Customer Reviews

Pious Secrets

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"Pious Secrets" is an English translation of a collection of German stories. The German title is "Fromme Luegen," which I would translate as "Pious Lies." My copy of the book is in German, so I don't know how the English version reads, but I have heard that Dische, who was raised in America, wrote her stories in English, though she translated them and published them in German. These stories should therefore work well in English.

There are seven stories in the collection, but the title story is as long as the other six together, and could be a short novel in its own right. I only read one of the other stories, "Mr. Lustgarten verliebt sich," or "Mr. Lustgarten Is In Love." That's a short, humorous story about an old man who falls in love with his maid, upsetting his children. The other stories are "A Jewish Lady for Charles Allen," "A Small Suicide Attempt," "The Smuggled Wedding Ring," "Hidden Motives of a Deserter," and "Nanny Jackie's Passion." (I'm translating, so these are probably not the actual titles in the English version.)

The title story deals with a Catholic family in New York City, who try to avoid their German background. The granddaughter thinks her grandfather may be Hitler, and enlists her mother's boyfriend, a pathologist, to help her find the truth. He quickly becomes obsessed with her family's past, which they keep shrouded in secrecy. In some ways, this story is a metaphor for the interpretation of the Third Reich and the Holocaust.

Dische's stories are entertaining on a surface level, and often quite funny, but "Pious Secrets," at least, has a lot of deeper meaning, and so can be read on two levels.