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Ursula Hegi was born and raised in Dusseldorf, Germany, in 1946, less than a year after the end of World War II. She immigrated to the United States at age 18, married, and raised two sons before beginning studies at the University of New Hampshire, where she earned both a B.A. and M.A.

Her novel, Stones from the River, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1994. She has also written five other novels, a book of nonfiction, two collections of stories and a children's book.

Hegi is professor emeritus at Eastern Washington University, and has also taught at Barnard and USC Irvine. Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Artist Trust. Ursula has served as a juror for the National Book Awards and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Throughout her writings, Hegi rehearses the pain of internal shame, shame that is the product not of what one has done but of what one is. Hegi's characters are, like herself, German Americans born in the immediate aftermath of World War II, surrounded by people directly or indirectly implicated in wartime atrocities who steadfastly refuse to speak about the war.

Her first novel, Intrusions, is the author's only attempt to overlay a story with humor and a modernist technique. Floating in My Mother's Palm, her second novel, essentially tells the author's own story of growing up in the first generation after WWII, cushioned from knowledge of the part her parents and countrymen played in the atrocities of that war by their perfect silence on the subject. Nonetheless, she is attuned to the guilt and self-hatred she sees in the adults around her.

Reading more like a collection of interconnected stories than a traditional novel, Floating in My Mother's Palm is set in the fictional German town, Burgdorf, which Hegi returns to several times in her fiction. The interwoven lives of the villagers are the stuff of these stories, which "glow with the luminosity of Impressionist paintings," claimed Sybil Steinberg in Publisher's Weekly.

Among the secondary characters in Floating in My Mother's Palm is Trudi Montag, the town librarian, a dwarf who seems to know everyone's secrets. Trudi became the central character in Hegi's next novel, Stones from the River, a highly celebrated treatment of life in a German town just before and during the rise of Hitler. Because Trudi is a dwarf, the townspeople fail to treat her like a person, and end up spilling their secrets in front of her as though she weren't there. During the war, Trudi is able to hide several Jews, in part because of this invisibility.

Reviewers were quick to draw comparisons between Hegi's dwarf and another famous fictional dwarf living through the Nazi era in Germany, created by Guenter Grass in The Tin Drum. "For both authors," noted Victoria J. Barnett in the Christian Century, "the Third Reich is part of a continuum (for Hegi, of silence; for Grass, of moral chaos) that begins long before 1933 and is not broken after 1945. Further, they contend that the failure to deal honestly with the past ensures the continuance of moral corruption." Thus, the importance of telling stories, of Trudi's stories, whatever their partiality or intent, lies in breaking the silence. "Telling a story and living a life--this compelling novel makes us see how little difference there is between them," observed Bill Ott in Booklist. Likewise, New York Times contributor Suzanne Ruta remarked: "In [Trudi's] progress from malicious gossip to serene artist, she hints at the ambiguous roots of  the writer's vocation."

Stones from the River was quickly followed by Salt Dancers, set in the author's adopted home of Washington State, where a 41-year-old woman decides to confront her abusive father in the hope of healing old wounds that might cause her to abuse her own unborn child. Christian Century contributor Sondra B. Willobee viewed Salt Dancers as a recovery novel, one in which the protagonist essentially travels the road from childhood injury through understanding to recovery. "Julia is distinguished from the heroines of other recovery novels by her awareness of her own cruelty and her willingness to understand the roots of her parents' pain," Willobee observed. Like Hegi's other protagonists, Julia learns the importance of moving out of the silence of memories and into the realm of stories. 

Hegi turned to nonfiction next, with Tearing the Silence: On Being German in America. The book is based on the author's interviews with more than 200 people who, like her, were born in Germany during or just after WWII and later immigrated to the United States. Tearing the Silence offers representative discourses on such verboten topics as racial prejudice and what these German-Americans knew about their parents' involvement with Nazism.

"The stories differ strikingly, but for the most part they share a common element: shame for the sins of their fathers," observed Sally Eckhoff in Salon.com. Kay Meredith Dusheck contended in Library Journal: "This singular work is an important addition to a greater understanding of the Holocaust."

In The Vision of Emma Blau, Hegi returned to fiction and the fictional world of Burgdorf, Germany, with an epic story of a family of German immigrants whose lives are ruined by the obsession of one of its members. Near the turn of the 20th century, Stefan Blau leaves his hometown of Burgdorf to come to the United States. After arriving, he has a vision of a young girl dancing in a courtyard, and resolves to make that vision a reality by building the Wasserburg, a luxury hotel set on the banks of a lake in New Hampshire. His singular focus on attaining that goal leads him to neglect his family. After the death of his first two wives in childbirth, Stefan returns to Burgdorf to find a third wife. He returns to New Hampshire with Helene Montag, aunt of Trudi Montag, the librarian in Stones from the River.

"This book started in my head long before I wrote Stones," Hegi told an interviewer with Publisher's Weekly. "I started it right after Floating, and when Stones crowded it aside, I had already begun to think about this boy who runs away from Germany to the United States."

Critical response to The Vision of Emma Blau was generally positive. In a review in the Atlantic Monthly, Phoebe-Lou Adams counted among the assets fo the novel "a large cast of convincing Blaus, tenants, relatives back in Germany, and Winnipesaukee [New Hampshire] locals." Hegi's account of the family of German Americans in the 1950s was also remarked upon. "In The Vision of Emma Blau, [Hegi] tells a story whose scope is an entire century,one filled with insight into a family legacy of secrets, the difficulties of assimilation, intergenerational misunderstanding and half-truths grown unmanadgeable over time," observed Valerie Ryan in the Seattle Times.

Source: Literature Resource Center. Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2000.