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Overview: Gina Roitman, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, was born in Passau, Germany in 1948 and lived in the Pocking-Waldstadt Displaced Persons Camp before emigrating to Canada as a child. An award-winning writer and poet, she is currently completing a film entitled My Mother, the Nazi Midwife, and Me – a documentary about her discovery that the horrific stories she thought were told to terrify her as a child were actually true. She lives in Montreal.

Genre: Fiction > General Fiction / Classics

Don't Ask
Posing the question: who packed the baggage we carry from birth?

Don't Ask poses the question: who packed the suitcase we carry from birth? In this literary thriller, a woman agonizes over her mother's suicide and is thrown into turmoil over her attraction to a German. Hannah Baran is 45, a successful Montreal real estate broker with a highly lucrative client who, like her parents, is a Holocaust survivor. Born in a German DP camp, she is the only child of Rokhl and the late Barak. One day, she arrives to take her mother to the doctor's but Rokhl is gone, leaving behind a mystifying note that reads: I am not her. Throughout Hannah's life, Rokhl's notes have been all the guidance she received from a laconic, distant mother, a foil to Hannah's voluble father who rescued Rokhl from Auschwitz. When Hannah announces that she must travel to Germany on business, Rokhl threatens that should Hannah 'go to that land of murderers,' it would be over her dead body. Three days later, Hannah locates her missing mother in the morgue. Secreted away in a confessional letter for Hannah to find one day is the story of Rokhl's life filled with loss, betrayal, and guilt. It is woven into the intrigue of the plot about contested land and a love affair weighted down by the baggage of history.

Tell Me a Story, Tell Me the Truth
“That’s how we lived, surrounded by ghosts. They sat at the table while we ate our Sunday meal. They lay beside us in the bed as we slept…” In Tell Me a Story, Tell Me the Truth, author Gina Roitman has captured her own experience as the daughter of Holocaust survivors in the character of Leah Smilovitz. Leah lives in a world trapped between two solitudes. An outsider, she belongs neither to her parents’ painful generation nor to her own, freshly minted in the freedoms and contradictions of Montréal in the 1950s and 60s. Growing up in a community of immigrants forever bound to the past, Leah tests the boundaries of her independence. This poignant and often funny collection of linked stories takes us through her rebellions, loves found and lost, and the pain of being helpless in the face of irreparable circumstances. Coming of age in a generation looking for its own identity, Leah struggles against old world fears and taboos to move into a more hopeful future.