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Photo: Julia von Vietinghoff / Julia von Vietinghoff / Friedenauer Presse
Just one word, for example, in the wrong language.
And then this painstakingly acquired feeling of belonging and security disappears, dissolves into nothing.
It's just not true.
Her origin identifies her as the other.
She will never be able to talk to her parents on the phone, for example, with all the things that are taken for granted around her.
It just sounds different with her, strange, wrong, wrong.
Your new life is just "almost" a new life.
The old sticks inextricably to her.
And always pushes herself out when she doesn't need it at all.
Anna Prizkau, born in Moscow in 1986, moved to Germany with her parents in the 1990s, has written incredibly beautiful, sad stories about arriving in this country.
About the "strangeness in me", as the Turkish Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk once called it.
The strangeness in her.
The stories are all related.
The constellation of characters is always similar, actually it is a short episode novel about the life of a young immigrant on unstable ground.
The mother did not want to go to the new country.
She went with me, drawn by her father's optimism and desire to remember.
To never arrive here.
Not to be happy.
The father - new job, new challenge, new colleagues - comes to life.
Start the new life with all your might.
The mother sinks alone in her addiction to the past.
A rift in the marriage.
The more determined and successful the man arrives, the greater the loneliness of the woman.
Depression, the clinic, the misfortune gets bigger, all by itself.
Perfect skin, perfect parents, perfect Germans
The narrator, the daughter, is determined to go the paternal way.
Train your accent away.
Speak like everyone else speaks.
Looking for friends, looking for lovers who are perfect.
Perfect skin, perfect parents, perfect Germans.
The stories tell of a life that tries to deny the inner conflict with all its might.
In front of the others and in front of yourself. And how it always fails.
Just as she is placed against her will in the corner of the East by ultra-tolerant lecturers at the university when it comes to getting to know each other when it comes to origin.
You belong there.
How the clerk in the social welfare office praises her for her flawless German, but she has to put his hand on her leg.
Anna Prizkau shows the hairline cracks in the stable house of tolerance and belonging.
What an effort it takes to be like everyone.
Or how to believe everyone is.
The damn silence.
And the open position again and again: the parents at home.
Which must remain hidden at all costs.
If one of those flawless friends came to her house and heard her parents talk, with what accent, in what language, then everything, everything, everything would have been for nothing.
The whole cover, gone forever.
"The foreign life in a foreign language in a foreign country. Lying in the new country. The silence and concealment. The desire to look like everyone else. To be like them. The fear of this one question: Where are you from?"
Most of the humiliations are silent
At the same time, however, the narrator is also super sensitive when she believes that other migrants are too well adapted.
Denial of one's own origin.
A boy of Indian descent, for example, who one day takes off his turban to unobtrusively adjust and line up, can be sure of all their contempt.
The first-person narrator sees her own betrayal reflected in it.
Anna Prizkau's Stories of Arrival is also a sibling book to the recently published "Frauein" by Mely Kiyak, in which the daughter of Kurdish immigrants describes her long path to self-confident self in autobiographical texts.
Prizkau, features editor of the "FAS", writes first-person fictions in beautiful, concise, clear language.
Most of the humiliations experienced are inconspicuous, quiet, and are carefully brought to light in their prose.
Only one wrong word is enough, spoken into the phone in the evening on the tram, a public word in the old, otherwise carefully hidden old language.
In a phone call with her father.
Three men don't want to hear that: "They shouted that they don't want to see me in their country. That I had nothing to do here. That they speak their language here and no other. The first kick hit my face, it hit the lip. The zipper sound. They kicked their feet into my body. As if they wanted to crush and destroy something that was hidden deep inside me. "
The memory of it remains.
But that they cannot destroy it, this is what this courageous, combative, beautiful book tells.
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