This book is set in Romania during World War II and into the years of communist rule, and is based on the author’s mother’s actual life story. She says she fictionalized parts of the story, but does not say exactly which parts, nor why, leaving the reader to wonder. The book itself is well-written, with only a few anomalies that are not too distracting.

The plot revolves around the fact that, in 1941 in Romania, the Nazis were conducting terrible mass incarcerations, murders, and seizing of properties. They were beginning to send people to what turned out to be death camps. A young Jewish couple with a three-year-old daughter realized that their lives were in danger, and that the only chance of the child’s survival was to abandon her where she would be found and rescued.

On a night when there were massacres and fires, they left her, dressed in her best, on a sidewalk. Eventually, she was picked up by a woman and taken to an orphanage. A cousin of a wealthy childless couple volunteers at the orphanage and tells them of the child. They eventually take her home and adopt her. They give her every material thing they can, and all their love.

As the war becomes intense, they are more and more restricted in their movements, eventually losing everything after the war when the communists take over in Romania. The girl, who is quite talented musically, has no conscious memory of her birth family, nor of her back ground, and the couple feel they must hide any hint of her Jewish background.

After losing their home and nearly all their possessions, and the man’s business, they and their daughter, now a teenager and then a young adult, are assigned to a “communal flat,” meaning two rooms with shared kitchen and bath, strict rules, and no privacy. The daughter, called Natalia, is working. She meets a man who had been helped by her father during the war, who is now important in the communist bureaucracy. After a time, with his help, she gets on a plane bound for the United States, where she starts a new life and finds her birth parents.

The author states that, in reality, her mother did not leave Romania until the author herself was a teenager; and she never found her birth parents. At the end, she includes some photos of her mother as a child, and the adoptive family. There are many twists and turns in this story, both in the author’s fictionalization and her mother’s life as it really was. The book is well worth reading. It is followed by questions that might be discussed by a book group. The reader wishes to know more, to know all the real facts.