The information in this book was very interesting, but this book really needed an editor. There were so many characters involved in various activities and many did not advance the story. The locations and relationships were very confusing. However, the details and concerns of people who were never able to have a real home and were always on the move to save their lives was important to absorb. The dangers of both fascism and communism were both frightening and all too relevant, more than a hundred years after much of this book took place. There were also many strong women who made the decisions and provided the necessary movement. ( )

This was a decent book that told a story of three generations of Romanian Jewish women from the Bucovina region. It was written in the 1980's, so the perspective is also an interesting moment in time when Bucovina is no longer a place name, and Chernovtsy was the place name for Czernowitz.

The story begins with questions in a stream-of-consciousness manner, where the narrator places bits of her ancestresses' stories in with her rumination during her journey by train. The grandmother's story begins in 1895, with Dora on her wedding day. Then it moves forward to her mother, Rosa, through various points in the 20th century, and also to her aunt Hetti both pre-and post- Soviet occupation.

The threat of war and the rise of fascism are undercurrents in Rosa's later story, and that of her sister Hetti who survived polio but with damage to her leg. Unlike Rosa, who marries and raises a family and helps move the family business along, Hetti lives with her boyfriend who meets her at the local Communist Party gathering. Rosa is the only one of the family to escape the camps by fleeing to Tel Aviv in 1937, and the experiences in both the Nazi and Soviet camps are told in retrospect.

The family reunites after World War II in Tel Aviv, and the final portions are the mid-70's from Hetti's perspective, as well as the narrator's final ruminations. The gem of this book is the different women's voices that are so well-crafted; the part that left me distracted was the lack of a foundation for much of the storyline. ( )