After growing up in the only Jewish family in Papenburg, Oliver Polak is familiar with all kinds of humour. Now he is thirty and looks back for the first time: on his youth as Generation One after Zero Hour – somewhere between Torah and VIVA.
The book deals with the two free lessons at school while his classmates took religious education. He spent those hours with »the other two losers« (a Muslim and a Jehova’s Witness). He tells us about his dominating mother´s strict Jewish instruction and the resulting psychotherapy, his double circumcision, his years in an Orthodox Jewish boarding school in England, the testicular cancer he survived and with the reason why Jews and Jamaicans are the same after all.
Oliver Polak explains what he has in common with the Pope and Alf, why the inhabitants of Papenburg are the salmon among the people of the Emsland, and he is annoyed at the fact that it is Osnabrück of all cities to which Hitler did not build a motorway. Sometimes he goes slightly too far. But: He is allowed to do so – he is a Jew!
By the way, the author asks for one thing: Do not read this book because of a guilty conscience or political correctness. Rather buy another copy for this reason.
Is one allowed to laugh about something like this? One has to! Because Oliver Polak writes with such charm and chutzpah about his first thirty years that one can happily announce: Jewish humour is back in Germany.
