The Book is Real

Digital art collage by Stella Kalaw

I have missed my Saturday mornings writing here.

When I first started posting draft chapters on “Mother Land,” I had no idea the story would take me where it did. You were there from the beginning — reading those first messy drafts as I tried to make sense of the fragments my father left me at the end of his life, and the silence my mother kept for her entire life. Your comments kept me going. More than once, they convinced me the story mattered beyond our family walls.

So it is with more than a little wonder that I’m writing to tell you: Family Secrets: A Daughter’s Search for Her Parents’ Hidden War will be a real book on April 15. I still can’t quite believe it.

The book is part detective story, part bridge between academic history and lived experience, and very much my own memoir of discovery. It’s about what happened when my father broke decades of silence, and I set off through archives and historical records to uncover my parents’ hidden wartime past in Nazi-occupied Poland. His revelations were just the beginning. After his death, I discovered my mother’s story too — secrets she had guarded to her grave, secrets she never intended anyone to find.

What I found is that secrets shape not only those who keep them, but those who inherit them — and sometimes the story of an entire nation.

I was that girl in small-town Ontario, mortified by her parents’ accents, by the recess snacks and the clothes that marked her as different, wanting nothing more than to blend in. What I couldn’t see then was the magnitude of what my parents had survived to give me a beautifully ordinary Canadian childhood I took entirely for granted. Writing this book changed that.

It also left me with questions I’ll carry for a long time: What do we owe our parents? What did they owe us? And what do we all owe history?

One more thing, since some of you have asked: I began this project when I retired, more than five years ago, and I wondered then whether I was starting too late. I no longer think so. Your sixties, it turns out, may be the perfect decade for something like this — not just because you have the time, but because you have the perspective to see what you missed when you were younger, the patience for deep research, and the courage to ask questions you once avoided.

For those of you who followed along on Mother Land: thank you. Those early chapter drafts have come down — they’ve become Family Secrets, which will be available April 15.

If you’d like to pre-order, that would be amazing. The book is available on Amazon, Indigo and Paragraphe Books in Montreal (the Canadian options, just saying). You can visit my website for all the pre-order links.

With gratitude and more than a bit of wonder,

Alice