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Pannonica monk

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Nica Rothschild’s Jazz-Age Awakening

ABOVE: HANNAH ROTHSCHILD. IMAGE COURTESY OF NELL BROOKFIELD

Smoky, seductive, smart, and full of both beautiful and sad family lore, Hannah Rothschild’s The Baroness: The Search for Nica, the Rebellious Rothschild (Knopf) is a sweeping biography. Nica Rothschild grew up with position and power, but her life within the perimeter of her family’s estate was suffocating and strange. Desperately lonely, with a distant mother and an alternately loving and suicidal father, Nica developed a rich imagination and daring. As a 30-year-old mother of five, Nica suddenly dropped her married life in South Africa to move to New York and become lifelong companions with Thelonious Monk. After throwing off her troubled family history, Rothschild thrived among the raw, creative talent in the dreamy, derelict downtown of Manhattan. And though she appears in Monk’s music, inspiring him, she is pretty much cut off from her famous family.

Rothschild’s grand-niece, Hannah, now rediscovers her life in tender, tumultuous, tragic, iconic

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Kathleen Annie Pannonica (Nica) Rothschild (1913-1988)

Kathleen Annie Pannonica Rothschild was born in London on 10 December 1913, the youngest child of Charles and Rozsika. She studied art in London, Paris and Vienna, going on to create a series of abstract paintings. She flew her own plane and met her future husband, Baron Jules de Koenigswarter whilst piloting in France. They were married in 1935, and spent time at his family estate Château d'Abondant in Eure-et-Loir.

In 1940 she joined the Free French Forces and was assigned to take medical supplies to West Africa; she then served as a decoder in French Intelligence as well as a broadcaster for a Free French radio station and an ambulance driver for the 1st Free French Division in Egypt and North Africa.

She was passionate about music early in life, especially jazz. After her marriage was dissolved in 1956, she moved to the United States where she actively supported jazz and some of it greatest musicians.

She wrote a number of important articles about jazz, became a member of the Musicians' Union, and w

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The Baroness: The Search for Nica, the Rebellious Rothschild | Jewish Book Council

This is a fas­ci­nat­ing and grip­ping biog­ra­phy of Pan­non­i­ca de Koenigswarter—née Roth­schild — who was bet­ter known as Nica — the author’s great-aunt. It describes the life and escapades of a woman who enjoyed liv­ing on the edge of a soci­ety — and indeed, a world — which was strict­ly seg­re­gat­ed and racist. The book, writ­ten by a writer/​producer of film doc­u­men­taries in Great Britain, weaves a fas­ci­nat­ing pic­ture of an extra­or­di­nary mem­ber of a fam­i­ly that had built a finan­cial empire in a rather frag­ile world which was in search of eco­nom­ic solvency. 

The Roth­schild dynasty was estab­lished by May­er Amschel (1744−1812) whose five sons were dis­patched by him to Euro­pean finan­cial cen­ters, in order to estab­lish and run a world-class finan­cial empire. Nica had five chil­dren and 306 cats, drove a Bent­ley, was sen­tenced to three years in jail for doing drugs, and was a patroness of var­i­ous b

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