Tiny Lights for Travellers

Book excerpt: Governor General’s Award Finalist: A “wry, moving” memoir of a woman retracing her grandfather’s escape from Amsterdam during the Holocaust (Alison Pick, Booker-nominated author of Between Gods). Why couldn’t I occupy the world as those model-looking women did, with their flowing hair, pulling their tiny bright suitcases as if to say, I just arrived from elsewhere, and I already belong here, and this sidewalk belongs to me? When her marriage suddenly ends, and a diary documenting her beloved Opa’s escape from the Nazi-occupied Netherlands in the summer of 1942 is discovered, Naomi Lewis decides to retrace his route to freedom. Travelling alone from Amsterdam to Lyon, she discovers family secrets and her own narrative as a second-generation Jewish Canadian. With vulnerability, humour, and wisdom, Lewis’s memoir of her journey, interspersed with excerpts from her grandfather’s diary, asks tough questions about her identity as a secular Jew, the accuracy of family stories, and the impact of the Holocaust on subsequent generations.