“One didn’t talk about the pain,” writes David Safier at the end of his new book “As Long As We Live”, the story of his family. They didn’t talk about the pain that their grandparents had perished in the Holocaust, or about the sadness of their Jewish father at having to give up their beloved homeland for a foreign country. The suffering of the mother who grew up in the hail of bombs as a war child was also taboo. The pain was overwhelming in the Safier household and that is why there was stubborn silence, like in so many other German families in the post-war period.
“Everything I know about my father and mother I’ve pieced together from brief moments,” said the Bremen author once in an interview. “I never dared to ask – out of respect or whatever.” He always “felt this resistance and it was only rarely told. If something was told and I was able to put something together, an image emerged from it. But of course those were fragments.”
A biography was hardly possible
Only now, decades after the death of her parents, has the bestselling author written down her touching life story. However, the book “As Long as We Live” has not become a double biography or documentation, but a novel. After all, according to Safier, his parents led “the lives of great fictional characters.” Another reason for the fictional style of narration is simply that a detailed biography would hardly have been possible due to the parents’ secrecy.
Safier became known for his witty, bizarre entertainment literature such as “Bad Karma” or “Jesus Loves Me”, in which magic and reincarnation often play a major role: people transform into animals or suddenly find themselves in the bodies of historical figures, sometimes even developing Animals have a human life of their own. Most recently, he celebrated great success with the crime series “Miss Merkel” set in the Uckermark.
However, Safier has already written once about the Holocaust. In his youth book “28 days long” he tells about the everyday life of a girl in the Warsaw ghetto. Safier’s own grandmother died in the Lodz ghetto after her deportation from Vienna.
“I think of my parents every day”
Safier describes the life story of his parents in two narrative strands, which seems appropriate at least in the first half of the book, because this couple from different worlds and generations only found each other in the early 1960s. When Joschi Safier, a Jew, meets Waltraud, he is already a middle-aged man marked by life. With a lot of luck, thanks to his energetic sister Rosl, he managed to escape from Vienna to Israel, where he never really felt at home. From an unhappy marriage he took refuge in seafaring. When he falls in love with the beautiful Waltraud on a shore leave in Bremen, he decides to stay in the country of the perpetrators. Despite her youth, Waltraud is already disabled. During the war she grew up in the poorest of conditions. A first marriage ended in the tragically early death of her beloved husband.
The love affair of these two battered people is heartfelt. Because the unequal couple expects a lot of suffering on their life together: alcoholism, the early death of cancer of a daughter and, last but not least, repeated financial failures because Joschi is a lousy businessman. If you are looking for light entertainment literature with a happy ending, you will probably be disappointed by the book. Anyone who can get something out of authentic life stories of the 20th century will appreciate it. Safier himself memorialized his father and mother with this novel: “I think of my parents every day.”
David Safier: As long as will live, Kindler Verlag, Hamburg, 464 pages, 24.00 euros, ISBN 978-3-463-00030-5
