Once We Were Home

October 1, 2022

Following Hargrave's adult debut, the Betty Trask honoree The Mercies, The Dance Tree spins off from real-life events as it visits 1518 Strasbourg, France, where women have begun dancing wildly in the town square and provoked a state of emergency (40,000-copy first printing). Opening in a fishing village in British colonial--ruled Singapore, Suicide Club author Heng's The Great Reclamation features a sweet boy with an extraordinary gift--he sees shifting islands no one else can--who comes of age during the Japanese occupation and, with a neighborhood girl, ends up remapping the future (75,000-copy first printing). Following the multi-best-booked Yellow Wind, Johnson's The House of Eve intertwines the stories of two young Black women--15-year-old Ruby, whose college ambitions are threatened by an ill-advised affair, and Howard University student Eleanor, looking for acceptance from her boyfriend's elite Black family. In Loesch's debut, The Last Russian Doll, a Russian �migr� studying at Oxford returns to Moscow after her mother's death and uncovers a family tragedy stretching back to the 1917 Revolution. A prize winner in Germany and a publishing phenomenon there and in the UK, where Berlin-based British-Ghanian Otoo is a Cambridge writer in residence, Ada's Room features four Adas: a 15th-century West African woman who confronts a Portuguese slave trader, Victorian England's Ada Lovelace, a Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp inmate, and a contemporary resident of Berlin, connected to them all in spirit. Following The Yellow Bird Sings, a National Jewish Book Award finalist, Rosner's Once We Were Home builds on real-life events to tell the stories of Jewish children wrenched from their families during World War II--like Ana, who remembers the mother who smuggled her out of a Polish ghetto, and Ana's brother, who knows only the family who raised him. In Spence-Ash's Beyond That, the Sea, Bea Thompson is sent from bomb-blasted World War II London to live in safety with a family in Boston, MA, and becomes so contented with her new life that she is reluctant to return home (150,000-copy first printing). From the No. 1 New York Times best-selling Walls, Hang the Moon follows the life of feisty young Sallie Kincaid, daughter of the big man about town in Prohibition-era Virginia, who's back home to reclaim her place nine years after being ejected from the family. The USA Today best-selling Webb's Strangers in the Night replays the romance between Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner (100,000-copy paperback and 30,000-copy hardcover first printing). In Two Wars and a Wedding, the New York Times best-selling Willig follows aspiring archaeologist Betsy Hayes from 1896 Greece, where she ends up tending the wounded as fighting breaks out with Turkey, and 1898 Cuba, where she serves with the Red Cross during the Spanish American War, hoping to find a lost friend (75,000-copy first printing).

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January 16, 2023
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.

January 15, 2023
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 W�jcik 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.

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January 1, 2023
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.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

December 1, 2022

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

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.