Where the Name Lives

Number 36 and 37, they lived here side by side for years. As a child, she would play table tennis on the glass-topped table in her grandparents’ apartment. As an adult, she eventually has to clear out their flat, bringing cutlery, pots and cassettes to her place next door. And there’s something else she wants to preserve: Levitanus, her grandparents’ surname. Her desire to adopt this name does not only accompany her in her daily life, it ultimately takes her all the way to Riga. She follows the words of her great-grandfather Salomon and finds a window in the former Riga Ghetto that is intricately linked with her family history – and she traces the movements of four generations of her family, from the Soviet Latvia of the seventies to present-day Germany.

Ricarda Messner’s debut novel revolves around a place imbued with memories. Time and again she returns to her life in two apartments, approaches losses and lacunae, draws connections between today and yesterday. In the most delicate way, Where the Name Lives brings an entire family to life, preserving the stories they have left behind.

»This delicate, honest book … is big literature that deserves to be taken seriously.« Zelda Biller, DIE ZEIT

»A striking debut, which despite all of its cautiousness and self-reflection never falls into sentimentality. Messner dares to leave gaps and takes ownership of them by putting them into words.« Lara Sielmann, Deutschlandfunk Kultur

»Ricarda Messner generously tells the story of her family, with the dead and the murdered. Through its language of longing, this deeply sincere debut novel reminds us that the dead we have lost, that the people who were taken from us, are always already here with us.« Senthuran Varatharajah

»How much tenderness can fit into a story? In this quiet, searching novel, Ricarda Messner tries to understand the concept of family – delivering a declaration of love to the sense of security that family can offer, despite gaps and misunderstandings.« Lena Gorelik

»Ricarda Messner's debut Where the Name Lives is a tentative attempt by a young woman to understand her family history and to preserve its memory. Based on the narrative of an unusual relationship between granddaughter and grandmother, the novel uses artefacts and reconstructions to circle in on the crimes of the Nazis in Latvia. Where the Name Lives finds a quiet and haunting language in which to show how losses echo in the realms of emotion and intuition, transcending generations.« Jury of the Fulda Literature Prize