This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II. Strong imagery and interesting characters populate the novel, but the story slips when it moves to Lily’s point of view.Ī beautiful tale that weakens when it returns to Lily’s life and the words of the woman whose identity she has assumed. Richler infuses her work with iconic images from the era she covers, painting a rich image of the Canadian Jewish community, their customs and family relationships, in a past century. Taking down the diary Lily has left behind, she begins to read it, thinking she is on track to find her mother, but she’s really reading the words of the dead Lily, who is as much of a stranger to her as her own mother. That rock is followed by others and leads Ruth to more closely examine the relationship she has with her own identity. That connection grows out of an unexpected place one day Ruth receives a package that contains a cryptic note and a rock.
Ruth, who does not remember her mother and has no sense of who she really might be, studies Yiddish at school and makes friends with neighborhood children but finds herself longing for a connection to her mother. Years later, Sol and Elka are married, and Lily has run off and left Nathan to raise their little girl. As it turns out, Elka’s mother is right to be suspicious of Lily, since the new bride has appropriated the identity of a dead woman, along with her diary and an uncut gemstone she carried. At the wedding, Sol meets Elka, the daughter of a woman who claims to have a cousin with the same name as Lily. Lily Azerov Kramer came to Canada to marry Sol Kramer but ended up with his brother, Nathan, after Sol refused to go through with the nuptials. Richler’s glimpse into the complicated lives of members of a Canadian Jewish family following the end of World War II provides a retrospective of a bygone culture forever colored by a mystery that shapes the future of a young girl.
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