ROSWITHA FREY

Rheinfelden A trunk on the floorboards proved to be a true treasure trove for Annette Meisl. It was filled with yellowed papers and letters that contained forgotten stories of her ancestors. And these led the Rheinfelden author to Cuba. She processed her passion for the sugar island under the pseudonym Ana Galana in a historical family saga. "Das Erbe der Zigarrenkönigin" has now been published. The work is the continuation of the first novel "Das Geheimnis der Zigarrenkönigin", which appeared in 2023. Back then, the manufacturer's daughter Anna from Bremen had set off disguised as a sailor to the New World and ended up in Cuba searching for her biological father. There, during the revolutionary upheavals, she found her great love in Luca, a former slave. I design packaging of all kinds and for all possible objects. My designs should offer products an expressive and functional home, packaging that contains and conveys meaning.

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The second part picks up from the events. In 1871, Anna and her daughter Alana live in Valle Escondido, a hidden valley where the coveted violet-colored tobacco is cultivated. Luca fights alongside the revolutionaries against the Spanish and rarely comes to his family. Anna sets out on dangerous paths to Havanna to sell the sought-after tobacco there, while her daughter stays in the village with her great-grandmother Lia. 

A second narrative strand takes place in Bremen, where Anna's grandfather Oskar Mehringer, a recognized cigar manufacturer, receives a mysterious letter. It states that his runaway granddaughter Anna is in Havana and in danger. The old gentleman then embarks on the arduous sea voyage to Cuba to find his granddaughter. She is all that remains of his family. But after a fruitless search, Mehringer begins the journey home and falls seriously ill at sea. Deathly sick, he has a message delivered to his granddaughter through intermediaries that she should take a steamer to Bremen as quickly as possible. When Anna receives the message from her dying grandfather, she takes the next ship. Her family in Cuba remains oblivious. Meanwhile, the daughter Alana secretly sets off from the valley to search for her mother in Havana. But the girl falls into the clutches of a brothel operator and must work as a maid for "Madame." Her only friend is the boy Carlitos, son of one of the prostitutes. But it turns out that Carlitos' father was the wealthy plantation owner Don Carlos – and that a fortune and a sugar cane plantation await the only son as an inheritance. 

From tropical Cuba the author shifts to wintry cold Bremen. There Anna must bury her grandfather and continue his cigar factory as sole heir. In Bremen her son Matthias is also born, whom his father Luca in Cuba knows nothing about. The plot lines constantly alternate between Bremen, where Anna manages the manufactory and the sickly Matthias grows up, and Havana, where her daughter Alana flees from the brothel and joins a traveling circus. In the ring she becomes a star as a tightrope walker. Her love for her childhood friend Carlitos threatens to fail.

Until Anna returns to her family and the couples find their way back to each other, Annette Meisl, alias Ana Galana, captivates her readers with atmospherically dense descriptions of old Havana, the secret Valle Escondido with its tobacco fields, and the bustling Hanseatic city of Bremen.