This book is subtitled "A Family History". However, I wasn't sure what Monika Maron was trying to tell. On the one side there are old letters, Pawel's Letters, from her Jewish grandfather. On the other side she also tells about her life in the German Democratic Republic. Of course both are part of this family history but they didn't really fit together. They better would have been told as two separate stories in a collection which would also have made the title less misleading.