Book Review: Mischpoke! Ein Familienroman by Marcia Zuckermann

I feel guilty for not reading too many books by German Jewish authors. I am definitely guilty for being so much focused on Jewish books about life in Israel or America ignoring what it is so close from home. The home, Germany, where I live and try to define my everyday Jewish identity.

Mischpoke! (extended family) by Marcia Zuckermann covers 300-year of Jewish life in Germany (West Prussia), through the story of the Kohanim family. The result of ten years of work and research, the book is sometimes ironic, sometimes dramatic, features that define, among others, the turmoil of Jewish life in German lands.

Some of the episodes and stories are inspired by the author´s own life and family experiences. She grew up in a Jewish communist environment, with family members killed in the Shoah or part of the anti-Nazi resistance. Together with her family, she left the GDR in 1958 for Western Germany where she settled her career as a writer. 

Although the book is important from the historical point of view and as a contribution to the literary history of Jewish topics written by Jewish authors in Germany and in German language - the original language of the book I´ve read - from the literary point of view I was not necessarily happy with the story. The timeline is sometimes confusing and the story is going sometimes in too many directions without always coming back. The characters do have a strong potential that is not always fulfilled through their literary encounters and life stories. The anchor to the reality - the story of the Iranian friend the she-storyteller is trying to save - is also a weak chain of the story in my opinion because it relies on a cliché - tikkun olam (repairing the world through good deeds - which is but also doesn´t make too much sense for the rest of the story. 

However, there is a lot of quality humor in the book, created through well-crafted dialogues, and story encounters, but also many elegant allusions on inter-marriage and assimilation - or integration, German style. 

Mischpoke! is a relevant work for the Jewish voices and histories in Germany. Hopefully will open my literary curiosity for more works signed by local authors (which will help me win more small victories in my everyday encounters with the far-from-perfect German language).

Rating: 3 stars