County of Birches

Proceeding from her father G bor's terse dictum, ""Why is what matters,"" Dana Weisz, the first-person child narrator of all but one of these 14 penetrating autobiographical stories, seeks to distill, without reducing, the details of her Hungarian Jewish immigrant family's life and her part in it. Arranged almost chronologically into three sections, this impressive debut collection by Canadian writer Kalman moves from an account of Dana's mother S ri's childhood on a Jewish family farm in the 1920s to a wonderful closing story about the largely assimilated family in their 1960s Montreal suburb. G bor--an ex-labor camp inmate--and S ri--an Auschwitz survivor--meet in the fall of 1945 during an improvised Rosh Hashanah service in a Beregsz sz (the eponymous county of birches) schoolhouse, just months after Germany's surrender. They have lost almost all of their relatives, including G bor's first wife and daughter; S ri's husband is missing, and though there are complications when the husband returns, S ri marries G bor. Soon thereafter Lillian is born, and six years later, Dana. The Russian ""arrival"" in Budapest forces the Weisz family to London and eventually to Montreal. Dana tries to reconcile the contradictions of past and present throughout: the ""grandeur that didn't fit,"" which she senses in her parents, dislocated victims of an incomprehensible atrocity; her father's ""mysterious capacity for love"" despite the loss of 80 family members to the Nazis. As Dana learns to inhabit both the orderly safety of her adopted new world and the residual, sublimated history of past homes and landscapes, she grapples with the dilemmas peculiar to second-generation Holocaust survivors. Kalman captures perfectly the sharp, intuitive quality of a child's perspective and the telling detail of everyday life, imbuing her finely honed stories with grace and wonder. (Sept.) FYI: ""Flight,"" one of the entries in this collection, won the Tilden Literary Award in Canada, where the book was published by Douglas & McIntyre.