Overview

Where is your husband? Nelli doesn't seem to be in crisis--or does she? The quiet youngest daughter in a noisy, tangled German Mennonite family who fled from Russia in the 1990s, does she even know where she belongs? Marriage, loyalty, faith, family: memory can be deceiving. A tense and unusual situation boils over in this darkly entertaining psychological novel of contemporary German life.

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9781987986280

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Reviews

Reflects on trauma, identity and language in a dark and often humorous way...Nelli lived as a devout Mennonite until one day her son discovered the mortal remains of his father carefully portioned in Ziploc bags tucked between zwieback and dumplings in the basement freezer. As the story unfolds and facts of the case are slowly revealed, the narrator illuminates the everyday life of German Mennonites from the Soviet Union.--review of German novel, Nachtbeeren, in Anabaptist World

Author Information

Elina Penner was born in 1987 as a Mennonite German in the former Soviet Union and came to Germany in 1991. Plautdietsch is her mother tongue. After years in Berlin and the U.S., she lives with her family in East Westphalia and is a successful blogger. This novel, her first, was published in 2022 as Nachtbeeren by Aufbau Verlage in Berlin. In 2023, she released the non-fiction collection Migrantenmutti; her second novel, Die Unbußfertigen will be published in Germany later this year. Bradley Schmidt is an American writer and translator. He grew up in a Mennonite community in Kansas, and now teaches and works in Germany as a translator, also teaching writing and translation at Leipzig University.

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