"This book invites the reader to embark on a journey that traces the paths of
ancestral memory over the steppes of the Russian empire to the valleys of
Canada's Fraser River. Connie Braun's narrative continues where Sandra
Birdsell's historical fiction The Russlander has left off - back to the
catastrophic events of twentieth-century Eastern Europe. Braun intimately
ushers us into the life of one extended Mennonite family," the Letkeman family,
"and in particular the life of her father and grandfather, living under the
terror of Stalin, and later, under the military expansion of Hitler's Nazi
regime in the Ukraine. In a memoir that is historically faithful to documents,
letters, old photographs and personal testimony, Braun offers a
second-generation witness to all those who have suffered displacement in
history's disasters, and whose obscure stories must be told. In doing so, she
honours the spirit of resilience embodied by the refugees who have created and
transformed Canadian society." --back cover