Reviews

A defty written story, full of danger, intrigue, suspense, and passion.
*The Christian Science Monitor*

YA‘Manya Gerson, a young widow, arrives at a displaced-persons camp in Germany after World War II feeling completely out of place. Unlike most of the residents, she is not a concentration camp survivor and was not raised as a practicing Jew; her parents were Jewish, but communists, and she survived the war working in her native Warsaw with forged papers, constantly changing jobs and locations. She finally begins to make friends in the camp and falls in love with the passionate Bolek Holzer, a Zionist involved in smuggling guns and refugees to Palestine. But Manya also is attracted to Emmanuel Kozek, a scientist who can offer her a life of security and safety instead of fear and uncertainty. What kind of life will she choose? This first novel is written with refreshing clarity and depth, and builds in intensity to a satisfying conclusion. YAs will identify with Manya's struggle to define herself in a world turned upside down, to choose between passionate love and secure companionship, and to understand and care about people very different from herself.‘Molly Connally, Kings Park Library, Fairfax County, VA

The setting of this austerely beautiful first novel is an overcrowded, all-Jewish displaced persons camp run by the U.N. in American-occupied Germany in 1946-47. Unlike most of the camp's residents, who are concentration-camp survivors, Manya Gerson, a 27-year-old woman from Warsaw, survived the war by passing as a gentile with forged identity papers. A Polish underground veteran and bitterly disillusioned ex-Communist, Manya endured the death of her parents in extermination camps, as well as the murder of her Communist husband, who was shot to death by a jealous comrade. Now pregnant, Manya, whose gutsy urbanity hides her anxieties, must choose between two very different men: her lover, immigration worker Bolek Holzer, a fiercely committed Zionist whose wife and son died in Birkenau and who smuggles shiploads of Jews and guns to Palestine; and a suitor, charming, gentle Czech microbiologist Emmanuel Kozak, a Bergen-Belsen survivor who offers Manya a stable life and a teaching post in Paris. Around them are the sharply delineated DPs, Holocaust survivors forever altered by their ordeal. Polish-born New York psychologist Mekler (coauthor of Bringing Up a Caring Child), who lived with her family in a German DP camp until she was four, indelibly captures the precariousness of Jewish existence in the postwar years preceding Israel's birth. Love blossoms amid the chaos, rubble and danger in a tender tale narrated with a calm restraint that adds to its power. (Apr.)

A defty written story, full of danger, intrigue, suspense, and passion. * The Christian Science Monitor *