Historical Note

I knew I wanted to write a novel with multiple generations harboring secrets. My father is a Soviet emigrant, and when I was growing up, he never really spoke about his first twenty-eight years before he immigrated to the US. But in my early thirties, my family traveled to my dad’s hometown in Ukraine, his first time back since he’d left, and he finally told us his stories. I wanted the protagonist—Joey—to transform, as I did, as she understands the history of her ancestors.

My paternal grandmother escaped Ukraine when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. But her parents and some other family members did not manage to escape, and were murdered by the Nazis and buried in mass graves in the rural outskirts of Zhitomir, a small city a few hours from Kiev. I am named after this paternal grandmother, and I feel very connected to her, despite never meeting her as she died shortly before I was born. I wanted to write a grandmother character loosely inspired by her, someone who narrowly escaped the Holocaust but was greatly impacted by it.

I chose to partially set the novel on Corfu because of its lesser-known Holocaust history, and also its island and European appeal. Initially, I spent a few weeks in Greece doing research, including on Corfu, and I met with an expert in Athens on Greek Jewish history. And then over the course of a few years, I read everything I could get my hands on regarding the Corfiot Jews, and I met with and spoke to many people with personal Greek Jewish stories, as well as further experts on Greek Jewish history. Many of them told me, “The world doesn’t even know what happened to the Greek Jews during the Holocaust. Our stories have largely been ignored.”

I am so grateful to the kind and generous people who shared insights and stories, often painfully tragic. All of it was invaluable to an accurate portrayal of what life was like for the Corfiot Jews in the forties, prior to, during, and after Nazi rule.

The story of Sarah and her family is fictional, but it is interwoven with many real stories and events of the time. For instance, Rabbi Iakov Nechama was once the rabbi of Corfu, and how the Nazis dehumanized him during their rule is historically accurate.

And Costas, who is Sarah’s customer on the island of Lefkada, is a fictionalized character based upon Costas Stagiannos, a member of Lefkada Resistance, who courageously aided the escape of some Corfiot Jews imprisoned on Lefkada.