Love Me Your Daughter

<p class=ql-align-justify><strong><em>After numerous volumes of poetry and short stories as well as two novels Geertje Suhr presents here a special kind of poetic autobiography: very personal and razor-sharp close to her subjects in her well-known witty and humorous style. [...]</em></strong></p><p class=ql-align-justify><strong><em>Countless characters appear in this book real and certainly fictional family friends relatives acquaintances countless places such as Prague Oldenburg Hamburg Lüneburg Hanover Lausanne Bunten Paris Chicago. [...]</em></strong></p><p class=ql-align-justify><strong><em>Gorda often appears comically funny and disturbingly angry at the same time. Only great writers achieve this rare effect with their characters. [...]</em></strong></p><p class=ql-align-justify><strong><em>Alongside humor with a deeper meaning are serious truths [and] the narrator repeatedly delves into Gorda's multi-faceted family history. The reader learns about the biological father who worked for Eichmann for a time and about the stepfather. The latter takes part in the general silence of Germany after the war and the silence of the mother. [...]</em></strong></p><p class=ql-align-justify><strong><em>At the end of the narrator's diary [...] a furious chapter emerges like a slap in the face. No longer as Gorda but as Geertje the author writes about what has plagued shocked and sickened her for many years. [This last chapter] deals with the guilt that Germans bear and that many who were born post-war repress reject accept and suffer from. [...] Many of Suhr's contemporaries and peers will identify with her as she learns about her biological father at the age of eight and the facts about the persecution of the Jews as a teenager. The questions and hesitant answers between daughter and mother are ironically fractured. It was to take almost half a century before she learned the full truth through certain documents. At the age of sixteen Geertje Suhr came to California as an exchange student and learned many new things about the subject there and then. Much later she asked uncomfortable questions in Germany and received no honest answers.</em></strong></p><p class=ql-align-justify><strong><em>Geertje Suhr challenges us with these brilliant last thirty-five pages of the book. She and her readers once again experience a purification. Many new questions arise. And every time the author has to answer I don't know new doors open into the horrific past. With all her precise observations including the repetitions exaggerations and understatements without which people do not learn Geertje Suhr succeeds in writing a radically honest autobiographical novel brilliantly presented.</em></strong></p><p class=ql-align-right><strong>Irmgard E. Hunt Professor Emerita</strong></p><p class=ql-align-right><strong>Colorado State University</strong></p><p class=ql-align-right><strong>Department of World Languages and Cultures & Literatures</strong></p><p><br></p>