Golden Daughter 'essential reading'

I was so happy, and proud, this week when three friends from Ontario messaged me to say my book The Golden Daughter has been recommended by the Toronto Star as one of its 'essential summer reads' picks.

The first message popped up on my phone as I wrapped up an emotional road trip to Northern Ontario. I had gone to the cemetery in Kirkland Lake where, three years ago, I found my birth father's unmarked grave. I had arranged for a gravestone to be put there.

I had a couple of good reasons for re-visiting the cemetery. I would meet Sonia (above), the woman who nursed my father - the man I never saw since I was four years old - in the last years of his life. 

And I would bury a handful of earth from my father's family farm in Poland, along with a sliver of plaster from the wall of the house where he had been born. It was from there that he left for war -  a journey that took him through a prisoner of war camp, into the arms of my mother, and into my life and - now - into my book.

I collected the dirt and the plaster last year when I went to Poland to meet his family, the family I never knew I had. Before I left Poland, one of my cousins slipped the little bag of earth into my hand, hugged me, and said 'let Stanislaw rest with a little bit of his homeland in his grave.'

So I'd driven two thousand kilometres from Nova Scotia to fulfil my promise when the first message popped up on my phone telling me The Golden Daughter was one of 15 books being recommended by the Star as an essential summer read.

The Golden Daughter tells the story of my mother's abduction, aged 17, from her school in Ukraine, her wartime ordeal as a German work slave, how she survived repeated Allied bombing raids on the factory where she she was forced to work, and how - in a displaced persons camp after the war - she married my father, Stanislaw, and gave birth to me, but fell in love with Stan's friend Frank.

Frank ran off with my mother and me when I was four. I never saw Stanislaw again.

I've been patching together the truth of my mother's life ever since I found a bundle of secret letters, written in Russian and Polish, among her possessions when she died. They are the basis of my book, The Golden Daughter.

I’m delighted the book has been chosen by the Star as one of their must-read summer selections. I am especially honoured to be in the company of that prolific and successful Canadian writer, Miriam Toews. In her memoir 'A Truce That Is Not Peace' Ms Toews tackles the question "Why do I write?"

For me, writing The Golden Daughter helped me work out my complicated relationship with a mother who was narcissistic, secretive and manipulative. And it allowed me to review the feelings of anger and abandonment I've carried for more than seventy years because of my father's early disappearance from my life. 

It also allowed me to tell the story of the five million slave workers of World War 2. The slaves, often mere children, were taken from their homes and forced to work for the Germans. If they survived the war (and many didn't, because they were worked to death) many were reluctant to go home to countries under Russian influence because Stalin decreed they were traitors and collaborators. Those, like my mother, who escaped Stalin’s grip, never talked about their ordeal in Germany. They were either ashamed that they worked for the enemy, or they just wanted to forget.

The Golden Daughter will be published by Anansi Press on August 5. It's already available for pre-order through all good book stores, or through the links on my website.