Motherland

There’s a jagged longing that animates the relationship between daughters and mothers. A daughter’s desire to please and be loved often cascades into enduring joy or peripatetic bitterness, while a mother’s desire to be loved and emulated often pours into exultant pride or raging resentment. Elissa Altman’s haltingly poignant Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing,…

Sometimes life presents you with a slate of bad choices—though some are braver than others. In Motherland, Maria Hummel, author of several novels and a former Stegner Fellow in poetry, enters relatively unfamiliar literary territory to tell the story of one so-called Mitläufer family: German citizens who would never have personally countenanced the terrible abuses…