New Releases by Lillian Boraks-Nemetz

"A collection of poems by a Holocaust survivor who relates her feelings of loss and guilt at having survived the Holocaust"--

"Mouth of Truth is the unique story of a woman trapped in the vault of family secrets, part of her still a hidden child, some 40 years after the Second World War. Following a crisis, she leaves her home and children in search of the truth about her beloved father, a Jewish policeman in the Warsaw Ghetto. The story reveals how unhealed childhood trauma of a parent can be transmitted from one generation to the next, destroying families and other relationships in its wake."--

In these eleven original stories, characters bravely face the challenges of settling into a new life. In this wonderful new short story anthology, eleven of Canada's top children's authors contribute stories of immigration, displacement and change, exploring the frustration and uncertainty those changes can bring. Told in first-person narratives, this collection features a diverse cast of boys and girls, each one living at a different point in Canada's vast landscape and history. With unforgettable protagonists -- such as Miriam, a Warsaw-ghetto survivor, now reunited with her family in Montreal; Wong Joe-on, a young Chinese immigrant who faces racism in a small Saskatchewan town; and Insy, an Ojibwe girl who makes her first trip to a "white" town in Northern Ontario -- young readers will be moved by the opportunities and difficulties that these characters face, as each one ponders what it means to be Canadian, and struggles to fit in. Hoping for Home includes stories by Jean Little, Kit Pearson, Brian Dowle, Paul Yee, Irene N. Watts, Ruby Slipperjack, Afua Cooper, Rukhsana Khan, Marie--Andrée Clermont, Lillian Boraks--Nemetz and Shelley Tanaka.

Winner of the Honor Book award in the 2003 Society of School Librarians International Awards program Selected as a finalist for the Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize Selected by the Pennsylvania School Librarians Association as one of the PSLA YA Top Forty Nonfiction Titles 2003 Tapestry of Hope is an extraordinary anthology of writing about the Holocaust for young people. Irene N. Watts and Lillian Boraks-Nemetz have gathered well-known published writing and new first-person accounts, to reveal the heartbreak, courage, and hope that define one of history’s darkest hours. The editors present writing about hiding from the Nazis, life in the ghetto, resistance, the camps, escape, survival, and life after the Holocaust. Selections include poetry, prose, and first-hand accounts such as Andre Stein’s Hidden Children, Jack Kuper’s Child of the Holocaust, Jason Shermon’s A Blessing in Disguise, Kathy Kacer’s Gaby’s Dresser, Eva Wiseman’s My Canary Yellow Star, Leonard Cohen’s All There is to Know about Adolph Eichmann, Jean Little writing about Anne Frank, Karen Levine’s Hannah’s Suitcase, and many others.

Slava travels to Poland to search for her missing sister -- and is targeted by the secret police.

The poems in Ghost Children explore the spiritual and psychological losses suffered by child survivors of the Holocaust. The title points both to the one and a half million children murdered in the Holocaust and to the many child survivors who have lived out their lives as "ghosts," never managing to allow their childhood self to surface in their adult lives. Drawing on her own experience of life as a child in the Warsaw Ghetto and her escape, Lillian Boraks-Nemetz divides her journey of discovery into three sections. She begins by travelling back in memory to witness to the pain and suffering of the Jewish children of Europe. In the second section, she journeys to Europe to visit the concentration camps, ghettoes and towns where Jewish life once flourished. Boraks-Nemetz finds ghosts of the past in the black granite memorials of what once was the Warsaw Ghetto, in the stones in Treblinka, in the trees of Auschwitz, and in her grandparents' Polish garden. She also travels to the Dead Sea and the caves of En Gedi to look for traces of her lost Jewish identity. Ultimately, she points to a place of healing, at a light that burns within the very act of surviving and remembering. In spite of all that has happened, in spite of the admonition that, after Auschwitz, poetry is impossible, Boraks-Nemetz affirms that we must continue the journey.

Sixteen-year-old Slava Lenski writes about her life during her stay in a Victoria boarding school where she reluctantly conceals her Jewish identity. But the memories of war-torn Poland, her missing sister and the memory of her beloved father intrude. Then the other girls discover her diary and her secret is revealed.

Garden of Steel is a song against the ruins of our age. This is a rare book of poems, a testament written out of the blood and imbued with the force of life, a poetry of victory rather than victimization, a poetry of healing and good health.

Expériences, racontées en alternance, vécues en Pologne et au Canada par une jeune réfugiée juive, avant, pendant et après la Deuxième Guerre mondiale. Evite le larmoiement et l'apitoiement propres à ce genre de réminiscences. A reçu deux prix littéraires: un du B. C. Book Prize Children's Book et l'autre du Jewish Book Committee's Prize.

Fourteen-year-old Slava Lenski recounts her family's adjustment to life in Montreal after fleeing Warsaw, Poland, in 1947