The Things We Cannot Say by Kelly Rimmer

And with Hitler’s army rapidly advancing, it isn’t long before Alina and her family find themselves face-to-face with the conflict. Shortly after the man to whom she’s engaged, Tomasz, leaves their shared hometown to study medicine, the distant rumblings of turmoil the family had heard about in Germany grow into a full-fledged world war. The first of these tales is set in the early 1940s in Poland and focuses on a young adult, Alina, who is taking her first steps into womanhood against the backdrop of the growing unrest of the Holocaust.Īt her tender, formative stage of life, Alina Dziak should be free to focus on building a life for herself - a family independent of the one she grew up in on a farm in rural Poland. In this powerful work of historical fiction, Rimmer tells unexpectedly parallel tales. Perhaps because my own mother obfuscated the truth regarding something as important as where I fucking came from, it was easy for me to understand why the elder of the dual protagonists in The Things We Cannot Say by Kelly Rimmer waited an exceedingly long time - almost until it was too late - to share the truth of her younger years with anyone. So, when I became an adult, I never really felt the need to broach the subject again.īut then, bits of the truth started spilling out here and there. Probable, even, given my mom's strength and determination. A man who was willing to help her fulfill her dream of becoming a mom and then walk away, leaving her with what she had always wanted, a child.Īnd maybe I'm naive, but I didn't question this narrative. So, newly single with her biological clock ticking - in an era that was light in fertility-extending technology - she made an agreement with a friend. Having never met my father, and growing up in an affluent suburb in the early 90s where this arrangement was rare to say the least, I logically inquired as to why I didn't have a dad.Īnd my mom told me how she had fallen in love in college and gotten married, only to learn when she was in her early 30s that her then husband no longer aspired to have the family they had agreed to build.

I grew up the daughter of a confident, contented single mother.