The Luck of the Cicadas

People of German descent are undesirable in Moscow in the late 1930s. The staunchly communist singer Nadja, whose husband Anton was born in Germany, is forced to emigrate with her family. The couple and their two children Senta and Peter travel to Nazi-Germany and while Anton adjusts, be-comes the family´s only breadwinner and tries to keep his positive attitude, for Nadja a stage career in Berlin is unthinkable. She despises living in Germany and feels bereft of her home country, her profession, her identity. She withdraws to herself. Only in a correspondence with a former colleague of Anton´s who has emigrated to the US, she seems to find something like home and familiarity. When Anton finds out about their correspondence´s intimacy and the fact that they plan to meet, he goes to any length in order to keep his wife.

One generation later: Nadja´s now grown-up daughter Senta has to make a decision. Her beloved Gregor has decided to move to East Germany permanently for political reasons. He chooses revolution over love. To distance herself from her mother, Senta chooses reason. She stays in West Berlin and hastily marries when she finds out she is pregnant with Gregor´s child. Her life with Michael is lonely even though they have several children. Like her mother, she withdraws to her own world. Thirty years later she receives a secret message from Gregor who is now in prison and needs help fleeing the GDR. Senta needs to decide whether she wants to try and turn back time... It is not until the third generation (with Senta´s piano-playing daughter Katarina) that the wounds inflicted by Nadja´s departure from Moscow are allowed to heal.

Larissa Boehning’s magnificent novel tells the story of three women who want to be in charge of their own lives. The young writer has written a three-fold East-West story and a three-fold search for home, identity and roots, written in a language that is melodic, agile and luminescent.