Es begann damals in Afrika (review)

Readers familiar with Stefanie Zweig’s previous bestselling novel Nowhere inAfrica, or Caroline Link’s Academy Award winning film of the same name,need no introduction to this novel’s backstory. The Redlich family fled fromNazi Germany in the 1930s to a Kenyan farm, where their gently wise cookOwuor became their friend and guide into the new culture. Walter and JettelRedlich’s young daughter Regina, like the author Zweig, attended a British boarding school during many of her formative years. The novel Es begann damals in Afrika fills us in on the lives of Regina and three of er schoolmates, who at the age of twelve made a pact under a eucalyptus tree that they would meet again in that spot ten years later, a reunion that never comes about.

Some references to the Redlich family’s experience in this novel are recognizable from both the film and the previous novel Nowhere in Africa (e.g., the mention of Walter’s irritation when Jettel brought an evening dress rather than an icebox with her to Kenya), while some new information about their life in exile is revealed as well. We learn further details about characters and relationships introduced in Nowhere in Africa, though it is not at all necessary to have read the earlier work already in order to enjoy this one. One aspect Zweig spotlights is Regina’s close relationship with her much younger brother Max, who in the first novel, albeit not in the film adaptation, was born while the Redlichs were still living in Kenya. We find out that Regina treated Max more like her own child than as a sibling, especially after her parents’ deaths, and that she stayed in post-war Germany mostly for his sake rather than returning to Kenya as she would have preferred (the author dedicates the book to the memories of her parents and her own brother Max). Those who know Regina Redlich from the earlier work might long for even more specifics about how her life transpired after she left Kenya for Germany with her family in 1947, but for this we have Zweig’s other sequel, titled Somewhere in Germany.

Although all four main characters in this novel (i.e., the schoolgirls turned women) are well developed, Regina arguably remains the most fleshed-out and intriguing—a judgment that might stem partly from the knowledge that she is the most autobiographical, representing an adapted version of Zweig’s own experience. Regina, like Zweig, eventually became a journalist and writer of children’s books, and the novel’s narrator comments correspondingly on the character’s love of writing on more than one occasion. The autobiographical aspects of Regina are also apparent in the memories and reminiscing that are more frequent in the sections featuring her perspective.

The three other figures are fascinating in their own right. They had all fled to Africa as children in order to escape the horrors of Europe during Hitler’s reign, although each has a unique story of how she ended up in Kenya rather than elsewhere. Zweig also provides much detail about the personalities and quirks of all four so that they are clearly differentiated, despite their shared experience of growing up as Jewish European immigrants in Kenya. After Regina Redlich, the novel’s second most developed character is Vicky Sedlacek. She is portrayed as somewhat superficial and overly concerned with appearances, possessing a tendency to deny or hide her Jewish identity for much of her young adulthood. She marries and has children with the rich English gentleman Mortimer Horatio Archduke, but is denied the anticipated storybook ending of her dreams when he divorces her in their seventh year of marriage. Liesel Freund is Vicky’s polar opposite. Mathematically and scientifically inclined, and seemingly unromantic by nature, she eventually falls in love with Emil, a survivor whose experience with the Kindertransport is revealed movingly in the novel’s final chapter. The fourth protagonist, Leah...