Nasrin Namdar

83 Baumstrasse Nasrin Namdar

Anna and Lena, neighbors on the same floor in a Hamburgian apartment-building on Baumstrasse, are the base for the life-stories of the residents on the floor, to illuminate and fade out. The two girls, one Christian and the other Jewish, grow up in innocent, magical friendship, in an era when the simplest turns to unbearable.

The events in the story, do not linger at the girls childhood; they swing back and forth with life stories of the residents in three apartments. They take you to different periods to Odessa, Cairo, Vienna, Hamburg and more.

The novel is a fruit of the author's (an ex-Iranian Israeli) contemplations on Holocaust. The author deals with the hideous tragedy from an unconventional angle. She brings the reader to ponder on reasons that bring human beings to be the most savage beasts.




From the Epilogue:

When I first visited the beautiful city of Hamburg, I condemned God who had repaid the Germans' savagery and brutality, so lavishly. Every elderly walking on sidewalks, was a brutal Nazi in my eye... Were those German soldiers not sons of mothers? Did they not feel pain, homesickness, fear, hunger and cold? Or maybe they were just emotionless war machines!"

This is Namdar's second Novel. The first "Snobar Khanom's Gold Coins" became a hit in three languages, Hebrew, Farsi and English. The book was awarded by the Israeli culture Minister in 2015.