Mirel's Daughter

Sonia Turbowskia was nearly ten years old when her pleasant childhood in the village of Brusilov, Ukraine, was shattered. In 1919, following the Russian Revolution and the end of World War I, civil war raged among Bolsheviks, Ukrainian Nationalists, and die-hard Tsarists. The latter two groups saw the Jews of the Ukraine as fair game for plunder and murder.

With her widowed mother, Mirel, and her sister Raizel, Sonia hides in the attic of their home as the first attack on their Jewish neighborhood unfolds on the street below. Thus begins Sonia’s harrowing tale of love and loss, despair and, finally, hope.

Mirel’s Daughter is a haunting novel that narrows the scope of war to one family, one child. Intimately told, it reveals the destructive power of hate and the enduring power of a mother’s love. Kay Gill’s depiction of hard-won survival retains its unforgettable immediacy long after the last page has been turned. Through imagination, memory, and research, she redeems compelling and appealing characters from a time as brutal as our own for contemporary readers to love and cherish.