Lea and Ruth are sisters. They come from a place that used to be called Brünn, where Germans, Czechs, Jews and Christians all lived together side-by-side. Fascism and its consequences have destroyed this life and torn Lea and Ruth out of the bourgeois world in which they had planned to go their separate ways. In a comic-melancholic symbiosis forced on them by the events, they end up spending their entire lives together, are both driven from Brünn to Swabia, and almost become one by the end. Through a dual perspective and fractured chronology, past and present, with humor, empathy and artfulness, Peter Härtling recounts the lives of these two very different sisters and how contemporary history shaped these lives. No one is better than Peter Härtling at writing about the different paths love takes and how the personal and political intersect and devour one another. With Lea and Ruth, he has succeeded in painting two wonderful portraits of women.
The story of Lea and Ruth, two sisters from Brünn, who over the course of time are forced into a lifelong symbiosis, ultimately almost blending into a single person. A contemporary novel about two women, artful and full of empathy.
