A highly fascinating German-Jewish-Soviet family history which reflects the manifold catastrophes of the 20th century. 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.
With impressive ease, Maxim Biller traces an arc from World War II Odessa across the late Stalinist period all the way to the present. 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?
