Linda Margolin Royal was compelled to write The Star on the Grave after discovering that her father, an emotionally distant Holocaust survivor, kept their Jewish identity a secret from her for twenty-one years. In this novel, Royal presents Rachel, a fictional Australian nurse in 1968 whose Jewish identity was similarly hidden. Once she uncovers the truth, Rachel, engaged to marry a Catholic man, struggles to choose who she will become moving forward. Determined to learn more about her heritage, she accompanies her grandmother Felka — vibrant, beloved, and once part of the deception — to Japan. There, Felka plans to join a delegation of former Jewish refugees to thank Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese diplomat who secretly wrote the 6,000 transit visas which rescued them from Eastern Europe in 1940.
Although the reclusive Sugihara is not there, Rachel finds him elsewhere. She also explores different facets of Judaism and discovers Jewish relatives in Tokyo she didn’t know she had. Throughout this journey, Rachel discovers new strengths within herself and comes to a greater understanding of the traumas her family and others experienced during World War II as well as the painful decisions they made afterward. She weighs personal questions about her own identity and the directions her professional, cultural, and love lives might take.
Multifaceted perspectives and suspense distinguish Royal’s first novel. Speaking with Sugihara’s son helped to inform her understanding of his quiet heroism and suffering, but Royal never lets research undermine the pace of this book as a story. Well-drawn dialogue enriches the emotional truth and resonance of her characters and historical events for readers beyond the quotidian of a young woman’s anger, as she pushes to understand her father’s cold dispassion. The reader comes to anticipate Felka’s larger-than-life buoyancy and grit, and to care about this young woman from Sydney who only discovers her Jewish heritage as an adult.
Sharon Elswit, author of The Jewish Story Finder and a school librarian for forty years in NYC, now resides in San Francisco, where she shares tales aloud in a local JCC preschool and volunteers with 826 Valencia to help students write their own stories and poems.
