The Passerby

About this book

Prize-winning author Liliane Atlan was hidden from the Nazis in France and Monaco during the Second World War. In this novels about the anorexic teenage girl No in the years after liberation, she has written a story that is not so much about herself, about the Holocaust, or even about Jewish survival as it is about the secrets of the human spirit. For as No faces a series of choices and lessons, she undergoes a transformation that is as much the shaping of the human soul as it is the odyssey of an individual. It is that spiritual journey we are all invited to join. Raised by her mother, I'm dying and her endlessly giving father, God does a bad job, I'll take over, treaded by doctors bad job, I'll toke over, treated by doctors like Deranged and Out of control, tended by family friends like I believe in fairy tales and his wife, I have a tender heart and I hide it, eventually married to I will and I hide it, eventually married to I will and I hide it, eventually married to I will discover the secret of life, No remains unable to see why she should be alive. Until, that is, her adopted brother, Auschwitz-survivor I will create myself, gives her the secret that shows her not only what she has to give, but he deepest purpose of human pain. In this exceptionally evocative novel, Atlan has drawn on her own experience and her study of the Jewish mystical tradition to create a work that reads like a prose poem and has all of the resonance and sudden clarity of a dream.