"The smile of my invisible father"
Dmitrij Kapitelman reads at TIETZ on 19 October
Dmitrij Kapitelman will be reading from his debut novel "The Smile of My Invisible Father" on Thursday 19 October at 7 pm in the TIETZ Central Library. The author has succeeded in writing a humorous and clever novel about the significance of one's own origins, combined with a touching father-son story. Admission is free.
The event is organised by the Sächsischer Literaturrat e.V. and the Landesverband Sachsen im Deutschen Bibliotheksverband e.V. (dbv) in cooperation with Chemnitz City Library as part of the Literaturforum Bibliothek - Autoren aus Sachsen in sächsischen Bibliotheken project.
Before Dmitrij Kapitelman and his father set off for Israel, their excursions were limited to the local Kaufland - back in the nineties, when they lived in a Saxon asylum seekers' home and you could still recognise the Nazis by their bald heads. Today, his father sells pelmeni and Crimean sparkling wine and is as little at home in Germany as he was in Ukraine. Perhaps, his son thinks, he will find clarity about his Jewish identity in the Holy Land. And he himself - contingent refugee, half-Jew, Ukrainian passport - at the same time. "The Smile of My Invisible Father" is a wistfully comic walk through a minefield of paradoxes. And a son's touching declaration of love for his father. The book was published by Hanser Verlag Berlin in 2016.
Dmitrij Kapitelman, born in Kiev in 1986, came to Germany with his family as a "contingent refugee" at the age of eight. He studied political science and sociology at the University of Leipzig and graduated from the German School of Journalism in Munich. He currently works as a freelance journalist in Berlin and publishes music under the artist name "Dheema".