The Sunflower Diary

Darleen R. Golke is a high-school teacher-librarian in Winnipeg,
Manitoba.

In this sequel to the Sheila Egoff Children’s Book Prize winner, The
Old Brown Suitcase (1995), Slava Lenski is sent to Vancouver to live
with her mother and her new husband, Max Steiner. It is April 1949.
Still mourning her beloved father’s death two years earlier, Slava
resents being forced to leave her best friend, Miriam, and her beloved
Joshua in Montreal. By August, Mama and Max initiate plans to send Slava
to St. Anne’s School for Girls in Victoria.

As an immigrant who survived the horrors of wartime Poland and the
Nazis, Slava has struggled in school. Because her education needs
upgrading, Max persuades the board of St. Anne’s to accept Slava into
Grade 10 with a chance of going directly to Grade 12 thereafter. Miss
Basil-Stubbs, the headmistress, strongly urges Slava to disguise her
Jewishness by adopting the name Elizabeth. Slava goes along with the
plan and is placed with the senior girls in the dormitory.

Slava assuages her loneliness by chronicling her struggles (past and
present) in a diary. Sensing that her housemates would torment her
mercilessly were they to read her most private thoughts, Slava seeks a
hiding place for her diary. Inevitably someone ferrets out the diary,
thereby forcing Slava to reveal the truth, which ultimately proves to be
beneficial.

Boraks-Nemetz, herself a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, sensitively
portrays Slava’s academic and personal struggles in what she calls
“documentary fiction.” A planned sequel, The Lenski File, will
continue Slava’s story. Recommended.