mansion while Ted and his wife and daughter were relegated to the servants quarters and attics of the house. Alexandra's father, classically educated but a born mechanic and farmhand, didn't like to bathe, her mother didn't know how to keep house and, what's more, didn't care to learn, and they usually had to borrow money to buy groceries. Alexandra was largely unsupervised, a free spirit at home in the woods and with the artists who lived in the creamery. Alexandra was also a good student devoted to playing the violin. She had two younger cousins to play with; they staged plays in the best rooms wearing gowns found in trunks. Youngest Maggie would lie on a couch dramatically announcing that she was dying of "ammonia." As young children they seemed to live a kind of charmed life, but as Alexandra grew near her teens she needed more guidance than her parents and her alcoholic grandmother could give her. She became ashamed of her clothing and her life, was bullied relentlessly by cruel "in" girls, and her grades suffered accordingly.At 14 she was shipped off to a private school, relieved at having escaped Rokeby but sad that she was leaving her now-sober grandmother alone and sad, and her parents to bicker endlessly to no purpose. The story of these people and other family, the estate, and the escapades of the strange friends Ted attracted is at times sad, at other times hilarious, but always made me thankful I came from more ordinary folks. You'll want to cry for Alexandra as she is bullied and humiliated. On the other hand, you'll be angry at the way her parents neglected her so much she had to get her drunken grandmother to drive her to her violin recital.Rokeby itself sounds like a shell of its former glory, like her Uncle Harry putting on airs and reminding everyone of his family background while struggling to keep up financially. Such is the fate of the 450 acres granted to Robert Livingston, Sr. by King James II in the 1680s and passed to the Astors when they married into the Livingston family, then on to the Aldrich family. From such famous history, decrepit in the 1960s.Recommended only for fans of memoirsSource: purchased from amazon.com