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FUGITIVE PIECES
Anne Michaels
(McClelland & Stewart)
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It is not often a writer manages to marry poetry, prose and archeology, but with Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels shows she is wedded to all three.
In a first novel simultaneously melancholy and majestic, the Toronto author recounts the story of Jakob Beer, a seven-year-old Jewish boy rescued from the mud of Poland during the Holocaust.
His unexpected savior, Athos Roussos, takes him home to Greece, where he nurtures the boy, slowly coaxing him to take an interest in the sciences, in life. But how to explore the sorrow and the terror of a youngster whose entire family was killed in front of his very eyes? How to explain the horror of a past so terrible it will forever color the future?
Somehow, in prose so lyrical it breaks the heart, Michaels lets us see into the very soul of Jakob Beer; she permits us to watch him experience and grow through his anguish.
And she allows us to observe as a sensitive, eccentric Roussos teaches the boy Greek and gently feeds him with a love of geology, cartography, botany, art and poetry -- while making sure he never forgets his own Jewish culture.
After the war, Roussos gets a job teaching in the new geography department at the University of Toronto, and it is with a startled sense of poignancy that the reader watIt is not often a writer manages to marry poetry, prose and archeology, but with Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels shows she is wedded to all three.
In a first novel simultaneously melancholy and majestic, the Toronto author recounts the story of Jakob Beer, a seven-year-old Jewish boy rescued from the mud of Poland during the Holocaust.
His unexpected savior, Athos Roussos, takes him home to Greece, where he nurtures the boy, slowly coaxing him to take an interest in the sciences, in life...