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Velkom to Inklandt by Sophie Herxheimer review – following in Grandma’s footsteps

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An uplifting collection told in the voice of the author’s German Jewish grandmother. Read it aloud for best effect

This book is uplifting, funny, heart-breaking – a one-off. I have been wondering how Sophie Herxheimer, whom I knew of as a talented painter, came to write these dramatic monologues in the voice of her German Jewish grandmother. For this enterprise, a mix of memory and imagination, is more than ventriloquy, it is a detailed evocation of character – like inspired eavesdropping – a pitch-perfect labour of love. Many poems will bring a lump to your throat, although, if you are taking heed of what Grent Muzzer Liesel believed, you will know to keep your emotions under wraps. There is a particularly moving poem, about the end of Liesel’s life, in which she is visited in hospital by her granddaughter (Herxheimer describes herself through her grandmother’s eyes). The granddaughter breaks an unspoken rule, telling her grandmother she loves her: “…but Luff’s a Sink we neffer/ menschen. Ve bose know zis Rule, chest/ es ve bose know ze rottett Stomek off Dizpair/ Zis is vot makes us… indeeztruktibel.”

An “author’s note” explains the poems are written “in a Lenkvitch that my ear remembers as the way my paternal grandmother spoke”. She adds, simply, that her “first 17 years were my grandmother’s last”. Liesel lived in a quiet north London suburb and, visiting her, Herxheimer often wondered how Leisel and her husband had transported “such enormous heavy wooden furniture with them whilst fleeing for their lives”. The book is full of Herxheimer’s wonderful black-and-white papercuts of this remembered furniture – a shelf on which a coffee cup steams, a curvaceous sideboard, a table set with a lacy cloth (one poem is entitled My Demesk Tapell-Kloss). There is also a papercut of a ghostly pair of gloves – crossed, perhaps clapping.

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