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The Spectacle Salesman's Family

Viola Roggenkamp

Paul Schiefer is a travelling spectacles salesman. Every Monday morning he leaves Hamburg on a week-long sales trip. His wife, his mother-in-law and his two teenage daughters Fania and Vera see him off with abundant hugs and kisses, and they welcome him back with equal exuberance on Friday evening - just in time for Sabbath eve. While her husband is away, Alma Schiefer defends the wellbeing of her family with an explosive mixture of ferocious love and extreme determination. Thirteen-year-old Fania is torn between the comfort of home and the fearful thrills of the unknown outside world, a sixties world that contains student protest, beehive hairdos, Israel and the Six Day War, politics, religion, revolution and . . . the promise of love.

Sensual, funny and acerbic, The Spectacle Salesman's Family is a brilliant, vivid portrait of Jewish life in post-Holocaust Germany that continues the Jewish tradition of memorialising, recounting the details in order to hold onto the past and its lessons.

  • Classification : General & Literary Fiction
  • Pub Date : DEC 18, 2008
  • Imprint : Virago
  • Page Extent : 416
  • Binding : PB
  • ISBN : 9781844082216
  • Price : INR 599
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Viola Roggenkamp

Viola Roggenkamp was a reporter for DIE ZEIT for three decades. This is her debut novel based on her experiences of growing up half-Jewish in post-war Germany. She has lived in Asia and Israel for many years and now lives in Germany.

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