AS LONG AS WE LIVE

What is stronger, love or fate? The story of a Jew and a German woman who find each other after the war.

There’s no reason why the Viennese Jew whose family are killed in the Holocaust and the young woman from Bremen should ever meet, let alone fall in love and build a life together against all the odds. Their story spans 80 years, taking us from Vienna in 1936, where we meet student Joschi Safier, to Gestapo jails and eventually to Palestine, where Joschi works as a barman and a spy and eventually goes to sea. Waltraut, for her part, grows up in a working-class family in Bremen. The family are bombed out of their home during the war, and live for years in a railway carriage. When the economic miracle arrives, Waltraut gets a sought-after apprenticeship as a saleswoman. She is widowed at a young age. The first time she meets Joschi at an ice cream parlour, she rebuffs him. But the sailor sends her postcards from all over the world, before turning up at her door one day with a typewriter under his arm. And there he stays. Their love soars to great heights and endures terrible twists of fate. How strong must the bond between two people be to withstand all of this?
Two lives that take us halfway across the world and through a whole gamut of emotions: a dramatic, moving and tender book.