Once We Were Home

Rosner (The Yellow Bird Sings) delivers an engrossing story inspired by the postwar lives of Jewish children who were hidden during the war. Seven-year-old Roger spent most of the war growing up in safety at the Convent of Sainte Marie de Sion, but in 1946, the church insists on keeping him, prompting Roger’s aunt to sue for custody. A parallel narrative follows siblings Ana and Oskar, whose parents send them to the Polish countryside. Near the war’s end, they’re taken by a Jewish woman reclaiming Jewish children to live in Israel, which excites Ana but upsets the younger Oskar, who’s grown attached to their foster parents. Twenty years later, Roger, now a professor in Israel, meets Renata, a British archeologist. They’re drawn to each another, but their romance is derailed when Renata reveals her parents were German. Ana, meanwhile, lives in a kibbutz with her husband, who wants to raise their children there, but Ana would rather leave the community; while Oskar falls in love with a talented violinist. When the siblings learn their foster mother is ill, they consider returning to Poland, and surprising revelations about Renata’s past explain why her family left Germany during the war. Rosner wrings a great deal of emotion from the various portraits, and she does an admirable job of exploring the characters’ conflicted loyalties. Fans of Jewish historical fiction will be moved. (Mar.)