Review by Booklist Review
Where is home when your home has been destroyed? Among the tragedies of WWII were the Jewish children separated from their families, at times forcibly taken, given new names, and instructed to follow new religions. Rosner follows her first WWII novel, The Yellow Bird Sings (2020), with this complex tale about fear, survival, and what it means to be a family as four children grapple with their identities during the war and in the decades that follow. Roger, taken to a French convent and baptized into Catholicism, is smuggled away to Spain when his relatives petition for his return. Their mother sends seven-year-old Mira and her three-year-old brother, Daniel, away from the Jewish ghetto to the relative safety of a childless couple in the Polish countryside, who tell prying neighbors the children are their niece and nephew. And in the late 1960s, Renata, a German-born Brit whose mother insisted they not mention their homeland, begins work on an archaeological dig in Jerusalem. All Rosner's uprooted characters eventually come to Israel, seeking a path to the future while struggling with the losses of the past.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Rosner (The Yellow Bird Sings) delivers an engrossing story inspired by the postwar lives of Jewish children who were hidden during the war. Seven-year-old Roger spent most of the war growing up in safety at the Convent of Sainte Marie de Sion, but in 1946, the church insists on keeping him, prompting Roger's aunt to sue for custody. A parallel narrative follows siblings Ana and Oskar, whose parents send them to the Polish countryside. Near the war's end, they're taken by a Jewish woman reclaiming Jewish children to live in Israel, which excites Ana but upsets the younger Oskar, who's grown attached to their foster parents. Twenty years later, Roger, now a professor in Israel, meets Renata, a British archeologist. They're drawn to each another, but their romance is derailed when Renata reveals her parents were German. Ana, meanwhile, lives in a kibbutz with her husband, who wants to raise their children there, but Ana would rather leave the community; while Oskar falls in love with a talented violinist. When the siblings learn their foster mother is ill, they consider returning to Poland, and surprising revelations about Renata's past explain why her family left Germany during the war. Rosner wrings a great deal of emotion from the various portraits, and she does an admirable job of exploring the characters' conflicted loyalties. Fans of Jewish historical fiction will be moved. (Mar.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Rosner's (The Yellow Bird Sings) moving story about identity, family, and the meaning of home explores the little-known story of the stolen children of World War II. Jewish parents fleeing the Nazis gave their children to non-Jewish families or hid them in convents or monasteries. Once the war was over, those who survived searched for their children, but the Catholic church had them baptized and refused to return them so that they could save their souls. Since most of the hidden children were very young, the families that hid them were the only families that they knew. Ana and Oskar lived on a farm in Poland where they tended livestock and grew herbs. Roger was in a French monastery. A gifted student, he sometimes got in trouble for questioning his teachers. Renata, originally from Germany, escaped with her mother and went to England. After the war, a Zionist organization brings Ana, Oscar, and Roger to Israel. They are unhappy about leaving the only homes that they knew, but they discover family on a kibbutz. Renata becomes an archaeologist and goes on a dig in Jerusalem. VERDICT Readers familiar with The Yellow Bird Sings will learn more about the characters in that book here. An excellent addition to historical fiction collections.--Barbara M. Bibel
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
During World War II, Jewish children are given to Catholics to raise by parents desperate to save them from the Nazi killing machine. The book opens with Roger, a French Jewish boy hidden in the Convent of Sainte Marie de Sion. It's 1946, and he remembers his baptism and forced Catholic religious training, even as he knows he's Jewish. A second story begins in 1942 when Mira Kowalski and her infant brother, Daniel, are hastily cleaned up by their mother and taken to live with a childless couple in the Polish countryside. Mira is renamed Anastzja Wójcik and her brother, Oskar. These children, too, are converted to Catholicism and steeped in the church. As they spend their formative years in hiding, memories of Jewish homes and rituals and parents fade, and in Oskar's case, are never formed. All are orphaned by Nazi violence. At war's end the protectors of all three children want to keep them, but Jewish activists successfully claim them as their own. Who is stealing whom? The children's storylines converge in Israel in the late 1940s and carry through to 1968, becoming interwoven with that of Renata, a British/German archaeologist with her own hidden, traumatic past. The characters mature and find careers and love but remain deeply unsettled by their mixed pasts. What is Roger's faith tradition? How does Oskar reconcile himself to being ripped from the only parents he remembers? And what about the grief of the Polish couple whose charges are forcibly resettled in Israel? "What is a mother if not a nesting box?" asks a character toward the book's conclusion. Oskar finally reconnects with the only parents he remembers, and new surprises about parentage continue through to the end. A carefully crafted and heartbreaking book. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
