Warsaw Spring

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

Set in 1979, Warsaw Spring deals with a young Polish-Canadian woman’s
attempt to locate her birth father and, thereby, to complete the puzzle
of her identity.

Born out of wedlock, Eve, now 18, was raised by her grandmother in
Edmonton, Alberta. Her mother Magda, who had pretended to be Eve’s
aunt while marrying a well-to-do Oil Patch executive, had recently
acknowledged her maternity, and Eve had attempted to live with Magda,
her stepfather, and stepbrother. However, the experiment did not work
out, and Eve has returned to her grandmother while quitting school and
taking a job at a restaurant in order to save money for a planned summer
trip to Poland where she will visit her paternal Aunt Janina.

After her employer at the restaurant attempts to rape her, Eve decides
to advance her trip to Poland. Much to her surprise, she is met in
Warsaw by an unknown and much older half-sister Hanna, the product of
their father’s first marriage. Unfortunately, after this point, the
plot loses its direction and wallows about as Eve meets character after
character, gets a fast-paced tour of Poland, and learns about Poland’s
past and communist present, with almost none of these events clearly
advancing the story. Few readers will persist to the book’s final page
where Eve, at last, makes telephone contact with her father. Not
recommended.