Hanky of Pippin's Daughter

Writing from America to her sister in Germany, the protagonist of this shattering first novel reconstructs the life of her parents--in the author's words, "just those 'ordinary people' who helped Hitler rise." Unflinching in her appraisal, she imagines how her father's latent anti-Semitism was triggered by his wife's affair with a Jew, who was later sent to a concentration camp. The tone darkens as the narrator realizes that she and her sisters are living out variants of their mother's sexual model.