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Summary
Summary
At Montreal's huge Sunday flea market, an elderly man is stricken when he finds a crude locket in a box of jewelry at one of the booths. While recovering, he explains that it was a gift to his beloved wife, who disappeared from their Kiev home in 1941 during the German occupation. He has been searching for her ever since. It is now 1982.
After that first encounter, Elia comes back to the flea market every Sunday to tell his story. It's the tale of a young Jewish mane risking his life to find his beloved. Elia recounts hiss earch for his pregnant wife through war-torn Eastern Europe, barely escaping death at Babi Yar, encountering suspicious partisans, posing as a Nazi soldier, witnessing the destruction of the Polish ghetto, and ending up in a concentration camp. The war over, he follows his wife's trail to Montreal - where it fades away. But three women are moved by his story and join the hunt. At the story's unexpected end, readers will believe that love and hope can in some way survive horror and inspire good.
Reviews (1)
Kirkus Review
Love, forgiveness, and hope are all affirmed in a posthumous debut about a husband and wife separated by war and the Holocaust but reunited 50 years later by three women. The author, a Canadian, spent years researching her subject, and her commitment to detail shows, especially in chapters set in the Warsaw ghetto and Treblinka. The tale has two narrators: Liz Cantrell, who with Chia Kushnir has a stall at the weekly Montreal flea market; and Elia Strohan, a customer whose life story forms the heart of the novel. Elia recognizes a beaten-up locket on sale in the women's stall as the one he made for his long-lost wife, Anna, whom he last saw in 1941; Liz and Chia decide they will try to find her, believing she must still be living in Montreal. Their search'revisiting the sites of recent garage sales'is soon joined by Liz's teenaged daughter, Jenny, a particularly dogged tracker. We learn that Elia, a Jew, was fighting in the Russian army when the victorious Germans ordered Jews to gather at the Kiev station and he found himself caught in the Baba Yar massacre. Miraculously surviving, he returned to Kiev only to find a note from Anna saying she was pregnant and had fled to Warsaw. There, Elia discovered that Anna had been sent to a labor camp and that their child was being raised by a German couple. Arrested, he was next taken to Treblinka, from which he finally escaped, and when the war ended he renewed his search. Learning that Anna, believing him dead, had remarried and moved to Montreal, he immigrated too, but never found her or his daughter. Jenny's persistence will finally pay off'even if in some ways it's too late. A sweetly redemptive, if a tad too schematically plotted, story that offers a graphic reminder of people's inhumanity as well as their capacity for goodness.
