Ann Arbor Jewish Book Festival Program

VIRTUAL PROGRAM

With Author Jennifer Rosner, Once We Were Home

Moderated by Jenny Traig

12:00 PM over Zoom

From Jennifer Rosner, National Jewish Book Award Finalist and author of The Yellow Bird Sings, comes a novel based on the true stories of children stolen in the wake of World War II.

Ana will never forget her mother’s face when she and her baby brother, Oskar, were sent out of their Polish ghetto and into the arms of a Christian friend. For Oskar, though, their new family is the only one he remembers. When a woman from a Jewish reclamation organization seizes them, believing she has their best interest at heart, Ana sees an opportunity to reconnect with her roots, while Oskar sees only the loss of the home he loves.

Roger grows up in a monastery in France, inventing stories and trading riddles with his best friend in a life of quiet concealment. When a relative seeks to retrieve him, the Church steals him across the Pyrenees before relinquishing him to family in Jerusalem.

Renata, a post-graduate student in archaeology, has spent her life unearthing secrets from the past–except for her own. After her mother’s death, Renata’s grief is entwined with all the questions her mother left unanswered, including why they fled Germany so quickly when Renata was a little girl.

Two decades later, they are each building lives for themselves, trying to move on from the trauma and loss that haunts them. But as their stories converge in Israel, in unexpected ways, they must each ask where and to whom they truly belong. Beautifully evocative and tender, filled with both luminosity and anguish, Once We Were Home reveals a little-known history. Based on the true stories of children stolen during wartime, this heart-wrenching novel raises questions of complicity and responsibility, belonging and identity, good intentions and unforeseen consequences, as it confronts what it really means to find home.

Jen­nifer Ros­ner is author of The Yel­low Bird Sings, a 2020 Nation­al Jew­ish Book Award final­ist in Debut Fic­tion and Book Club. She also wrote the mem­oir If a Tree Falls: A Fam­i­ly’s Quest to Hear and be Heard, and the Sydney Taylor Book Award Notable pic­ture book, The Mit­ten String, about deaf­ness in her fam­i­ly, which she has traced back to Gali­cia in the 1800s. Jennifer’s books have been translated into a dozen languages. Her short writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Times of Israel, The Massachusetts Review, the Forward, and elsewhere. In addition to writing, Jennifer has taught philosophy. She earned her B.A. from Columbia University and her Ph.D. from Stanford University. She lives in Western Massachusetts with her family.