INKFLOWER

A fictionalized adaptation for teens of the Holocaust survival story Zail shared in her self-published adult memoir, The Tattooed Flower (2006).

Switching between Australia in 1982 and Europe during the Holocaust, this work presents two distinct first-person narratives connected by one life. The late-20th-century storyline is a work of shallow realistic fiction about teenage Lisa, whose comfortable life is disrupted when her beloved father is diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The World War II storyline follows Emil, a Jewish boy from Czechoslovakia who manages against all odds to live through multiple Nazi camps before eventually emigrating to Australia. Only Emil comes alive on the page; Lisa exists mostly as a collection of ’80s pop-culture references and feelings about her father’s revelations. Until his diagnosis, he never revealed his childhood experiences to her. Other characters, including Lisa’s Hungarian mother (whose own Holocaust story is barely mentioned), serve only as window dressing. And yet it’s impossible not to feel the palpable loss as Emil grows sicker and parcels out his past over the course of one Shabbat after another; his experiences (largely drawn from Zail’s father’s life) make the novel succeed despite its other flaws. Major characters are coded white; jarringly, given his own experiences with being dehumanized, Emil describes arriving in Australia and hoping “to spot a kangaroo or a black man with a spear.”

An important but unevenly told story.