Anton und Alma

Anton und Alma is a contemporary Berlin love story that gradually becomes a novel about Jewishness, German guilt, inherited trauma, family damage, conversion, antisemitism, the Israel–Gaza war, and the terrifying fact that private love is never protected from history. It follows Anton Weiss, a young Jewish German-American man from Berlin, and Alma Bormann, a non-Jewish German woman from the eastern edge of the city, as they fall in love, move in together, break apart, try to return to one another, and are finally overtaken by political violence.

The prologue goes back to the beginning: Anton and Alma meet as teenagers on a school exchange in France. Alma is immediately obsessed with him. He gives her his yoghurt when she cannot eat the meat, and that small act becomes enormous to her. She imagines falling into his body, disappearing inside him. But they are young, awkward, and unable to turn the attraction into anything stable. Alma remembers him for years.

The main story begins much later in Berlin. Anton takes the U7 through the city, each station linked to some humiliating, erotic, drunken, or family memory. He is studying history, depressed, clever, defensive, and anxious. His parents, Gary and Orna, are loving but exhausting: Gary is American, sentimental, wealthy, and needy; Orna is Israeli, sharp, ironic, and a child psychiatrist. Anton’s sister Paulina is more competent and confident than he is. Anton feels permanently inferior to his family and ashamed of how little he has done with his life.