The Wholeness of a Broken Heart Author:Katie Singer Narrated through the voices of four generations of Jewish women, this book recounts the story of a young woman's troubled relationship with her mother. Growing up in Cleveland in the 1960s and 1970s, Hannah Felber basks in her mother's devotion to her, and for Celia, her daughter is her redemption from an unhappy childhood. But when Hannah goe... more »s off to college to begin a life of her own, her mother inexplicably shuts her out, refusing to answer her letters or phone calls. With her mother's abrupt abandonment, Hannah loses not only her closest confidante, but also her sense of identity--she searches through old photographs and listens to family legends for clues to who she is and where she comes from. Drawn deeper and deeper into her family's past, she begins to see that the fate of her grandparents and those left in the old country has a direct bearing on her own life. In chapters narrated by Hannah's maternal ancestors, we hear the voices and stories of those beyond the grave: Leah, the family matriarch, transports us to nineteenth-century shtetl life in Dvinsk, where she tells of sacrificing one of her daughters for the safety of her beloved son--Hannah's brutal and inscrutable grandfather; Channa, Celia's adored grandmother, recalls witnessing a Cossack soldier desecrate a family grave in Koretz, describes her emigration to America, and tells of her ongoing relationship with the miscarried child she cannot forget. We hear from Celia's mother, Ida, who does what she can to raise a family in suburban America, amid the difficulties of assimilation and the horrifying reports from Europe, where relatives and a way of life are being obliterated. With virtuosic intensity, this book offers an understanding of the immigrant experience through the stories of the women who, in this affecting novel, hold the world together. In seeking to understand and triumph over the disturbing legacy of the Holocaust in the American Jewish experience, Singer brings to vivid life an all-but-forgotten world, as she illuminates our contemporary one.« less