Maxim Biller arrived from Czechoslovakia to Germany as an early teen. His Jewish Soviet-born family was forced to leave country after country in order to escape the anti-semitism and political pressures.
´Ich bin Jude, weil ich keine Russe, Tschecke oder Deutsche sein will´. (I am Jewish, as I don´t want to be Russian, Czech or German - my translation).
His story is a story of Jewish life in the 1980s, at a time when Jews - Jews coming to live in Germany particularly - were a rare occurrence. Those living there already in public positions - like the literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki that Biller randomly interviewed as he 24 years old - were rare and rather were introduced in a ´clean´ narrative of the post-WWII Germany. A rhetoric of the kind: You see, we don´t kill all our Jews, some of them are even allowed to return? From this perspective, there may be some Jews who accepted to be publicly used in this way.
As someone who haven´t lived in Germany those years, such an autobiographical account fills up many details about what really Jewish life meant at the time. I may not say that now it is better or things are improved, but there are different pieces of the puzzle that may come together differently.
At the same time, the book is also a book about coming-at-age in Germany as a non-German Jew, finding your literary way and thinking at length about having - or not - a place in this complex realm. It is not a philosophical approach too, and there is a lot of Czech-alike humour that is still very useful for surviving Germany, particularly if you take your Jewish identity seriously.
PS: On purpose I will not mention anything at all about the recent Biller-Czollek ´halachic´ debate
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