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" Was the story my grandfather told her about the Jewish linen salesman really true? Or was it just a postwar family fantasy, like the one about Willi's having hidden his Jewish employer in the shed in his mother-in-law's backyard? Or like the one about Willi's supposed Jewish roots, 'because of the way he looked,' and because his mother, the woman on the cuff links, had had red hair? Even though nobody had ever found, or even looked for, the slightest evidence of Jewish ancestry in our family, the conjecture promised comfort to my guilt-ridden teenage mind. As a young woman traveling abroad, I would mention the possibility with ill-founded confidence when asked where I was from. "

Nora Krug , Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home


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Nora Krug quote : Was the story my grandfather told her about the Jewish linen salesman really true? Or was it just a postwar family fantasy, like the one about Willi's having hidden his Jewish employer in the shed in his mother-in-law's backyard? Or like the one about Willi's supposed Jewish roots, 'because of the way he looked,' and because his mother, the woman on the cuff links, had had red hair? Even though nobody had ever found, or even looked for, the slightest evidence of Jewish ancestry in our family, the conjecture promised comfort to my guilt-ridden teenage mind. As a young woman traveling abroad, I would mention the possibility with ill-founded confidence when asked where I was from.