Kay Gill talks about Mirel's Daughter:

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I was five or six when my mother, Sonia, first told me stories of her childhood in Russia, simple stories at first, and sweet.  She lived in Brusilov, Ukraine, with her mother, Mirel, and an older sister and brother; her father had died when she was a baby.  Her mother had a maid, Ulka, a gentile woman who had been with them “for thirteen years when the trouble started.”

In the late summers, she said, her mother and Ulka would make jelly. Not on a stove.  Outside.  In a kettle hung over a fire.  She told me about coming to America on a ship – “in first class,” she always added.

As I look back, I realize that for me writing Mirel’s Daughter has been a journey that began with those stories.

Years later, she told me hard tales of loss and hope – about being driven from their home during war, about pogroms against the Jews.  It was difficult for her to tell these stories, but slowly I gathered enough threads to weave the tale that I knew I must write.

My mother was in her seventies before she could tell me everything.  The “bad things” were still vivid in her mind, but by now many details of daily life had drifted away – her friend’s name, the food they ate.  And, because she was so young when all this happened – only twelve when she came to America – she was innocent of the politics that had brought it about.

We cried but there was laughter, too, as when she tried to draw a floor plan of her family’s house so that I could comprehend how different her life in Brusilov had been from mine.  “Back here in the kitchen was a barrel,” she said.  “A man came to fill it with water from the town well.  And we had a porch; I remember taking naps on that porch.” “Bathroom?” she laughed.  “There was a privy in back.  Out here somewhere,” she said, pointing to a spot behind the drawing of her house.  “And over here was a garden.”

When I had heard all she had to tell me, I began to fill in the blanks with research.  As I began to write, I relived her story.  I understood my mother as I never had before.  And I understood that her story is one story but that it is universal, that in every war since the beginning of time, a child like Sonia had been there.