from http://www.zeit.de/2009/08/KJ-Luchs-Nathan

DIE ZEIT and the Radio Bremen jury present:
Mirjam Pressler’s Novel “Nathan and his Children” – adapted from Lessing’s great poetic drama
Reviewed by: Siggi Seuss [Translation by: Allan Dorr]
Date: 10/9/2009

January 2009. In front of running cameras, a Palestinian doctor working in an Israeli hospital is given the news that a recent bomb strike has hit his house in the Gaza strip and three of his eight children were killed. Many Israelis react indifferently toward the photographs. Some even ridicule the mourning father. 800 years after the Crusades there’s still fanaticism, regardless of where you look.

To bring such an important work of the European Enlightenment, such as Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, back to light could be interpreted as a desperate act of common sense. The Jewish merchant Nathan has suffered unutterable pain. Fanatic Christians have killed his wife and his eight children. Lessing’s hero, though, doesn’t practice retribution. Going against his own lust for revenge, this wise man forgives, and instead adopts an orphaned Christian girl so he can raise her and teach her to be kind. At least on the German stage, this is the stuff that dreams are made of when it comes to reconciliation between Islam, Christianity and Judaism. There is also no more beautiful metaphor for peaceful coexistence of religions than the ring parable from Lessing’s play.1

Up until now, though, this story has had a little problem on the reception end, especially amongst young people. In the play, the characters parley downright iambic. Many readers of other literature are also just plain opposed to reading plays. They may love to read books which awaken the illusion that the narrator is sitting right across from them. Which is precisely what happens in Mirjam Pressler’s newest novel, “Nathan and his Children”. The popular children’s author gives the characters new reasons to breathe. Nathan’s daughter, Recha narrates, as do the young temple knight, the housekeeper Daja, the dervish Alhafi, Sultan Saladin’s sister. Even a few characters who weren’t a part of Lessing’s play have found a voice: the orphan boy, Geschem, who works in Nathan’s kitchen or Abu Hassan, a fanatic Captain working for the Sultan. They are all reminiscent of the dramatic events in and around Nathan’s house in Jerusalem in the year 1192. The narrator’s voice is not modern. It sounds more like an echo from that era – slightly archaic, but very comprehensible, and in some places even poetic.

Most importantly, Mirjam Pressler’s prose invigorates the perception of moods and landscapes. Which is how we readers, without realizing it, become a part of the story. Sometimes we might think that we are sitting on a hill in the shade of a fig tree, leaning on its trunk and looking out over the criss-cross of alleys in Jerusalem, across the city and beyond and along the near horizon of the country whose residents call it “holy.” We are always close to people, all their dealings, fears and their desire to live in peace with their neighbors. At the end of Mirjam Pressler’s sensitive Nathan adaptation, we are not given Lessing’s idea of a “Group Hug.” At the same time the novel is a close to real plea for an alternative way out of the millenium tragedy of the world religions – a different way than what we see every day in the news.