Review: The Summer of Lost Letters
The Summer of Lost Letters
by Hannah Reynolds
Razorbill (imprint of Penguin Random House)
Category: Young Adult
Reviewer: Cheryl Fox Strausberg
When Abigail Schoenberg receives a package of her grandmother Ruth’s
personal effects, the last thing she expected to find was a bundle of
love letters. However, the stranger part is that these letters were not
signed by her grandfather, but instead by someone named Edward, of whom
Abby’s family knows nothing. Abby and her
family only know that her grandmother immigrated to the
United States at the age of four in 1939. So, who is this mysterious
Edward?
After reading through the letters and doing a bit of online research,
Abby discovers that her grandmother was part of an American
Kindertransport program. She was brought to the U.S. and essentially
adopted by a wealthy Jewish family who summered on Nantucket Island.
After discovering that Edward is still alive, Abby attempts and fails to
arrange to speak with him, so she arranges a summer job on Nantucket
hoping that proximity to the family will entice them to open up to her
about her grandmother’s past. What follows is a tale of love, loss, and
sacrifice, not only in the past but in Abby’s present as well.
This book is a poignant discussion of the Jewish communal psyche. On
one hand, you have young Ruth struggling with who she is and what her future
holds as a Holocaust survivor: alone, essentially a charity case, but
also as a woman in love with a man she to whom she could not marry. On
the other hand, you have Abby, also struggling with who she is and what
her future holds as a seventeen year old girl today worried about
fitting in, planning for college, and first love. Both women struggle
with the central theme of the book, “Who am I? Where do I come from?”
of which there are no easy answers for the descendants of the Holocaust
survivors.
I think this book should be considered for the Sydney Taylor Book Award. It is an engaging novel that explores what it means to be Jewish, not just today, but what it meant to be Jewish in the mid-20th century. It takes a look at the American response to the threat of Fascism during the late 1930s and the steps that American Jewry did and did not take to assist Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. It puts the Jewish experience at the center without taking such a heavy hand on history. It addresses the questions of how Jews, as a people, can move forward while not having a solid grasp on our personal histories and it also addresses how the legacy of the Holocaust will continue to be far-reaching into the future until historians have a better grasp on the documents and records that can help the Jewish people put their history back together again.
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