Review: Compelling empathy in ‘My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me’

Published 1:30 am Tuesday, January 24, 2017

By Linda, Everett Public Library staff

My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me by Jennifer Teege

Jennifer was adopted when she was 7. She remembers a little about her birth mother Monika and grandmother Ruth Irene Goeth. She never met her father, a black man from Nigeria.

She always wondered why her mother gave her up. Then, as an adult she finds a book titled I Have to Love my Father, Don’t I? written by her mother, about her grandfather Amon Goeth, a vicious Nazi Commandant.

Jennifer then begins the struggle to try to overcome her guilt and shame and to try to come to terms with what her family had done and who they were.

I was very moved reading this. It was so hard to imagine what I would have done in this situation. I admire the author’s strength in continuing her struggle to make peace with her mother, and her demons.

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