A “marvelous” autobiographical novel of a Jewish girl emerging from hiding in Poland after the defeat of the Nazis, and rediscovering freedom and hope (Publishers Weekly).
By the time I was five years old I had spent half my life hidden away in a barn loft. I had vague memories of the world outside and I listened to stories people around me told of that world, but it was hard for me to believe in its existence. Was there really anything beyond the wails of this barn? I knew that there were people out there, people other than my mother, my aunt, my cousin and another family who shared our hide-out, but it was hard for me to imagine them . . .
After two and a half years, a little girl returns to the world, liberated by Soviet soldiers who have driven out the Germans. Amid the rubble and chaos, her mother wants only to look to a new future—while her aunt, on the other hand, recounts tales of life before the war. Moving from their devastated village to Bylau, a German town under Russian rule, and then to Warsaw and eventually Montreal, Ann Charney, a winner of the Chatelaine Fiction Prize and two National Magazine Awards, “beautifully evokes her fear-filled young narrator’s gropings toward maturity and a sense of identity in this moving and memorable novel” inspired by her own childhood experience (Publishers Weekly)—an examination of trauma and renewal that also serves as “an illuminating document of an unusual time and place” (Library Journal).
