The Spectacle Salesman's Family

By 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1844082210
• ISBN13: 9781844082216
• Release Date: June 2009
• Publisher: Virago Press (UK)
• Length: 409 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.1" x 8.3"