Anja Lundholm 'Geordnete Verhältnisse' ('A Well-Ordered Life') Verlag Langen Müller, February 2001, 300pp. ISBN 3-7844-2811-8 This autobiographical novel was first published many years ago and was rediscovered by an editor at Langen Müller last year. Ruth, as the author calls herself, is eight at the start of the book. The year is 1932. She lives an apparently 'well-ordered life' with Viktor, her pharmacist father, a harsh and autocratic Lutheran Christian, and her beautiful bridge and piano-playing mother, Else, a convert to Christianity, who comes from a rich Jewish family. Ruth knows, after frequent clips round the ear and worse since the age of three, that there is little that she can do to please her father. If only she was Otto, the longed-for son. She tries, in games of violence, to play as she imagines he would have done, to no avail. Any loving contact, however minor, is frowned on. There is never a hug or a goodnight kiss for this traumatised child, whose own father throws her only soft toy out of the window so that she cannot cuddle it in bed. When he breaks his own rules and Ruth finds him locked in a passionate embrace with her governess, Leonore, she is both appalled and confused. She and her mother leave at once to visit her Jewish grandfather and aunt, where for one short week she is made to feel cherished. Instead of being called rude, greedy, lazy, obstinate, a weakling, as she is at home, she discovers what it is to be loved, and to love in return. But she and her mother are obliged to return home. The Jewish pogroms are beginning and there is apparent safety for her mother in marriage to a Gentile. The juxtaposition of life inside Ruth's family with the growing sense of nastiness in the town outside are a remarkable achievement. Ruth's interpretation of events which she cannot understand is entirely that of a child. The sheer honesty of her account, and the cool dispassionate language in which her story is told, make this a gripping and highly impressive read.