Sasha Mariana Salzmann
Daughters, Mothers, Daughters

Mother-daughter pairs are the backbone of Sasha Mariana Salzmann’s new novel. They are bound and strangers to each other. They lose what is dear to them and are unable to speak about it. Not even about the giraffe outside the window.

By Marit Borcherding

© Suhrkamp It begins dramatically: A young woman, beaten up, writhes in a courtyard while two others bend over her, wailing. A fourth finds both descriptive and suggestive words for this constellation of pain, saying, “Mother and daughter, the one lay on the ground as if she were a shadow cast by the other. And the other seemed to grow from her feet like a shrub with broken branches.”

But the setting was supposed to be completely different. Lena, the mother of the badly battered Edi, wants to celebrate her fiftieth birthday. Instead, she finds herself with her friend Tatjana and her daughter Nina, who acts as narrator here, first in the dark courtyard and then in Nina’s flat. Im Menschen muss alles herrlich sein (Glorious People) has an emotional introduction that raises questions yet, due to omitted explanations, draws the reader into the novel.

a sick SYSTEM

After these six pages, the story cuts away to a long flashback on Lena’s mercurial life, full of impositions, in the former Soviet Union. It begins in the 1970s, the Brezhnev era dominated by rigidity and domestic policy restrictions. Lena lives with her parents in Gorlovka, a Ukrainian industrial town. She’s always happy when allowed to visit her beloved grandmother in Sochi on the Black Sea, a bright world of fragrances and colours and a hazelnut orchard, which Salzmann, with emotional density, presents as a paradise for the senses.

But this happiness doesn’t last. Lena, like other children, has to spend the summer in a pioneer camp, whose barracks-like atmosphere forms the greatest possible contrast to the affectionate stays with her grandmother. The illness of her mother causes an even greater blow. It is also Lena’s first contact with pervasive corruption, which activates her sense of injustice in a physically palpable way. “Lena suddenly felt dizzy when she saw the envelope with the notes. She knew the meaning of the word ‘bribe’ by now, but she had never done anything like this before, she had never seen so much money at once ... something about it was wrong; it didn’t feel good in the pit of her stomach.” Although a fortune goes to an unscrupulous doctor, Lena’s mother is not helped. She dies, and Lena feels existentially forlorn. “Tears ran into her mouth. The veneer of the table, ... curled and broke at the edges. Lena stared at the long protruding splinters until it was completely silent. Then a high-pitched sound and a hiss.” Salzmann allows all the abysses in the social fabric to shine through the experience of her characters as if in a mirror. She thus never has to explain further why so much is collapsing inside and out, even if the façades are preserved for as long as possible.

That’s it

In the narrative, which is rich in events but never overloaded, moments of alienation accumulate. Lena, who knows how clever and capable she actually is, only gets a place at medical school through connections. Her head doctor awards her a lucrative dermatology practice – in return for a transfer of profits to him, of course. Soon times change; in the nineties under Gorbachev, lucrative deals are made. Poets like Anton Chekhov, to whom this book owes its title, are considered merely yesterday’s news. “I can’t listen to this Chekhov crap any more. At every damn opportunity, these idiots quote from Uncle Vanya,” one of Lena’s fellow students sneers. She falls unhappily in love with a Chechen man who had come to her practice as a patient. In the end, he does not pledge himself to her, despite her pregnancy, and so Lena ends up marrying Daniel. She also has to cope with the death of her beloved grandmother. A chapter closes, “That’s it, grandmother was gone. This would likely be Lena’s last time in the hazelnut village, her mother was gone as well; her father laid freshly picked flowers on her grave ... That’s it. That was the feeling that had repeated itself continuously over the last few years ... as if a trap was snapping shut, and the prongs of its steel jaws sounded like: That’s it.” And because that was it, Lena and Daniel, who comes from a Jewish family, leave for Germany as quota refugees. The growing anti-Semitism in Russia is always running in the background of the narrative, sometimes defining the plot.

seeking distance

About halfway through the novel, the chronology entwined about Lena is broken up. Nina takes over the part of the first-person narrator for a few pages, as she did at the beginning of the book, filling it with her both keen and distanced view of the self-deceiving behaviour of the parent generation. “To have excuses, you get drunk, and to have excuses, you have children. Life gets out of hand, so you add another link to the chain you’ve been inserted in. Then at least you’re not the last fool; there’s another one coming after me.” Entanglements and surrender to the demands of existence wherever one looks.
Nina’s first-person perspective is soon abandoned again, and Edi, Lena’s daughter, takes centre stage instead. She lives in Berlin and corresponds to many Berlin clichés with her casual appearance and queer lifestyle, while at the same time marking the distance to her parents. As an aspiring reporter, she observes the disintegrating Soviet Union, the conflict hotspots in Russia and Ukraine from an observer’s perspective and doesn’t want to be pinned down to questions of her origins. But the family ties are always there, despite all her resistance, and so Edi travels together with Tatjana, her mother’s terminally ill friend, to Jena, the family’s place of arrival in Germany a long time ago, for the aforementioned milestone birthday. Plenty of talking goes on there, but not in a way that meets Edi’s demands for honest, open exchange. “Finally say something that matters,” she thinks in Lena’s direction, herself repeatedly unable to say things that are important to her out loud.

coming full circle

Finally, we come to the escalation described at the beginning. Again Nina, with her autistic and unsentimental traits, takes over the narrator’s role. After the birthday party gone wrong, Edi and Nina meet again and although they know each other well thanks to their mothers’ friendship, they are not always close. The conversation between the daughters on the book’s final pages is about assuming positions, about futile attempts to leave, about plans for the future, about Nina’s mother’s illness or about having someone. It is also about a giraffe that Edi had seen the day before between the blocks of flats in Jena, which Nina secretly dismisses as a stoner’s fantasy until she goes to the window and, “There was an eyelash-less black eye staring at me, two horns, ears, nostrils. A downy white forehead pressed against the glass between her and us.”

A fairy-tale moment conjured up by an exotic gentle animal whose females always flock together - this little poetic ingredient also adds to the beauty of the book. It captivates the reader through the vivid drawing of its characters and their empathically described search for identity and closeness under changing societal conditions. Sasha Mariana Salzmann’s second novel was very rightly longlisted for the German Book Prize 2021; it would have been equally deserving of a place on the shortlist. It will, in any case, find its readership.