This is a definitive work of original history embedded in a personal memoir. The author leaves no stone unturned in archives across the former Soviet Union and the Middle East, but I am most impressed by how she gains insight and empathy by putting herself in the actual places her father lived. The book reads like a mystery explained, with the author's revelations about her father's experiences and those of his cohort illuminating the history itself. For example, when she gets sick from bad water in Uzbekistan, and describes her (horrible) symptoms, she then quotes from testimonies describing refugees dying in that place from similar sicknesses, and their tragic history becomes tangible. She also comes to realize that what the child survivors remembered as a voluntary movement across the Soviet Union must have been a mass forced migration. So much of this history will never be fully known, but this book has told me about the experience of a quarter million Jews forced into the Soviet Union at the beginning of World War II, a massive story I knew absolutely nothing about.

Numerous children of Nazi victims have written memoirs. But most of them do not focus on historical detail . . . A line divided historians from psychologists and memoirists, an underlying assumption that intense historical focus in a memoir makes it less personal . . . I too had begun in this way, treating historical research as an exigency and a means to an end--I would conduct just enough to allow me to write my father's memoir responsibly. But increasingly, the knowledge of historical detail was making me listen more shrewdly but also more empathetically. The more I knew, the more I read, interrogated, and compared accounts and testimonies, the broader, deeper, and more precise my understanding became . . . ( )