"The main thing confessed in an obsession: the Holocaust. The little girl on the page grew up with a black cloud over her head, which germinated like a vine to intertwine with her developing ego. Both her parents were prisoners of Auschwitz; in fact, that's where they met, that's where her father proposed to her mother with a ring she had found in the pocket of a coat and managed to save for months in her shoe. It's a heavy load to bear, for them of course, but also for their daughter. The child is awed by the unspeakable darkness in their past, by the nightmares that haunt her father and the victimization they have suffered. As a Canadian Jew, growing up in a sheltered community in Toronto, no less, she knows none of the hate they have experienced. She struggles daily to somehow attain her own cultural self-justification."