Synopses & Reviews
Paul Schiefer is a traveling spectacles salesman; every Monday morning he leaves Hamburg on a week-long sales trip. His wife, mother-in-law, and two teenage daughters Fania and Vera see him off with abundant hugs and kisses, and they welcome him back with equal exuberance on Friday eveningjust in time for Sabbath eve. While her husband is away, Alma Schiefer defends the well being of her family with an explosive mixture of ferocious love and extreme determination. Meanwhile, 13-year-old Fania is torn between the comfort of home and the fearful thrills of the unknown outside world, a 1960s world that contains student protest, beehive hairdos, Israel and the Six Day War, politics, religion, revolution, and the promise of love.
Synopsis
Paul Schiefer is a travelling spectacles salesman. Every Monday morning he leaves Hamburg on a week-long sales trip. His wife, his mother-in-law and his two teenage daughters Fania and Vera see him off with abundant hugs and kisses, and they welcome him back with equal exuberance on Friday evening - just in time for Sabbath eve. While her husband is away, Alma Schiefer defends the wellbeing of her family with an explosive mixture of ferocious love and extreme determination. Thirteen-year-old Fania is torn between the comfort of home and the fearful thrills of the unknown outside world, a sixties world that contains student protest, beehive hairdos, Israel and the Six Day War, politics, religion, revolution and . . . the promise of love.
Sensual, funny and acerbic, The Spectacle Salesman's Family is a brilliant, vivid portrait of Jewish life in post-Holocaust Germany that continues the Jewish tradition of memorialising, recounting the details in order to hold onto the past and its lessons.
About the Author
Viola Roggenkamp was a reporter for Die Zeit for three decades. This is her debut novel, based on her experiences of growing up half-Jewish in postwar Germany.