Across hundreds of thousands of words, Siegfried manages to say almost nothing about their first-hand experience of the Third Reich. The memoir ‘officially’ ends on the day Hitler came to power. Much of the book details our ancestral history, starting with Jizhak Merzbacher, an eighteenth-century trader of animal hides from north-east Bavaria. The manuscript also spends a great deal of time on Siegfried’s grandmother, Nanny Merzbacher, including a hundred pages of her diary which he faithfully typed up, word for word