The Sweetness

A Foreward Reviews Indie Fab 2014 Finalist for Book of the Year

A. L. A. Sophie Brody Award 2014 nominee

Early in The Sweetness, an inquisitive young girl asks her grandmother why she is carrying nothing but a jug of sliced lemons and water when they are forced by the Germans to evacuate their ghetto. "Something sour to remind me of the sweetness," she tells her, setting the theme for what they must remember to survive. Set during World War II, the novel is the parallel tale of two Jewish girls, cousins, living on separate continents, whose strikingly different lives ultimately converge. Brooklyn-born Mira Kane is the eighteen-year-old daughter of a well-to-do manufacturer of women's knitwear in New York. Her cousin, eight-year-old Rosha Kaninsky, is the lone survivor of a family in Vilna exterminated by the invading Nazis. But unbeknownst to her American relatives, Rosha did not perish. Desperate to save his only child during a round-up of their ghetto, her father thrusts her into the arms of a Polish Catholic candle maker, who then hides her in a root cellar─putting her own family at risk. The headstrong and talented Mira, who dreams of escaping Brooklyn for a career as a fashion designer, finds her ambitions abruptly thwarted when, traumatized at the fate of his European relatives, her father becomes intent on safeguarding his loved ones from threats of a brutal world, and all the family must challenge his unuttered but injurious survivor guilt. Though the American Kanes endure the experience of the Jews who got out, they reveal how even in the safety of our lives, we are profoundly affected by the dire circumstances of others.

Author: Sande Boritz Berger
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: 09/23/2014
Pages: 307
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.89lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.51w x 0.71d
ISBN: 9781631529078


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 07/01/2014 pg. 76
Booklist 08/01/2014 pg. 36
Kirkus Reviews 08/15/2014

About the Author
Berger, Sande Boritz: - After two decades as a scriptwriter and video/film producer for Fortune 500 companies, Sande Boritz Berger returned to writing fiction and non-fiction full time. For years she attended The Writer's Voice in NYC and writing conferences at Stony Brook Southampton College, where she once got lost driving Joyce Carol Oates to a dinner in her honor. Ms. Berger's stories and essays appear in a multitude of publications, including Every Woman Has a Story (Warner Books), Ophelia's Mom (Crown) and Aunties: Thirty-Five Writers Celebrate Their Other Mother (Ballantine). Her fiction and poetry have appeared in the Southampton Review, Confrontation Literary Review, Tri-Quarterly Magazine, Epiphany, and other publications. She received first place in the Winthrop B. Palmer Poetry awards at Long Island University, and her short story from which this novel evolved, "The Sweetness," received a fiction prize from Moment Magazine. The Sweetness was a semi-finalist in Amazon's annual Breakthrough Novel Awards. Ms. Berger has taught creative writing as a volunteer at NYU's Medical Center Rusk Institute's pediatric division and recently completed an MFA in Writing and Literature at Stony Brook Southampton College. In 2010 she received the college's Deborah Hecht Memorial prize for fiction.