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The author taps into the deep well of her ancestry while exploring the lives of her grandmother and aunt as they navigate the slow but devastating ascent of Hitler in Nazi Germany. As many Jews seek refuge abroad between 1933 and the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Clara lingers in Germany to manage the sale of her home and to ensure the safety of her three young adult children as they juggle employment opportunities and wait for visas to emigrate to the United States and the United Kingdom. Clara and her daughter Edith's experiences are intertwined throughout the novel. Edith hides her journal and the letters from her Aryan sweetheart when she flees to London in 1936 and later, during a visit to Germany in 1938, leaves them for Clara's review. Clara's life arrives at a similar poignant impasse when she meets a Jewish musician whose love for her is pure, though he cannot yet flee Germany because he is the sole caretaker of his elderly mother.
A large portion of this biographical and historical novel is epistolary, with Clara experiencing, through Edith's writing, the excitement of her first love and the pall of absolute secrecy required to conceal the forbidden Jewish-Aryan romance. Clara's concern for her daughter's welfare heightens as Edith begins to navigate the highs and lows of a new relationship with an Englishman who adores her but has limited capacity to understand her plight with wartime pregnancies and the depth of her worries about family and friends. The quiet writing and quiet story grow large in the author's expert telling and in the merging of fact with the necessary embroidery of fiction. The novel will appeal to both adult and mature young adult audiences because of the experiential parallels between mother and daughter, and the devotion shown by women of all generations in times of great peril.
RECOMMENDED by the US Review