The net of dreams

by Julie Salamon

Lilly Rapaport was a young woman in Czechoslovakia when she and her parents were taken away in cattle cars; her refusal to give in to despair sustained her through the loss of her parents and brother, privation in a work camp, and relocation to Prague, where she met her future husband, Sanyi Salamon, a doctor who had been sent to Dachau for treating an injured partisan. But The Net of Dreams is not a Holocaust story; rather, it is about how Julie's father and his extraordinary wife end up in the American heartland - Seaman, Ohio, to be exact - and how that journey comes to define what we are as a country and who we are as a people. It's about growing up with a mother who has an undying faith that everything will turn out for the best but who keeps half-eaten sandwiches in her purse just in case. It's about adoring your father while wondering about the "other" family he never, ever talked about - his first wife and child, who were sent to a separate concentration camp and certain death.