Germany

Angelika Schrobsdorff

Angelika Schrobsdorff was born in 1927 in Freiburg. She immigrated to Sofia in 1939 with her mother and returned to Germany in 1947. She married Claude Lanzmann, director of the landmark 1985 documentary Shoah, in 1971, and, after more than a decade in Paris and Munich, they moved to Israel in 1983. Today, Angelika Schrobsdorff lives in Berlin. She is the author of ten novels and two works of short stories.

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Latest reviews

Set mostly in 1920s Berlin, this novel is a young woman's attempt to make sense of the life of her flighty, pleasure-seeking mother, Else, long after her death. Else begins life as a middle-class Jewish girl in pre-WWI Germany. The first sign that she is not like other...

— Jul 15 2012

For anyone who has wondered how German Jews could have ignored the historical events swirling around them when Hitler was coming to power in the 1930s, Angelika Schrobsdorff’s difficult-to-categorize book — it’s been called a novel, a historical novel, and a memoir—...

— Jul 10 2012

Often, the market for Jewish literature seems saturated with books about the Holocaust. However, even among this plethora of often complex and fascinating narratives, Angelika Schrobsorff’s “You Are Not Like Other Mothers” (originally titled “Du bist nicht so wie...

— Jun 22 2012

This is an extraordinary book. More autobiography than novel much of the time, it has a fictional twist. The fictional Angelika was born in Germany, and spent the war in Bulgaria, just as the writer did, and returned to Germany in 1947, as the writer did, too. This...

— May 3 2012

You Are Not Like Other Mothers is a simple title for a book that is neither simple fiction nor dry enough to be called non-fiction. Instead it is a narrative vacuum into which the reader is sucked along with the author’s thoughtful (if belated) understanding of her...

— Apr 10 2012

Schrobsdorff’s title comes from a poem that describes a mother who doesn’t “envelop” her children “[i]n heavy care.” The mother, Else—the uninhibited daughter of middle-class Jewish parents in turn-of-the-century Berlin—has three children (Peter, Bettina, and...

— Apr 9 2012

The prodigal son investigates Michael Ofer set out to find the story of his father, Dr. Walther Hirsch, about whom he knew little because he had been 'exiled' to a kibbutz at age 10, a traumatic event he had never before been able to understand.

— Apr 5 2010