by Alice Parizeau
When the Soviets drove the Germans out of Poland at the close of World War II, the Poles briefly believed that freedom lay ahead. It is at that point that this novel, which carries through to the recent turmoil in Gdansk, begins. Helena, a 13-year-old girl who has been working with freedom fighters against the Germans, escapes and while making her way back to Warsaw is raped by Soviet soldiers. Her mother, a concert musician, and her father, an engineer who has lost a leg in the war, take her to the country where a tough old woman nurses her through pregnancy. Gradually the family comes to realize that repression under the Russians is as bad as the life they knew under the Germans. The historical subject matter is compelling, and there are plenty of grim details of life under occupation that we in the West have been spared. But the Polish-born author, now a best-selling writer in French Canada, has chosen to tell her story as if it were a romantic soap opera. The characters are like actors in a stock company: ingenue, good priest, fine doctor, wily peasant, wonderful mother. The melodramatic turns of plot are old-fashioned and predictable so that the ending, which is splintered, seems unsatisfying. Perhaps it was forced, by what is in fact happening in Poland today, to be open-ended. (New American Library, $15.95)
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