Unapologetically Jewish

Barbara Honigmann on literature, life and Jewish identity

What does it mean to be Jewish? And what does it mean in literature? Barbara Honigmann has written about these issues her whole life long, both in the form of autobiography and concerning works by other writers. Her latest book describes how, in her search for Judaism that always remained difficult, she found her own literary path.

Barbara Honigmann is in a league of her own. She vividly describes an encounter with a Jewish businessman on an aeroplane to New York, which culminates in the question ‘What do goyim talk about anyway?’ And she can apply the same fine wit or, where necessary, directness to describing her discovery of existentialism as a fourteen-year-old girl growing up in East Berlin. Her path in life led her out of the GDR to the West, from Germany to France, away from her assimilated Jewish existence. She is unapologetically Jewish in the quite literal sense, and writes personally, humorously and cannily in her very distinctive way.