Search Results: Returned 4 Results, Displaying Titles 1 - 4
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By Pick, Alison2014., Adult, Doubleday Canada Call No: BIO Bio P594b Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: From the Man Booker-nominated author of the novel Far to Go comes an unflinching, moving and unforgettable memoir about family secrets and the rediscovered past. Alison Pick was born in the 1970s and raised in a supportive, loving family in Kitchener, Ontario. As far as Pick knew, both her parents were Christian. Then as a teenager, Alison made a discovery that instantly changed her understanding of her family. She learned that her Pick grandparents, who had escaped from the Czech Republic during WWII, were Jewish--and that most of this side of the family had died in concentration camps. In her early thirties, engaged to be married to her longtime boyfriend but struggling with a crippling depression, Alison slowly but doggedly began to research and uncover her Jewish heritage. Eventually she came to realize that her true path forward was to reclaim her history and indentity as a Jew. In this by times raw, by times sublime memoir, Alison recounts her struggle with the meaning of her faith, her journey to convert to Judaism, her battle with depression, and her path towards facing and accepting the past and embracing the future. Illuminated with heartbreaking insight into the very real lives of the dead, and hard-won hope for the lives of all those who carry on after. Alision Pick has published two volumes of poetry, and is a faculty member at the Humber School for Writers and the Banff Centre for the Arts. She lives in Toronto.
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By Pick, Alison2010., Anansi Press Call No: Fic Pic Edition: 1st Canadian ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "When Czechoslovakia relinquishes the Sudetenland to Hitler, the powerful influence of Nazi propaganda sweeps through towns and villages like a sinister vanguard of the Reich's advancing army. A fiercely patriotic secular Jew, Pavel Bauer is helpless to prevent his world from unraveling as first his government, then his business partners, then his neighbors turn their back on his affluent, once-beloved family. Only the Bauers' adoring governess, Marta, sticks by Pavel, his wife, Anneliese, and their little son, Pepik, bound by her deep affection for her employers and friends. But when Marta learns of their impending betrayal at the hands of her lover, Ernst, Pavel's best friend, she is paralyzed by her own fear of discovery -- even as the endangered family for whom she cares so deeply struggles with the most difficult decision of their lives. Interwoven with a present-day narrative that gradually reveals the fate of the Bauer family during and after the war, Far to Go is a riveting family epic, love story, and psychological drama"--P. [4] of cover.
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By Pick, Alison2017., Adult, Alfred A. Knopf Canada Call No: Fic Pic Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "This spare, beautifully written, shocking and timely novel whisks us back to 1921 Palestine, when a band of young Jewish pioneers, many escaping violence in their homelands, set out to realize a utopian dream: the founding of a kibbutz on a patch of land that will, twenty-five years later, become part of the State of Israel. Writing with tightly controlled intensity, Alison Pick takes us inside the minds of her vastly different characters--two young unmarried women, one plain and one beautiful, escaping peril in Russia and Europe; one older man, a charismatic group leader who is married with two children; and his wife, Hannah, who understands all too well the dark side of "equality"--to show us how idealism quickly tumbles into pragmatism, and how the utopian dream is punctured by messy human entanglements. This is also the story of the land itself (present-day Israel and Palestine), revealing with compassion and terrible irony how the pioneers chose to ignore the subtle but undeniable fact that their valley was already populated, home to a people whose lives they did not entirely understand. Writing with extraordinary power, Pick creates unforgettably human characters who, isolated in the enclosure of their hard-won utopian dream, are haunted by ghosts, compromised by unbearable secrets, and finally, despite flashes of love and hope, worn down by hardship, human frailty, and the pull of violent confrontation. The novel's utterly shocking but satisfying conclusion will have readers flipping back to the first page to trace patterns and wrestle with the question of what is, or is not, inevitable and knowable in the human heart."--From publisher.
