What was it like to grow up Jewish in postwar Germany and Austria, in the shadow of the Holocaust? And what is it like to live there now? In this collection of fiction, memoirs, essays, and poems, fourteen German Jewish writers in their 30s and 40s answer these questions in a variety of ways.
"By turns comic and sharp, melodramatic and maudlin, Jewish Voices, German Words shows the varied range of experience among today's German Jewish writers." - New York Times Book Review
What a strange feeling, to grow up being aware that your existence is not generally welcome; something in the atmosphere, something extremely powerful opposes it. The majority of people around you, people you have learned to call your fellow countrymen, once did everything in their power to make sure that someone like you would no longer be found in their part of the world. Your birth, your parents' coming together, your first signs of life, even your childish prattling - all constitutes an affront.
- Chaim Noll, from "A Country, A Child, But Not the Country's Child"
I dreamed that I was an emaciated camp inmate trying to cut through the barbed-wire fence, in order to escape. my first concentration camp dream! Dreamed in Poland, not in Germany. Would it come back in Frankfurt? Mama says: Certainly not. Mama knows: Germany is the place of forgetting, in Germany they clog your brain with their false remorse and sympathy, with their pathological philo-Semitism and their damn grieving process. In eighteen years, Mama hasn't seen a single SS-man in her dreams - she's delighted about my trip to Poland.
- Maxim Biller, from "See Auchwitz and Die"
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