'We are the brack children. Brack, homemade Irish bread with German
raisins.' The raisins pepper his skin with specks and make him
different from the other children on the Dublin streets. The gang
call him and his brother Eichmann and Hitler and the little boys
know that the jeers will turn into torture and certain execution if
their tormentors catch them alone. Acclaimed novelist Hugo Hamilton
has captured the voice of childhood to relate his experience of
growing up: a baffled half-understanding, a reluctant obedience to
his father's harsh rules and, finally, rebellion. His father was
Irish and insisted that the children speak Irish, punishing them
violently if they brought English words into the house. Their
loving mother was German and, along with her language and her
courageous history, gave them a more gentle morality. Over and over
again she would tell them not to fight back for they were 'the word
people and not the fist people' and the best defence was 'the
silent negative'. Scarcely any other children spoke Irish and their
mother's German accent made her hard to understand so the brothers
and sisters became more and more isolated. A child hears what an
adult says but only gradually begins to make sense of it. This
spiral development is present in the structure of the book so that
stories are glimpsed and later returned to, and details are
repeated and added as the child becomes mature enough to
comprehend. Hamilton is never sentimental, never self-pitying;
indeed he is harder on himself, or rather the child that he was,
than on his parents, but he describes a life where language was a
weapon rather than a means of communication. This is an
extraordinary book, beautifully written and desperately poignant.
(Kirkus UK)
The childhood world of Hugo Hamilton, born and brought up in Dublin, is a confused place. His father, a sometimes brutal Irish nationalist, demands his children speak Gaelic, while his mother, a softly spoken German emigrant who has been marked by the Nazi past, speaks to them in German. He himself wants to speak English. English is, after all, what the other children in Dublin speak. English is what they use when they hunt him down in the streets and dub him Eichmann, as they bring him to trial and sentence him to death at a mock seaside court.
Out of this fear and guilt and often comical cultural entanglements, he tries to understand the differences between Irish history and German history and turn the twisted logic of what he is told into truth. It is a journey that ends in liberation, but not before he uncovers the long-buried secrets that lie at the bottom of his parents wardrobe.
In one of the finest books to have emerged from Ireland in many years, the acclaimed novelist Hugo Hamilton has finally written his own story - a deeply moving memoir about a whole family's homesickness for a country they can call their own.
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