Few Ger­man Jews who fled from the Nazis returned to their home­land after the war. Ste­fanie Zweig’s fam­i­ly was among the few. This nov­el, like the pre­ced­ing one about the family’s exile in Kenya, Nowhere in Africa, which was made into an Oscar-win­ning film, is based on her own expe­ri­ences. While it picks up on the sto­ry of the family’s African exile, with fre­quent flash­backs, a knowl­edge of the pre­vi­ous book or film is not nec­es­sary for a read­er of this book. 

The father of the fam­i­ly is an attor­ney who longed to get back to his old pro­fes­sion, though his wife and daugh­ter would have pre­ferred to stay in Africa. He ulti­mate­ly becomes a suc­cess­ful lawyer with such celebri­ties as Otto Frank, Anne Frank’s father, among his clients. The begin­ning of the sto­ry is espe­cial­ly riv­et­ing in its evo­ca­tion of Frank­furt after the war, with its bombed-out streets, short­age of food, lack of hous­ing, and the awk­ward­ness of being Jew­ish among the for­mer Jew haters and Jew mur­der­ers, many of whom turned out to be decent peo­ple with whom it wasn’t hard to get along. The nar­ra­tive has an authen­tic ring to it, with all the sub­tleties of every­day rela­tions. The old­er child, the teenage daugh­ter Regi­na, has a hard time adjust­ing and in her home­sick­ness for Africa some­times talks Swahili with her beloved father. But we also learn of her lit­tle brother’s first encounter with Ger­man anti-Semi­tism at school. We get glimpses of the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty in Frank­furt as it becomes pros­per­ous in Germany’s flour­ish­ing econ­o­my. Regi­na grows up and becomes a Ger­man girl, as the coun­try goes from rags to rich­es after the cur­ren­cy reform and the so-called ​“eco­nom­ic mir­a­cle.” The par­ents’ eccen­tric­i­ties sup­ply col­or and com­ic relief. There are such prob­lems as how to find Jew­ish hus­bands for Jew­ish daugh­ters in a coun­try where there aren’t many eli­gi­ble young Jews. The com­mon solu­tion for those who can afford it is to send the girls for a year to anoth­er coun­try. But Regi­na yearns for inde­pen­dence, refus­es to go hus­band-hunt­ing in Eng­land and instead starts a career as a jour­nal­ist. Her first love affair is with an old­er man.

But there remains a cer­tain unease about liv­ing in Ger­many. Only with the news of the Mau Mau upris­ing in Kenya does Regina’s nos­tal­gia for the coun­try of her child­hood change and she becomes rec­on­ciled to the family’s return from Africa. 

The book ends with the father’s death. Its only flaw is its lack of nar­ra­tive ten­sion in the sec­ond part. The fam­i­ly is shown to be almost too loy­al and like­able, with all their con­flicts only fake con­flicts. Still, this is a vivid and dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed pic­ture of Jew­ish life in post­war Germany.