Paperback. Pub Date: 2000 08 Pages: 288 in Publisher: VintageEbury This the extraordinarily compelling novel centers on an intense adulterous love affair between Saffie a silent young German woman who is the first maid and then wife to a famous flautist and Andras. the Jewish flute-mender to whose little atelier she takes her husband's flute to be mended. Their liaison doesn't eak the same taboos as The Reader but their love is 'forbidden' not only in the sense that it's adulterous. but also because she always takes her baby son along in his pram. as a cover and protection. Both the German woman and the Jew have been damaged by WWII; she more traumatically and personally than he - watching her mother's rape and anding by Russian soldiers. being raped herself . and then finding out after the war that her gentle scientist father was implicated in Nazi experiments with drug tri...