White Space Between

By Ami Sands Brodoff

A family's story of the Holocaust lies buried in the soil of a graveyard in Prague, in the old neighborhoods of Montreal, in the serenity of a small New Jersey town, and in the memory of Jana--a woman finally asked to bear witnes.

Far from the landscapes of her earlier life, Jana raised her daughter, Willow, on the beautiful scrapbooks she kept of her own childhood in Prague before World War II. But her stories end with the beginning of the Holocaust, and Willow knows little of her mother's life during the war and its aftermath. Jana's memories of this time are so guarded that Willow is uncertain who her father is--the answer left behind in Montreal, the city where Jana first settled after the war.

When both Willow and Jana find themselves back in Montreal, the past can no longer be hidden. New loves are found and lost loves rekindled, and mother and daughter decide to journey to Prague to unearth the stories that can no longer stay buried.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1897187491
• ISBN13: 9781897187494
• Release Date: October 2008
• Publisher: Second Story Press
• Length: 308 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

A beautiful story

"The White Space Between" is a beautiful story of a complex and loving mother-daughter relationship. Ami Sands Brodoff has done meticulous research on Montreal, the Holocaust and Prague that gives this novel a wonderful sense of realism. A must read!

Superb novel

I very much enjoyed 'The White Space Between' and was very moved by it. There were many things I liked about it. The mother's story, Jana's story, was incredibly powerful and the mother-daughter relationship beautifully delineated and intensely moving. Montreal provided a unique backdrop for such a story. The use of the marionette - that very typically central European image - is a superb analogy. The metaphor and reality around the buried menorah almost brought me to tears. I visited Slovakia in 2003 and in one village in central Slovakia, there's a ruined castle which we went to see. At the foot of the hill on which the castle stands is an old graveyard. When we went closer, we realised that it was an old Jewish graveyard, with, of course, no dates after the early 1940s. The village originally must've been at least partly a Jewish village. Many of the stones had been desecrated, stones kicked over and/ or spray-painted with Nazi symbols - and the desecrations were recent. There have been virtually no Jews in Slovakia for over sixty years. It was scary and sickening. Did you know that the wartime Slovak regime was the only regime who actually PAID the Germans to take their Jewish population to concentration camps? When you look at what happened in Bosnia-Hercegovina during the 1990s, it becomes obvious that this virulent cultural pathology is very much alive in central and eastern Europe. Then, in the very quiet village square, we met this old guy who was a little drunk and who garrulously claimed to have been a paratrooper durng WWII; he was swaggering and boasting about it; we didn't ask him which side he'd been on. By that time, I just wanted out. 'The White Space Between' is a beautifully written, powerfully moving and deeply illuminatory novel. Brilliant.

Wonderful read

Just finished The White Space Between and greatly enjoyed it. Very finely written. I liked the structure and the depth of the characters. Also made me want to visit Montreal (in winter).

Powerful and sensitive

I greatly enjoyed this book during my recent trip to Israel. Is is beautiful and powerful and brought many a tear to my eye. Lawrence Knight M.D. Montreal

Crossing Borders of Secrets

If every book is a journey, then The White Space Between, by Ami Sands Brodoff is a voyage without borders of time or geography. We begin in 1942 in Auschwitz with Jana, a Jewish Czech prisoner whose death has been postponed so that she can work as a "secret-bearer" typing bogus death certificates for the daily victims of the Nazis (she was allowed to "choose" from 34 diseases). But even in those moments, Jana dares hope for the future, which unfolds from a ship bound for Canada and freedom, to New Jersey to Montreal to Prague and back. Through flashbacks, real time action and snippets from Jana's memory books that she created to hold on to what she lost, a complex, tantalizing story emerges. In 2005, Jana, now living in Princeton, has an adult daughter, Willow, an artist who creates marionettes, and gives them life in the plays she writes for them. But Willow has no clear picture of her origins, knowing only that she was conceived and born in Montreal; and that her father was a mysterious Quebecois who died before she could meet him. When she is offered a position as a resident artist in Montreal, she eagerly accepts, hoping to not only develop her art but also find out more of her history. Willow's move to Montreal and Jana's memories of the Holocaust set off a chain of events that lead both women to truths they had never dared imagine. In the sure hands of Sands Brodoff, Jana, Willow and the other characters jump off the page--as do Willow's opinionated marionettes. The author writes Montreal as a lover, with a wealth of sensory detail that bewitches the reader and makes us want to imediately book a plane there. A thread of longing weaves through the book, like the faint strains of a klezmer band from Old Prague; but it accompanies rather than distracts from the story. If you are moved by the Holocaust and its legacy and you appreciate beautiful, evocative writing, then this book--which I read in one sitting--is for you.