Border of Truth

At 41, single professor Sara Leader decides to create a family by adopting a child. After the adoption agency asks for details about her background, Sara reluctantly begins to probe her father’s secret history — in particular, his flight as a 17-year-old Holocaust refugee aboard a ship denied entry into America. The more she learns about her father’s past, the more Sara feels the need to question him about what happened — and the more she realizes how her father’s secrets have shaped her own life. Alternating between a teenage boy’s energetic letters to Eleanor Roosevelt and a daughter’s sifting through the fragments of her father’s traumatic wartime choices, Victoria Redel brilliantly imbues her characters with not only bravery and strength but with the humor to survive the pain of the past and the uncertainty of what lies ahead.

At 41, single professor Sara Leader decides to create a family by adopting a child. After the adoption agency asks for details about her background, Sara reluctantly begins to probe her father’s secret history — in particular, his flight as a 17-year-old Holocaust refugee aboard a ship denied entry into America. The more she learns about her father’s past, the more Sara feels the need to question him about what happened — and the more she realizes how her father’s secrets have shaped her own life. Alternating between a teenage boy’s energetic letters to Eleanor Roosevelt and a daughter’s sifting through the fragments of her father’s traumatic wartime choices, Victoria Redel brilliantly imbues her characters with not only bravery and strength but with the humor to survive the pain of the past and the uncertainty of what lies ahead.

Publishers Weekly

In 1940, Itzak Lejdel, a teenage Jewish refugee from Brussels being held aboard a ship docked in Virginia, is one of 86 passengers whose visas have been rejected and are about to be returned to Nazi-occupied Europe. Itzak writes a series of pleas to Eleanor Roosevelt to intervene, filling his letters with colorful rumors about fellow passengers, endearing details about the movies he loves and his adolescent crushes, as well as harrowing tales about his family's flight from the Nazis. The correspondence alternates with the 2003 story of Itzak's daughter, Sara, a 41-year-old single professor with a penchant for married lovers who's in the process of adopting a war-refugee child. This milestone, coupled with Sara's chance encounter with a woman who knows more about Sara's family history than Sara does, compels Sara to look into her family's hidden past: did Itzak abandon a sickly mother to pursue his own freedom, and what was the fate of Itzak's father? Redel (Loverboy) offers a welcome and fresh perspective on the well-trod subject of the Holocaust, and though Sara can grate (she acknowledges early on that she sounds "like someone on a moral high horse"), young Itzak's joie de vivre perfectly counterbalances her self-importance. (Apr.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Victoria Redel is the author of Loverboy, Where the Road Bottoms Out, the poetry collection Swoon, and Already the World. She has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship. She teaches writing at both the Columbia University School of the Arts and Sarah Lawrence College. She lives in Manhattan.