“MIGHT IT TAKE STRENGTH TO CRY, TO CONSIDER ALL THAT WAS AND WILL NEVER BE?” So muses the sixteen-year-old narrator of Monique Polak’s novel, What World is Left. Anneke is an inmate in Theresienstadt, the Nazis’ so-called model concentration camp. Of the four novels released this fall by Montreal writers on the theme of Holocaust survival, Polak’s work is the only one that takes the reader to the heart of the horror by creating a character whose vivid confusion, disbelief, and innocence are immediate and powerful.

Anneke is based on Polak’s mother, Celien Spier. While Polak is careful to explain that this is not a memoir of her mother’s life per se, Spier’s history forms the book’s framework. Like Anneke, Celien Spier’s father was an established Dutch cartoonist whose artistic skills saved his wife and children from the gas chambers. Both Polak’s mother and her fictional counterpart endured the misery of camp life; in the end, remaining hopeful is what allowed them to survive.

Polak explores this reality’s effects on survivors and their families perceptively and with depth. Her book is intended for young adult readers. The three others considered here are meant for the adult market. Curiously, they all take a more arm’s-length approach, in terms of both style and subject matter.

Ann Charney’s earlier book, Dobryd featured a child narrator based on Charney’s own experiences as a five-year-old in hiding in rural Poland during WWII. In her new novel, Distantly Related to Freud, we meet eight-year-old Ellen, the narrator, who has come to Montreal with her mother after the war. Their migrations have taught them not to get too attached, to people or places.

Charney appears to have applied the same lesson to her writing style. Even when Ellen is supposedly in the throes of adolescent angst over an amorous young man, or panicked anxiety about her missing best friend Lydia, the reader never quite feels Ellen’s emotions. The plot of this coming-of-age story also feels like a series of near misses. The post-coital breakup with Peter is done by mail and Lydia reappears after a kidnapping virtually unchanged, aside from a new hairdo. Distance and denial may be useful life skills for survivors of genocide, but they are problematic as narrative choices in a novel. Perhaps the writer sensed the limitations of a narrator with an emotional half-life when in the final paragraphs Ellen realizes that, “…my old strategy – see them before they see you- no longer satisfied me…” and hastens “… inside, towards the warmth and the light…” Yet after 314 pages of being kept on the outside and no convincing proof of the character’s transformation, it is difficult for the reader to believe that Ellen’s modus operandi has really changed.

Gina Roitman’s collection of linked stories, which she openly admits read like a memoir of her experience as the daughter of Holocaust survivors, in a displaced person’s camp in Germany and then in Montreal, takes the adult reader closest to what it means to grow up in the shadow of one’s parents’ past. Roitman’s writing style is straightforward and unembellished, and although written in English somehow reads like a tale in Yiddish, infused throughout with the sights, smells, and sounds of Montreal in the fifties.

Roitman introduces her book by describing her mother’s effect on her life and her work. “She crops up in my stories — her words, her expressions… When I’m in doubt, she is still the strongest voice in my head.” No surprise then that the most powerful stories take place during Leah’s childhood. Here we glimpse what it means to be loved by a mother who survived Auschwitz and who now struggles to reconcile the pain of past losses — a husband and three-year-old son — with her desire for intimacy with her rebellious only daughter.

In What World is Left young Anneke stays hopeful, her father often repeating, “All that matters is that we are still together.” Roitman/Leah’s mother also manages to sustain hope for the future, attach to her children and learn to love Leah’s father, her second husband, even though she lost her first family. It is her Jewishness — a faith in God, the Yiddish language, and ritual practices, especially those involving food — that keeps her going. Although Leah is hurt by her mother’s criticisms and manipulations, she is also grateful for her mother’s flashes of emotional intensity. The maternal emotions — sorrow, anger, pain, and joy — educate Leah and allow Roitman to create an engaging protagonist.

Ami Sands Brodoff’s mother-in-law inspired The White Space Between. She has done her research: studied testimonies from survivors, delved extensively into her husband’s family history. Yet her depiction of survivor Jane Ives, formerly Jana Ivanova, secretary of death, doesn’t ring true. When Jane arrives unexpectedly at her daughter Willow’s apartment in Montreal, accepts an invitation from gregarious neighbor Luc and ends up spending the day in his welcoming apartment, Brodoff explains the older woman’s immediate ease with the young stranger by claiming, “Jane has become more trusting in her old age…”

Unfortunately, Holocaust survivors rarely become more trusting with age, especially those who, like Jane, recount their war memories in “[An] eerie mechanical voice…tone formal and distant…” and who, according to her daughter Willow, ” Wouldn’t let me go on class outings, field trips, even though she taught in the same school! … I couldn’t go into the next room without her shouting, ‘Be careful!’”

Brodoff’s mother-daughter protagonists do express their emotions, “…sudden rages…crying jags,” but these outbursts are described rather than experienced by the reader, and like Jane’s testimony of her wartime experience the reader’s distance from the action diminishes the emotional impact.

Jane tells her daughter, “You can survive anything, if you can tell a story about it.” But it is not simply telling a story that helps us survive painful histories. What is required are tales that touch us deeply, that affirm both our suffering and our survival, giving us in turn the strength to cry.

B. A. Markus is a writer, mother, and child of a Holocaust survivor, living in Montreal. She is currently looking for a publisher for her first novel.