SOURCE: Hunt, Irmgard Elsner. Review of Pawels Briefe, by Monika Maron. World Literature Today 73, no. 4 (autumn 1999): 733-34.

In the following review of Pawels Briefe, Hunt finds shortcomings in Maron's “self-righteous” tone and lack of compassion.

Since 1981, Monika Maron has published three novels and a volume of essays. Pawels Briefe (Pawel's Letters) is her fifth major publication. Rather than “a family history,” as the subtitle purports, the volume comprises family stories, reflections on remembering and forgetting, the portrayal of a mother-daughter relationship, and, inevitably, a tracing of German political developments and how they affected the family. However, one comes away from this reading wondering just how much all that has to do with Pawel's letters. They do not seem tightly connected to the whole.

Pawel is the autobiographer's maternal grandfather, and, as the only Jewish family member, he was deported and murdered. That is the significant and horrible fact...