HANKY OF PIPPIN'S DAUGHTER

Writing from America to her sister in Germany, the protagonist of this shattering first novel reconstructs the life of her parentsin the authors words, just those ordinary people who helped Hitler rise. Unflinching in her appraisal, she imagines how her fathers latent anti-Semitism was triggered by his wifes affair with a Jew, who was later sent to a concentration camp. The tone darkens as the narrator realizes that she and her sisters are living out variants of their mothers sexual model.