Something funny about my experience with this book is that I read the whole thing thinking it had been written by a woman, and then at the end actually looked at the authors name and saw that it was a man! For some reason the gender of the author frequently affects my reading of a book (or a whatever) so it kind of threw me off. Anyway. Fun fact.
Okay so this book is about this teenage boy who is a Polish Jew who is the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust. It follows two parallel story lines-- (1) the boy, Yulek, joins a refugee group and makes his way to Israel, and forms relationships with different folks, the most important being with this other Jewish girl Theresa who was saved from Nazis by joining a convent, which makes it all weird because she's going to go live in a Jewish nation but she has serious Catholic tendencies, having spent the formative years of her life basically training to be a nun. Anyway, they have a nice little understated romance which is sweet. So they all work and train and dodge the British government and whatnot who try to keep Jewish refugees out of Palestine (since Israel hasn't been formed/recognized as a nation yet). Very exciting. then there's story (2) about Yulek's long lost aunt who was disinherited by her family years before the war because she went to study in London and married a Gentile. She figures out that Yulek is alive, and spends the whole book trying to track him down since they are the only family members each other has left. Her story is sweet because it's a big journey of self discovery as she travels to Jerusalem and deals with balancing her developed Britishness with her ancestral Jewishness.
All in all, it kind of felt like Exodus for beginners, but that was okay. It's like Exodus if there were no Paul Newman character and most people didn't die at the end. Hooray!
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