You, With Your Waiting (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798993309613)

Two Jewish children. A world in flames. A daring quest to survive.

In the summer of 1941, as Nazi forces sweep into the Soviet Union, fourteen-year-old Bronya dreams only of the violin. She has just earned a coveted place at the Moscow Conservatory. But when her horizons are shattered, she carries her battered case into war, as both shield and promise. Her younger brother Avsey, precocious and lonely, hoards stolen family treasures in a birch box, a child's secret world pitted against the chaos that surrounds him.

With their mother institutionalized and their father preparing to defend the motherland, the siblings are scattered, forced into choices no child should ever face. Bronya is sent to harvest wheat in the Ukrainian fields, armed only with her violin, while Avsey evacuates with neighbors who desert him, leaving him to survive on luck and wit. And the contents of his birch box.

The children are pushed through the landscape of war-Bronya makes her way east, one step ahead of the Germans as they take Kharkov. Avsey works with partisans on the front lines in Ukraine and forays into enemy territory as a spy. Impossibly, both children are pushed into the spa towns in the Caucuses, tantalizingly close to one another yet uncertain as to the other's whereabouts. As the Germans occupy the mountainous region, Avsey learns his sister is in Zheleznovodsk, not far from him in Pyatigorsk. He makes a dangerous nighttime foray over the mountain that separates them, only to learn Bronya has fled. As the children navigate the occupation and the roundups of Jews, they again must make impossible choices - and survival becomes both an act of resistance and a fragile hope.

You, With Your Waiting is a searing novel of childhood lost, of courage forged of necessity, and of the haunting bonds that tether us to family, memory, and home.

Author: Leslie Lacin
ISBN-13: 9798993309613
Publisher: Write the Way Home
Language: English
Published: 11/18/2025
Pages: 310
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.79lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.70d