Safe Harbors

In an autobiographical novel, the sequel to Touch Wood, Rene+a7e, now a teenager, comes to America in 1950 to begin a two-year job as a governess for a wealthy New York family.

Grade 9-12-An autobiographical novel in diary format that is a sequel to Touch Wood (Four Winds, 1988), the author's account of growing up in World War II France. It is 1951, and Renee Roth, now 19, has arrived in New York City as a governess for a wealthy family. She has come to learn English and to escape her domineering mother and is still haunted by memories of her father's death in 1946. A nonpracticing Jew herself, she is surprised to find a "strong, assertive Jewish culture" in New York. Through her friendship with the sister of her employer, self-centered Adele Miller, Renee comes to terms with her heritage. Needing money to return to Paris, where she wishes to be reunited with her boyfriend, she stands up to her mother and leaves Mrs. Miller to work for a publishing firm. An epilogue tells readers of subsequent developments in the author's life. Roth-Hano has created strong, memorable characters; while Renee's growth to maturity is the central theme, she has also portrayed with humor and sensitivity an individual's adapting to a new culture. She shows a fine historian's eye for detail and has re-created New York in the early 1950's, and Paris as well.
Diane S. Marton, Arlington County Library, VA
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Roth-Hano continues the autobiographical story begun in Touch Wood , her delicate evocation of her childhood as a Jew in wartime France, when she and her younger sisters found a haven among Catholic nuns in Normandy. Safe Harbors meets up with Renee in 1951, when, at 19, she has just arrived in New York City, an au pair for a family of assimilated Jews. In adjusting to her new environment, Renee must continue to confront the legacies of the war and of the intervening years--she grapples with religious identity, including the solace she has learned to find in Catholicism; with uncertain faith in God; with grief and guilt over her father's peacetime death; with her shock at the losses of war. Renee's divided attentions strain the narrative: arranged in the form of a journal, passages frequently read like unmediated diary entries, their artlessness obscuring the poignancy of the author's observations and their introspection endowing only Renee with full dimensions. More ambitious than Touch Wood in its attempt to shift among various chronological settings, this sequel, paradoxically, succeeds on a smaller scale. Ages 12-up.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The rebellion of late adolescence is complicated by the memory of war years: a sequel to the critically acclaimed Touch Wood (1988). Roth-Hano picks up her autobiographical story (told, again, as diary entries) when she sails to America at 19. She shares her bewilderment at American culture and language; she has never seen so many Jews gathered in one place as she observes in the reformed synagogue, nor witnessed Jews flaunting their religion as they do on America's streets and on TV. Meanwhile, flashbacks depict childhood moments back in France, and there are glimpses of the future (the loss of her father, the bittersweet joy of first love), while Ren‚e's resentment toward her mother--an anger eventually assuaged by the growing understanding of maturity--colors every line. A book that offers keen insights into postwar America as seen through the eyes of an emotionally burdened foreigner. (Fiction. 12+) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Gr. 8-12. In this autobiographical novel, a sequel to Touch Wood (1988), which was about her experiences as a Jewish child hidden in a convent, Roth-Hano writes about her postwar coming of age in New York City, where she traveled at the invitation of Adele Miller, who needed a governess for her 10-year-old daughter. Roth-Hano's ruminative, unaffected telling combines memories of what she encountered in her new home with flashes of the past--about Fernand, her boyfriend; her postwar life in Paris; her strained relationship with her mother; and her beloved father, whose death she still feels partly responsible for. Her story is intriguing on several counts. A keen observer of human nature, she gives readers a vivid, concrete sense of the people she meets. And her candor about matters of religion is refreshing: she is openly awed by religious freedom in the U.S. and is straightforward about her loss of faith and disillusionment with traditional Judaism, her attachment to the Catholic Church, and her eventual discovery of a "safe harbor" in a Reform Jewish temple. Readers will applaud her when she accepts responsibility for herself and breaks away from the Millers, from her guilt, and from her mother's domination. An unusual fictionalized memoir that draws its drama from the strong voice of its narrator. Stephanie Zvirin