Debut novel by Alisha Gamisch: To avoid becoming like the sooty Germans

The thing is the size of a matchbox, pink and made of plastic. One day it appears, a model of a ten-week-old embryo with its thumb in its mouth and its eyes closed. Along with a pamphlet from an organization against abortion rights, it ends up in Valli and Lydia's mailbox and messes everything up. Especially with Lydia, who suddenly stops talking and no longer moves.

Lydia and Valli and Rina are the names of the three protagonists in Alisha Gamisch’s novel “Parasiti”. Lydia, the eldest, is Valli's aunt, Rina is her niece and therefore Lydia's granddaughter, three Russian-German women from three generations. Gamisch tells about their lives in flashbacks, with one of them always being the focus. It goes back to the 1960s, to the barracks settlement in Novosibirsk, and to the present day, to the terraced house in Fürstenfeldbruck.

In fragments and jumps in time you learn what shaped her: her grandmother, the expulsion, the hunger and freezing, the violence, life in the shantytown. And how she had to behave there: “The most important thing was to maintain decency, not to become like all the sooty Germans who no longer adhered to any rules and traditions, who let their children run around the barracks unsupervised and become wild like street dogs.”

Alisha Gamish: “Parasiti”. Voland & Quist, Berlin 2026, 240 pages, 24 euros

It's about growing up and finding your own role: "The rules for being a woman were handed to her like Holy Communion." She learns stitching techniques, that people get married, but not to Russians, not even to German Catholics, and that one doesn't give in too easily.

Why the mailing has such a big impact on Lydia becomes clear as you read. For a long time, abortions were the only contraceptive method she knew. Whenever her husband Sashka, who is usually blue, misjudges himself and doesn't stop "sliding around" in time, she has to go to the "Balnitza", to the hospital - "what are you going to do, put a lock on it?"

Lydia still had one child, Elvira, Rina's mother, with whom she tried everything to "avoid the mistakes of her neighbors". Lydia also raised Valli, her niece, Jelena's “cuckoo child” and the “bat brat” who simply stopped picking her up.

In contrast to Valli and Rina, as a reader you find out about the abortions, something like that is not talked about, it is one of those things - and there are quite a few of them - that are not told.

The horrors and traumas of the past still make their way from generation to generation. All three women suppress and hide things, swallow them down, and simply leave questions hanging. They have learned to maneuver their way through, to function, and they are ashamed when that doesn't work, like when little Rina "suddenly stood out like an inappropriate Christmas tree ball" at school despite having neatly sharpened pencils in her pencil case.

Above all, they try hard not to be seen as what Gamisch gave her novel as the title: as “Parasiti”, the Russian word for parasites. As real vermin, the parasites live in the Siberian barracks, they persecute Lydia as a insult, also through the so-called “parasite law”, which in the Soviet Union punished those who did not work, useless people like Lydia's Sashka, and as little parasites in the stomach that have to be scraped out.

Alisha Gamisch, born in Tegernsee in 1990, comes from a Russian-German family and has primarily written poetry. Her first volume “Lustdorf” was published in 2020, and in 2022 she received the first Nora Pfeffer Prize for poetry from the Bavarian Cultural Center of Germans from Russia. She curates various formats such as the PostOst Café at the Center for Anti-Slavism Research and, together with her colleagues Raphaëlle Red and Paula Fürstenberg, is part of the “first literary girl group” No Scribes.

Gamisch wants a lot with her debut novel “Parasiti” and tells it so tightly that the little breaks she keeps forcing on you are good for you. Their trick is the many linguistic Russian-German sprinkles. They can be looked up in the “Small Russian German Inventory” at the end of the book.