This short, halt­ing tale reveals a mon­u­men­tal sto­ry. Inter­spers­ing text amid emo­tion­al­ly charged paint­ings and draw­ings, author and artist Simon Schnei­der­man pro­vides an insight­ful account of the life of his father, Yoel, and touch­ing­ly recalls fam­i­ly mem­bers mur­dered in the Holo­caust. While the author nev­er actu­al­ly gives a name to the Nazi-dri­ven atroc­i­ties vis­it­ed upon his rel­a­tives, his sur­re­al and haunt­ing illus­tra­tions imply a tor­rent of both tan­gi­ble and imag­ined hor­rors. Yoel’s fam­i­ly is robbed of life and lega­cy; he sur­vives the war and a DP camp and even­tu­al­ly immi­grates to Cana­da. While Yoel nev­er mourned, in the author’s words, in a ​“rit­u­al­ized way,” por­tions of the text read like a prayer or oth­er-world­ly poem, reveal­ing the tran­sient state in which his father seemed to exist, unable to live com­plete­ly in the present and keep past ghosts in the past. 

Schnei­der­man con­veys in this small book the epic biog­ra­phy of a man whose life was filled with tragedy and redemption.