It is apparent is that Isabel has a very intense, even strange, relationship with the home she grew up in. This feels somehow bound up with her extreme isolation. She is not simply single, she is almost defined by her solitude.
Even more mysterious is what happened to the siblings’ parents, although we are aware that their mother is dead. An obvious clue lies in the date – the novel begins soon after the war. There are two passing references to “the camps” near the beginning, but nothing more for a long while and, as the novel unfolds, there are other curious fragments. “All of them gone?” Isabel asks in passing. Later, someone mentions “airplanes” and “bombs”. There is also a brief reference to a rabbi, Pesach and a menorah.
“Isabel found a broken piece of ceramic under the roots of a dead gourd” is the opening line of the book and, over the next couple of pages, the references to fragments, shards and pieces of crockery abound. This is how the novel continues – an underlying fascination with things that have been broken and cannot, apparently, be repaired. Suddenly a novel about a non-Jewish family starts to feel very Jewish indeed as the fragments come together. This is a story of secrets, and not just those of one family, but of a whole country.
