The Sweetness

Foreward Reviews Indie Fab Finalist in Historical Fiction
USA Book Reviews Best Books of the Year Finalist
Nominated by the A.L.A. for The Sophie Brody Award in Fiction

Early in The Sweetness, an inquisitive young girl asks her grandmother why she is carrying nothing but a jug of sliced lemons and water when they are forced by the Germans to evacuate their ghetto. “Something sour to remind me of the sweetness,” she tells her, setting the theme for what they must remember to survive. Set during World War II, the novel is the parallel tale of two Jewish girls, cousins, living on separate continents, whose strikingly different lives ultimately converge.

Brooklyn-born Mira Kane is the eighteen-year-old daughter of a well-to-do manufacturer of women’s knitwear in New York. Her cousin, eight-year-old Rosha Kaninsky, is the lone survivor of a family in Vilna exterminated by the invading Nazis. But unbeknownst to her American relatives, Rosha did not perish. Desperate to save his only child during a round-up of their ghetto, her father thrusts her into the arms of a Polish Catholic candle maker, who then hides her in a root cellar─putting her own family at risk. The headstrong and talented Mira, who dreams of escaping Brooklyn for a career as a fashion designer, finds her ambitions abruptly thwarted when, traumatized at the fate of his European relatives, her father becomes intent on safeguarding his loved ones from threats of a brutal world, and all the family must challenge his unuttered but injurious survivor guilt. Though the American Kanes endure the experience of the Jews who got out, they reveal how even in the safety of our lives, we are profoundly affected by the dire circumstances of others.

Author: Sande Boritz Berger

Publication Date: September 23, 2014

Categories: Audiobooks, Fall 2014, Fiction, Historical Fiction

Description
About the Author

Description

Foreward Reviews Indie Fab Finalist in Historical Fiction
USA Book Reviews Best Books of the Year Finalist
Nominated by the A.L.A. for The Sophie Brody Award in Fiction

“As Berger’s novelmoves back and forth from Vilna to Brooklyn, the focus is on Rosha and Mira aswell as on Charlie’s sister Jeanette. All three attempt to make sense of a lifethat often makes no sense at all. VERDICT: In this engaging debut, asemifinalist for Amazon’s annual Breakthrough Novel Award, readers gain threedifferent views of the effects of World War II on ordinary people.”
─AndreaKempf, formerly with Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, KS

“Despite the title, bitterness is thedark driving force in this stirring debut novel of Holocaust survivorguilt–guilt about being safe. Told with candor and tenderness, there are twoparallel stories of Jewish girls–one a teen, one an eight year old– from thesame family but worlds apart during WWII.”
─Hazel Rochman, Booklist

“Original characters, against a backdrop of vivid and exact period detail, drive this highly readable saga of two uniquely different Jewish girls and their families during World War II. Warm, rich, and smooth as glass, their stories sweep over you and into your heart. A solid read for devotees of WWII literature, as much for its retelling of the ravages of the Holocaust, as for its insightful vision of a home front population shaken by shock-waves from abroad.”
─Mary Glickman, author of Home in the Morning, 2011 National Jewish Book Award Finalist for One More River.

“Sande Boritz Berger has written an engrossing family tale filled with promise and hope while paying homage to the undercurrent of survivor’s guilt that can coexist beside that joy. The Sweetness explores themes of morality, fate and death while illuminating how grief can effect even a generation removed, and even those thought to be spared. A great read that will touch your heart.”
─Judy L. Mandel, author of ReplacementChild”

“The Sweetness is one of those rare novels that knowingly informs us about not one but two very different worlds. Although we think we are familiar with the horrors of the Holocaust, we can never be. Although we assume we can understand survivor’s guilt, we cannot. One of this novel’s strengths, perhaps surprisingly, is its restraint. Sande Boritz Berger’s skillful juxtaposition of two very different girls, their tenacity, their search, is searing. And memorable.”
─Lou Ann Walker, Editor of The Southampton Review

About the Author

After two decades as a scriptwriter and video/film producer for Fortune 500 companies, Sande Boritz Berger returned to writing fiction and non-fiction full time. For years she attended The Writer’s Voice in NYC and writing conferences at Stony Brook Southampton College, where she once got lost driving Joyce Carol Oates to a dinner in her honor. Ms. Berger’s stories and essays appear in a multitude of publications, including Every Woman Has a Story (Warner Books), Ophelia’s Mom (Crown) and Aunties: Thirty-Five Writers Celebrate Their Other Mother (Ballantine). Her fiction and poetry have appeared in the Southampton Review, Confrontation Literary Review, Tri-Quarterly Magazine, Epiphany, andother publications. She received first place in the Winthrop B. Palmer Poetry awards at Long Island University, and her short story from which this novel evolved, “The Sweetness,”received a fiction prize from Moment Magazine. The Sweetness was a semi-finalist in Amazon’s annual Breakthrough Novel Awards. Ms. Berger has taught creative writing as a volunteer at NYU’s Medical Center Rusk Institute’s pediatric division and recently completed an MFA in Writing and Literature at Stony Brook Southampton College. In 2010 she received the college’s Deborah Hecht Memorial prize for fiction.