Mama, bitte lern Deutsch by Tahsim Durgun

This is not a biography, Durgun makes this clear in the beginning of the book. And yet it’s full of (early) life anecdotes of his life in what he calls the “scaffold landscape” (or “Gerüstlandschaft” in German). From translating for his mother at the immigration office to racism experiences in primary school to family traditions, he paints the picture of a Kurdish family and their experience as a family with immigration background. He conveys the feeling of not belonging, of being the outsider.

It might be just me, but I felt like something is missing from this book—it didn’t pull me in, there was no story arch, no punchline, it felt more like a concatenation of individual stories. Maybe that’s all it wanted to be.

But it’s incredibly valuable to hear these anecdotes told from his perspective and I think you should read it.