FREIBURGER ZEITGEISTLITERATURE (Satis Shroff): Review by Satis Shroff: ‘And My Mom Kept her Secret ‘ a biography novel by Elfriede Nappa

FREIBURGER ZEITGEISTLITERATURE (Satis Shroff): 

A true story of a family from the Waldach Valley where I spent three weeks of digital detoxing, forest bathing and 'Anwendungen.' A sympathetic author who made a novel out of her family history.

Review by Satis Shroff: ‘And My Mom Kept her Secret ‘ a biography novel by Elfriede Nappa

Elfriede Nappa was born in 1947 in Gässle (Haiterbach). „Und meine Mutter schwieg“ is the title of her personal, moving book in the original German version. A paperback with 260 pages, 12, 80 euros, ISBN: 9783741270604. She’s looking for the authenticity and traces of her family like a sleuth.

She decided to write this book when she set out alone for two months to North Spain across 900 km via Santiago to Finisterre and Muxia to reach the Atlantic. In this journey she argued with herself and finally decided to pen the family history.

‘I fought with myself for a long time, as to whether I should write the story as it really was,’ says Elfriede Nappa. The book is a biography written in the form of a novel and a story based on truth, although a part of it had to be written to express how it must have been in the pre- and post-war periods.

Elfriede Nappa says she had to do a long, specific research on this book. Life is hard as depicted in this book and also a beautiful love relationship.

After Katharina and Johannes died within three months of ‘Schleimfieber’, typhus, her four year old daughter Barbara was bought to Schietingen to the family of her father. When she was 27 years old she met the shepherd Heinrich from Kirchheim-Notzingen and fell in love with him. Her daughter Christine was born on August 9, 1870. Her relatives were against Barbara’s marriage with a shepherd. She married in her birthplace in the Schwarzwald.

Small Christine grew up without her mother in Schietingen. As an illegitimate child, without dowry, and her own illegitimate child, Christine married at the age of 28 in Waldach Valley with a widow who has six children. After ten years of marriage, she gave birth to three children—and her husband died. Life was hard and she carried on living and ran the homestead with her nine children.

As a widow it was the beginning of a fateful and beautiful relationship with a man.
Frieda, who was the fruit of this new love, suffered a lot in her life because of her origin and kept the secret to herself. Frieda died in the hospital in Freudenstadt on January 10, 1996. She had to spend the last years of her life in silence due to a throat operation in which the surgeons removed her voice-box.