"You can never hide who you really are, Eva."
In a formerly grand home in postwar Bucharest, Eva is the only child growing up in a family of eccentric adults. There’s Eva's father, a filmmaker who once risked his life for a volume of Shakespeare, and her mother, a former ballerina who insists on living life without regrets. Aunt Puica spends her days reading romance novels in her underwear, while her jokester husband, Uncle Max, continues to poke fun at the Communist party, despite numerous warnings. Uncle Natan is the permanent bachelor with the photographic memory, whom Grandma Iulia coddles as though he were still in diapers.
Troublesome, argumentative, but ultimately loving, these are the post Holocaust voices that shape Eva’s formative years in a country that is changing in evermore frightening ways. And when Eva accidentally uncovers the truth about her Jewish identity, everything changes.
The Communist Party's newest initiatives become increasingly dangerous, and the adults in Eva’s life must decide if it is more important to stay together in Romania, or to separate in order to flee to Israel, where they hope a free future awaits.
With razor-sharp detail and unforgettable caricatures of her animated family, Haya Leah Molnar captures with heartbreaking precocity the very adult realities of living behind the Iron Curtain in this unique memoir of her childhood.
