A debut novel explores family relationships and cultural displacement

In her debut novel, Misophonia, Dana Vowinckel explores the cultural diaspora through one teenager’s summer across Berlin, Jerusalem, and Chicago. It’s a coming of age story that balances the narratives of a daughter and her father as well as the fifteen-year-old protagonist’s abrupt (and reluctant) reunion with her mother.

The book is also a semi-autobiographical trek through parts of Vowinckel’s own life.

Born in Berlin into an American-Jewish-German family, the author grew up between Chicago and Berlin and her novel manages to capture the sometimes awkward, oftentimes tender, dynamics of a family pulled across continents and histories.

Though it explores the travails of teenage girlhood, the book also delves into the nuances of being Jewish and German and the challenges of reconciliation when your goals and feelings collide with world events.

“Language is at the core of the book, not identity,” Vowinckel explained in a recent interview in New York. “It would be a mistake to read it as purely an identity novel,” she says.

Critics have praised the novel for its rich, contrasting ingredients and Vowinckel’s ability to narrate the emotions of its teenage protagonist with warmth and clarity.

The book won the Mara Cassens Prize, a German literary award given annually for the best German debut novel, and earned Vowinckel the literature prize of the Association of Arts and Culture of the German Economy. It was also shortlisted for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize which celebrates outstanding new publications written in German.

The 27-year old Vowinckel, who studied linguistics and literature in Berlin, Toulouse and Cambridge, was in New York to promote the recently published English translation of Misophonia by HarperVia. (The book was translated from its original German by Adrian Nathan West.)

Vowinckel’s visit included events at Germany’s Consulate General of New York - which promotes cultural, intellectual, and artistic exchanges with Germany - and Deutsches Haus at New York University.

Misophonia opens in Chicago, with parts set in Berlin and Israel. It follows a teenage protagonist, Margarita, as she travels to her father’s birthplace in Israel with the mother who left her when she was a toddler. Margarita shares a special bond with her father, Avi - a doting Israeli who is a cantor at their local synagogue - ever since her mother, Marsha, abandoned the family.

Eventually, arrangements are made - without Margarita’s knowledge - for her to meet Marsha in Israel before returning to Germany. Blindsided, she wants no part of this overdue reconciliation with a mother she hardly knows. Meanwhile, in Germany, Avi tries to fill the hole left by Margarita’s absence with a trip of his own, embarking on a personal journey, both hope-inducing and despairing.

Writing the book through the prism of dueling narratives - switching between a teenage girl, and her father - allowed Vowinckel to engage readers in an unusual point-of-view combination, she says. Accounts of Jewish congregational life in Berlin are mixed with detailed descriptions of the awkwardness and lust that go along with living inside a female teenage body.

“Both perspectives were very interesting to me,” Vowinckel told the Chicago Review of Books in May. “With a 15-year-old, there’s early sexuality and kind of being lost in the world, contrasted with the very lonely, quiet life of Avi,” she said. Straddling the two narratives also helped balance the exploration of imperfect family relationships and larger cultural displacement, the author says.

“I think it was very helpful for me to have a protagonist with a very specific job description because that gives you rhythm to the text,” Vowinckel says. “It made it very easy for me to start this big novel project with this very calm, laconic voice, and then mix it with Margarita.”