Esther Dischereit – splinters that cannot be put aside

Absurd, sad, tragicomic, bizarre. These adjectives all fit Esther Dischereit’s new novel “A Pile of Dollar Bills.” An autofictional story, told neither chronologically nor linearly. At the beginning the author lays down a clue: »It remains a strange thing that I report on things as if I had been there. I probably feel like I was there. Like a representative, or I would have several identities that I assign here and there.”

It is the story of her Jewish family in the broadest sense, which Dischereit, born in 1952 in Heppenheim in southern Hesse, tells in a polyphonic manner from different perspectives. It is not always clear who is speaking. The action takes place on several time levels in various countries, equipped with an almost unmanageable staff of Dostoyevsky proportions. This novel is about the impact and aftermath of the Shoah on the life of a large family up to the present day, which is characterized by persecution, hiding, hiding and survival. Life in exile, in the USA, in Israel/Palestine is examined as well as the relationship to Judaism and the scandalous terms of the Nazi successor state FRG such as “compensation” and “reparation”.

»All who have been at home in this world put aside splinters or do not put them aside or frame them. But every time there are hundreds of pieces missing. No picture wants to emerge. In addition, sometimes they put the splinters the other way around, then the previously laid splinters no longer fit. Any attempt to retell this scenario must remain incomplete, which is also indicated by the fine cover drawing by beate maria wörz, which shows a map of various scenes sketched by hand .

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Esther Dischereit’s mother, Hella Freundlich, is married to Felix Zacharias. They have a daughter: Hannelore. You live in Berlin on Bornholmer Straße. Since the family was scheduled to be deported to the camps for extermination in the summer of 1943, Hella and Hannelore went into hiding. They often change their location until they end up in Sorau, now Polish Żary. Father Felix goes into hiding in another way. In Żary, Hella and Hannelore are denounced and rescued by the railway worker Fritz Kittel, who takes care of them both and hides them. He passes Hannelore off as his niece so that she can attend school under his name. An incredibly courageous act in the middle of a war under a fascist dictatorship. Esther Dischereit says about this in a film that was part of an exhibition at the Jewish Museum Frankfurt in 2023: “I have always thought about why someone helps.” There is still no conclusive answer in the case of the railway worker Fritz Kittel.

A little later, as the front approaches, Kittel is transferred to Hesse. He persuades Hella and Hannelore to accompany him, even though they would have been freed from persecution by the Nazi regime earlier as the Red Army approached. At his new location in Heringen (Werra), Kittel uses forged papers to declare Hella as his wife and Hannelore as their daughter. In an interview with Deutschlandradio Kultur, Esther Dischereit speaks of 17 other people who helped her mother and sister survive.

No wonder, then, that the novel contains an index with almost 60 people and brief characteristics as well as a list of 20 locations of the action. The central focus is the dialogue between the aunt, who lives in Berlin, and the black nephew, the son of Hannelore and Harold Bradley, an African-American activist. Hannelore, Esther Dischereit’s older half-sister from her mother’s marriage to Felix Zacharias, met the former GI Harold in Italy, where he was studying art history. In contrast to his mother Hannelore, who for him would be a “Closet Jew” and who enjoys eating voluminous pork knuckles, he not only professes Judaism, but also a closeness to Orthodoxy.

So many thematic and biographical “splinters” are picked up and dropped again in the novel that this narrative style could perhaps be read as an expression of the disparate and torn biographies and identities of Jewish people after the Shoah and in the Diaspora. Nevertheless, a more linear narrative style would have benefited the novel. Nevertheless, it contains many strong scenes that are definitely worth reading. Where does the title “A Bunch of Dollar Bills” come from? It is based on the many letters from her grandfather from the USA to the author, which always contained a one-dollar bill.

Esther Dischereit: A pile of dollar bills. Maro-Verlag 2024, 312 pages, hardcover, €24.