My Mother's Secret: A Novel of the Jewish Autonomous Region (Paperback)

With his dying breath, Lena‘s father asks his family a cryptic question: “You couldn’t tell, could you?” After his passing, Lena stumbles upon the answer that changes her life forever.

As her revolutionary neighbor mysteriously disappears during Josef Stalin's Great Terror purges, 18-year-old Regina suspects that she's the Kremlin’s next target. Under cover of the night, she flees from her parents' communal apartment in 1930s Moscow to the 20th century's first Jewish state, Birobidzhan, on the border between Russia and China. Once there, Regina has to grapple with her preconceived notions of socialism and Judaism while asking herself the eternal question: What do we owe each other? How can we best help one another? While she contends with these queries and struggles to help Birobidzhan establish itself, love and war are on the horizon.