The Ancestral Pyramid By Ilse Tielsch

As a young girl, Anni is confronted with her family tree. As she scrutinizes it with her father, it seems to her that she has the awesome responsibility of bearing on her own slim shoulders the intolerable weight of all her ancestors. Thus is born an abiding interest in family. Four hundred years of family history. Four hundred years of Central European history! A mixture of oral history, personal reminiscences, and painstaking research, The Ancestral Pyramid ranks with such works as Christa Wolf's A Pattern of Childhood as a fascinating approach to the recent past of what was once, for a few years, "Greater Germany." As such, it both raises questions and provides the insights for which we all too often look in vain. Although within the tradition of that post-1945 literature which endeavors to come to terms with the immediate past, works such as Günter Grass's The Tin Drum, it is also deeply and touchingly personal, while at the same time doing for Moravia what Grass has done for Danzig.