A Picture of Grandmother

The Association of Jewish Libraries awarded this book a Sydney Taylor Book Award silver medal, and it truly deserves recognition. It's a quiet gem. At face value, it's about the value of truth, the importance of forgiveness, and the joy of family bonding. The language is simple yet elegant, formal in a European way that adds flavor to the Vilna setting. Young readers will be drawn in by the mystery that baffles Sara and the honesty of the emotions portrayed will resonate with them. On another level, the story is a remarkable tribute to the author's pre-war childhood. As anyone who has read Hautzig's The Endless Steppe knows, most of her family perished in the Holocaust; she survived with her parents and grandmother only because they were exiled to Siberia as capitalists. In this book she brings her belvoed Vilna back to life, peoples it with her extended family, and breathes significance back into matters that the Nazis were soon to treat as inconsequential. Rathe rthan describe the disruption of family connections by war, she examines the history of the family and the mending of broken connections. Although it takes place in 1939 the story has nothing to do with war, highlighting the normalcy that was soon to be destroyed and intensifying the poignancy for those who know Hautzig's history. The story is fiction, but it is based on real events in Hautzig's childhood, and many of the characters bear he names of her actual relatives. The facts may be fictional but the feelings are real.-Heidi Estrin, Sydney Taylor Book Award Committee, Association of Jewish Libraries