![]() ![]() ![]() This primary narrative unearths itself almost like a mystery while Ruth’s seeking also provides the raison d’être for a layered narrative, based in Montréal, but also reaching back to Amsterdam, Poland, and Palestine during and after WWII. When her father answers that they “really don’t know,” Ruthie sets the course that she will run when she has become Ruth, an experienced mother herself: “Then maybe I’ll have to find her and ask her.” At thirteen, at a family Seder, she asks why this mother, whose periodic gift of stones seems to both affirm and to grieve their bond, is not there with them. Little Ruthie is hurt by her mother’s abandonment, which her father cannot even begin to explain. Most of the novel, Richler’s third, is told from the perspective of this woman, Ruth, as she grows up in the warm embrace of the Jewish immigrant family that her mother, posing as Lily Kramer, married into before fleeing Montreal for Canada’s hinterland to protect herself. It offers history and insight into human relations as it explores how the two shape each other in this story of one woman’s search for the mother who left her, as an infant, to be raised by her father and his family. Nancy Richler’s The Imposter Bride is a haunting, often beautiful, read. ![]()
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