From Publishers Weekly
Sadness pervades Melnyks moving novel, the tale of a husband and wife wrenched apart by WWII, but the kindness and compassion of strangers provides an inspirational counterpoint to the cruelties of fate. Browsing at a flea market, Elia Strohan, an elderly Holocaust survivor living in Montreal, finds a locket he made for his wife 50 years ago in Kiev, the Ukraine. The heartbreaking story he reveals to the vendors, who are themselves of Ukrainian descent, is a tale of his unflagging love and his half-century quest for his wife. In 1941, the Jewish polyglot professor of languages loses contact with his gentile wife, gifted violinist Anna Romanovich, and after barely escaping extermination, he discovers that she has fled with their newborn baby to her family in Poland. Anna, meanwhile, believes that Elia was killed at Babi Yar, the ravine on Kievs outskirts where the Nazis shot to death 30,000 Jews. Melnyk, a Canadian writer who died earlier this year, mined letters and diaries of Hitlers victims in the Jewish Museum in Montreal, and the narrative vividly describes three well-known Holocaust sites: Babi Yar; the Treblinka extermination camp, where Elia, imprisoned as a work-Jew, joins a doomed revolt, and again miraculously escapes to hide out in the forests; and the Warsaw ghetto, as seen through the eyes of one of Elias fellow slave-laborers. Anna, sent to a forced labor camp in Germany, survives only by prostituting herself. After the saga of Elias frustrating search, the surprise ending brings yet another twist to an eloquent story. As if to relieve the novel of its burden of grief, Melnyk counterposes the horrors of the Holocaust with the offbeat quotidian world of flea markets, personified in warmhearted vendor Liz Cantrell and her rebellious teenage daughter, who try to track down the source of the pendant. These lively scenes of contemporary life take on a suspenseful immediacy as the search narrows and the quest nears its end. While it suffers from some of the awkwardness of a fictional debut, Melnycks heartfelt tale raises questions of morality, responsibility and guilt, and dramatizes the enduring effects of the Holocaust in a classic love story.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From School Library Journal
-Elia Strohan, a Ukrainian Jew, searches for his gentile wife, Anna, from whom he has been separated since 1941 and the massacre of Baba Yar. The story opens in 1982 in a flea market in Montreal, where Elia happens upon a locket he made for Anna more than 40 years earlier. Taken under the wings of Liz and Cia, the proprietors of the booth, he gradually relates his sad story, starting in Kiev in 1941. Anna, finding herself pregnant and thinking Elia dead, goes to her people in Poland. Elia survives Baba Yar and follows her to Warsaw, only to learn that she has been sent to a labor camp. He continues his search for her, eventually ending up in the Treblinka concentration camp where, because he is a "work Jew," he escapes extermination. All who hear Elia's story, including the market vendors and Liz's teenage daughter Jenny, become caught up in it and are determined to find Anna and reunite the two. This part of the book offers relief from Elia's powerful story of the atrocities he witnessed during the war. It all comes together in the end, leaving readers with an awareness of the human capacity for goodness as well as for inhumanity. YAs will identify with Jenny and her desire to help Elia. This gripping book will linger in the minds of all who read it.
Pamela B. Rearden, Centreville Regional Library, Fairfax County, VA Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
