Mama Odessa

• A great European novel in the tradition of Gaito Gasdanov, Isaac Babel and Joseph Roth
  
• A novel about life’s missed opportunities and the destructive power of history
• SPIEGEL bestseller
• English sample translation by Damion Searls available
  

A highly fascinating German-Jewish-Soviet family history in which the manifold catastrophes of the 20th century are reflected. But above all it is a touching homage to a maddeningly fascinating - caring, loving, humorous and brilliant, but also extremely manipulative and egomaniacal - female figure: the mother.

Everything is interconnected in the Grinbaum family: the Nazis’ massacre of Odessa’s Jews in 1941, which the grandfather miraculously escapes; an attempt by the KGB to poison the narrator’s father; the Zionist daydreams of the father, who ends up stranded with his family in Hamburg – where he stops loving his wife, leaving her for a German woman.

Like her son, the narrator's mother has also written prose throughout her life, but she was never published. This changes when her son passes on her texts to a publisher to cheer her up after her divorce from her husband. And also to protect himself a little from her undivided attention, which has been focused on the son since his father left.  But the publication of her book of family stories unleashes a competition between mother and son over the question: who has the right to present the family stories in literary form?