The County of Birches by Judith Kalman. St. Martin’s: 183 pages. $21.95.

The film “Life is Beautiful” ends with the reunion of a mother and child emancipated from a concentration camp. The boy rides on an American tank, thinking (due to the machinations of his lovingly manipulative father) that he has won a game. But what happens next? A sunny day and a tank ride can’t protect a child from his eventual knowledge. And it can’t protect his children or even their children from being marked by the Holocaust.

Judith Kalman’s collection of interrelated short stories, “The County of Birches” picks up the thread and continues the story. The result is a complex tale, woven with tragedy and resilience and deep family connection.

Kalman writes mainly from the point of view of Dana, a child. Dana is born after the war, in the shadow of the Holocaust. Dana’s parents were middle class Hungarian Jews who lived in “An earlier world that was a golden era of wealth and community and insoluble family bonds.” Removed to death camps as young adults, they emerged to find their world a wasteland. Their decimated families had lost their past and were scattered to England, France, and Canada.

“Not for Me a Crown of Thorns” is a story about Dana’s mother and aunt-- Sári and Cimi--and how their bond in childhood resurfaces at Auschwitz. Cimi seems to “disappear into herself,” and slowly becomes unable to care. As a result, the more earthbound Sári must work to keep her sister emotionally alive.

“Monahan Avenue,” story is, on the surface, a bittersweet memory of Dana having her tonsils out. But Kalman also shows how Dana’s perception of the ordeal is molded by her parents’ wartime experiences of rejection, shame, and humiliation. Dana is wrought with the feeling that only her mother visits her because her father has rejected her. When she leaves the hospital, she notes: “I’m so relieved to be forgiven and allowed another chance. The blackness came and swallowed me, but I was granted a reprieve. I don’t know why I’m so lucky. I got close to the abyss, teetered over the blackness, but it only got a part of me. . . . I will have to stay sharp from now on so I can see what’s coming.”

“Ladies’ Wear,” takes place in Montréal, where the family moves after England. Dana’s sister, Lillian, receives clothes and a job through her mother’s brother-in-law. The deal is cinched by an unspoken agreement that her mother will stay silent about the war, not speak Hungarian, and not disappoint her brother-in-law by being too Jewish. In return, he rewards the family for fitting in. One wish they won’t grant him is conversion. The family continues to quietly practice their traditions behind closed curtains.

In “The Making of a Jew,” Kalman explores the complexities of being Jewish and its connections to blood and family and guilt but also to love. Dana narrates the story of Lillian’s eventual marriage to a convert. Dana’s own conversion is of a different type: from promising scholar to wife. As Dana observes her sister’s face “wiped out behind a fountain of gauze,” she ponders her dashed hopes that “together we would rise above what my parents had been reduced to by history and circumstance, and regain the poise and mastery that was theirs before the war destroyed everything.”

Kalman’s stories, which are divided into three sections, “Old World,” “Grey World,” and “New World,” form the pieces of a journey. Through writing that is dense and tightly woven, Kalman reveals what it means to heal from tragedy and to live with scars that can’t be erased. No one person saves the children of the Holocaust—their savior is time, family, and life.

    Wendy L. Smith teaches English at San Diego Mesa College.