Novel depicts German family between the wars

By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO — Readers of San Diego Jewish World are familiar with Dorothea Shefer-Vanson through her columns that she sends from the Jerusalem suburb of Mevasseret Zion. They often focus on Israel’s lively music scene.  The reporter also is a fine novelist, her latest work being Time Out of Joint: The Fate of a Family, which draws on the history of her own family to produce a compelling work examining the lives of middle class Jews in Germany between the two World Wars.

While Hitler’s repression of the Jews leading to the Holocaust is, of course, an important element in any story about this period; this novel goes much farther than the typical Holocaust account.  Through the eyes of the main characters – Robert and Hedda von Dornbach and their children Grethe, Siegfried and Hermann, we are exposed to a wide range of philosophies that shaped German Jewish thinking during this period – from German patriotism to socialism, communism and Zionism.  Through the lenses of the family’s eyes, world events are put into context during the tumultuous years between the 1920s and 1940s.

This book, however, is not simply a vehicle for comprehending world events; it creates for us five very believable and sympathetic characters, whose lives we follow.  There is Robert, an importer of tobacco (before anyone understood its unhealthy effects), who is Shomer Shabbos and a leader of his synagogue’s Chevra Kadisha, which watches and washes the bodies of other Jews prior to their burials.

His wife, Hedda, is a fastidious housewife, whose special delight (though it affects her figure) is her baking; her pastries are light and delicious.

The daughter Grethe finds the rules of Judaism too constraining; she leaves Germany, and eventually makes her way to the south of France, where only her closest friends know she is Jewish.

The elder son Siegfried, sidelined as a child with meningitis that caused his head to permanently tilt, nevertheless seems the life of the party, attractive to girls, but he fights terrible depression and loneliness.  His parents send him to Kentucky to learn the tobacco business, and later he wins a job in Shanghai, China.

And finally, there is Hermann, the youngest brother, who stays behind in Hamburg, Germany, and experiences the degradations of the Hitler regime until his mother insists that he accept passage to England, even though they might never see each other again.

Shefer-Vanson meticulously researched the social customs and morés of the Jews who lived in  between-the-wars Germany, helping us to understand their regrettably-too-common belief that their military service in World War I, their contributions to the arts and culture of Germany, and their thorough identification with the Fatherland would outlast the Hitler madness.

At the same time, she helps readers understand the divisions that weakened the European Left, so that they were a fragmented force unable to offer any alternatives to Hitler’s barbaric appeal in an economy that had wiped out people’s savings and encouraged them to find scapegoats.

Time Out of Joint: The Fate of a Family is a thoughtful book that will lure many readers away from television programming.

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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World.  He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com