The Spectacle Salesman's Family

Trade Paperback

How do you look to the future when all around you are living in the past? This stunningly written coming-of-age story explores life in a 1960s German Jewish family with all its contradictions, frustrations and occasionally, mesmerising glimpses of light.

Hamburg, 1967. Fania Schiefer is growing up, or trying to, in a dilapidated house full of holocaust survivors. Her mother and grandmother survived in hiding but lost siblings, nieces and nephews; their lives and identities are now shaped by a world that has 'more death than life in it'. Her parents' experiences and past invade her present and Fania and her sister feel imprisoned by their family's love. Enveloped in parental protection, they are not able to go anywhere unaccompanied except for school and are teased by classmates for running home from school every day. Fania starts to realise how her world differs from that of her peers: 'You are crazy, your mother is not going to kill you if you are late...' but Fania knows: 'Of course my mother is not going to kill me, she is going to kill herself.' Challenging, lyrical and life-affirming, THE SPECTACLE SALESMAN'S FAMILY is a lesson in life after death.