*****NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD WINNER (2012)***
**
From the award-winning, internationally acclaimed writer ("One of the
best novelists alive" --Irving Howe): a Jewish woman marries a gentile
laborer in turn-of-the-century Austria, with disastrous results.
A high school honor student bound for university and a career as a
mathematician, Blanca lives with her parents in a small town in Austria
in the early years of the twentieth century. At school one day she meets
Adolf, who comes from a family of peasant laborers. Tall and sturdy,
plainspoken and uncomplicated, Adolf is unlike anyone Blanca has ever
met. And Adolf is awestruck by beautiful, brilliant Blanca-even though
she is Jewish. When Blanca is asked by school administrators to tutor
Adolf, the inevitable happens: they fall in love. And when Adolf asks
her to marry him, Blanca abandons her plans to attend university,
converts to Christianity, and leaves her family, her friends, and her
old life behind.
Almost immediately, things begin to go horribly wrong. Told in a series
of flashbacks as Blanca and her son flee from their town with the police
in hot pursuit, the tragic story of Blanca's life with Adolf recalls a
time and place that are no more but that powerfully reverberate in
collective memory.
