Author and poet Victoria Redel will speak about her book, The Border of Truth (Counterpoint, 2007) on March 10 at 1 p.m. at the Robert A. Scott Student Center, Alumni Lounges (SC137-138). The Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies is sponsoring the event.

Like so many children of survivors and refugees, she grew up in the shadows of her parents’ different escapes from war. Although certainly not her father’s story, The Border of Truth parallels his journey away from the bombed city of Brussels through France and Spain and Portugal, and she gratefully benefitted from his recollections of life before the Nazi occupation.

The Border of Truth starts with single professor, Sara Leader, deciding to create a family by adopting a child. After the adoption agency asks for details about her background, Sara reluctantly begins to probe her father’s secret history — in particular, his flight as a 17-year-old Holocaust refugee aboard a ship denied entry into America. The more she learns about her father’s past, the more Sara feels the need to question him about what happened — and the more she realizes how her father’s secrets have shaped her own life. Alternating between a teenage boy’s energetic letters to Eleanor Roosevelt and a daughter’s sifting through the fragments of her father’s traumatic wartime choices, Victoria Redel brilliantly imbues her characters with not only bravery and strength but with the humor to survive the pain of the past and the uncertainty of what lies ahead.