Mirel’s Daughter

by Kay Gill (2006)

hardback

Mirel’s Daughter is the haunting story of a young girl who loses her family death by death in the pogrom massacres of Ukrainian Russia. In beautiful, vivid language, Kay Gill pieces together a story woven from fragments of her grandmother’s history and the archives of history. Her discovery of how one intrepid mother taught her daughter the spirit of survival-that people are good if they are given the chance, is a tale that reads almost like a legend. Set historically just after WWI, when the Germans were withdrawing, the Communist revolution beginning and gangs of nationalist and tsarist ‘bandits’ rampaging through Jewish villages, Gill skillfully chronicles what it was like for the Jews of the Ukraine as they endured the prototype of the ethnic extermination to come. A valuable addition to the great witness literature of the twentieth century, Mirel’s Daughter is a testament to the human spirit, for it shows how dehumanization and torture ultimately fail to stamp out the will to love and prevail.
-Julie Brickman, author of What Birds Can Only Whisper