Appelfeld, Aharon.Katerina. New York: Random House, 1992.
The narrator, Katerina is an eighty year old gentile woman reflecting back to the time she learned to love the Jews and their lifestyle as they faced obliteration throughout Europe. Katerina lived in Ruthenian, a part of the Ukraine. It is not an urban area; and she works in Jewish households taking care of the children. Overcoming her own initial prejudices, she incorporates Jewish values and customs into her own life. Katerina's own child, fathered by a Jewish man, is killed for being Jewish. Her own people offer her no solace; only ostracism. She is tried for the murder of the man who killed her son; and imprisoned becomes the "memory" of the Jews who were killed during the war.
[This book was chosen because the Holocaust effects us all, Jew and non-Jew. Katerina comes from a truly, anti-Semitic background and yet she learns to know the Jews, to suffer with them. Katerina's story is that no one people truly suffers alone when this kind of Holocaust occurs.]
She tells the story in a haunting, dreamlike fashion.
I left home with neither pain nor remorse, taking the back road everyone calls the Jewish road. Here, in the spring, but also in the winter, thin Jews used to gather, like grasshoppers, and sell their wares. They were one of the frightening wonders of my childhood. With their appearance...they weren't like creatures of this world, but like dark spirits scuttling about on spindly legs. "Don't go there." I heard my mother's voice more than once. That warning just increased my curiosity, and every time they appeared, I would be there.