Posing the question: who packed the baggage we carry from birth?
Don't Ask poses the question: who packed the suitcase we carry from
birth? In this literary thriller, a woman agonizes over her mother's
suicide and is thrown into turmoil over her attraction to a German.
Hannah Baran is 45, a successful Montreal real estate broker with a
highly lucrative client who, like her parents, is a Holocaust survivor.
Born in a German DP camp, she is the only child of Rokhl and the late
Barak. One day, she arrives to take her mother to the doctor's but Rokhl
is gone, leaving behind a mystifying note that reads: I am not her.
Throughout Hannah's life, Rokhl's notes have been all the guidance she
received from a laconic, distant mother, a foil to Hannah's voluble
father who rescued Rokhl from Auschwitz. When Hannah announces that she
must travel to Germany on business, Rokhl threatens that should Hannah
'go to that land of murderers, ' it would be over her dead body. Three
days later, Hannah locates her missing mother in the morgue. Secreted
away in a confessional letter for Hannah to find one day is the story of
Rokhl's life filled with loss, betrayal, and guilt. It is woven into the
intrigue of the plot about contested land and a love affair weighted
down by the baggage of history.
