Mama Odessa

The world of the Russian-Jewish family from Hamburg, which is the focus of Maxim Biller's new novel Mama Odessa, is filled with secrets, betrayal, and literature. We hear a clever, beautiful, and truthful audiobook about a son and a mother, both writers, who love each other, betray each other time and again because of writing – and yet never lose one another. With impressive ease, Maxim Biller weaves a narrative that spans from wartime Odessa through the late Stalinist period to the present day. Everything is interconnected in the Grinbaum family: the Nazi massacre of the Jews of Odessa in 1941, from which the grandfather miraculously escapes, a KGB poisoning attempt aimed at the narrator's father that also affects his wife, the father's Zionist dreams, which ultimately lead him and his family to end up in Hamburg's Grindelviertel, where nothing recalls the neighborhood's Jewish past – and where he stops loving his wife to leave her for a German woman. Nevertheless, a beautiful, bright light seems to shine through the lines of this often deeply sad, extraordinary book. Mama Odessa is a literary masterpiece of the greatest precision and poetic power, a rare achievement in German literature.