Gila Lustiger So sind wir (That’s the Way We Are) Berlin Verlag, February 2005, 260 pp. ISBN 3-8270-0557-4 In this, her third novel, Gila Lustiger turns her sharp eye on her own family and the particular exchanges – or silences – that formed her childhood and her growing perception of what made them different: not just her exotic name (‘Why couldn’t I have been an Ulrike’), but the legacy she only becomes fully aware of when chancing upon a book by her father in a Parisian bookshop. She captures brilliantly the incongruity of that moment. Her father is the historian Arno Lustiger, and a survivor of Auschwitz. It is the story of a woman almost at home in three countries and cultures – Germany, Israel and France – the resisting of labels too easily attached, the striking of the tricky balance between telling too much and too little, and offers, too, a candid sketch of the emergence of Israel. It’s all related in a voice unequivocally her own – saucy, sharp and with a fetching dose of sarcasm.