Letters from the Writing Desk

The Staircase:  When a House Remembers

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September 2026

 

I am presently working on a novel set in the Franconian town where I was born. The Staircase began with a question that has followed me for years: Can we ever truly possess a house when its walls contain the memories—and perhaps the suffering—of those who lived there before us?

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The novel moves between postwar Germany and 1990, when a woman returns to her place of birth and begins uncovering the history of a Jewish family displaced from a familiar house. As she searches through letters, photographs, and the guarded recollections of those who remained silent, the house itself seems to become a witness.

 

I am still discovering the story as I write it. What draws me forward is not only its mystery, but its deeper question: What do the living owe the forgotten?

 

 

Novel in progress · Historical literary fiction