PICK OF THE WEEK
A Boy in Winter
![A Boy in Winter by Rachel Sieffert.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170717131656im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/7/0/y/r/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gx719c.png/1499666705751.jpg)
Rachel Sieffert
Virago, $29.99
The Babi Yar massacre of more than 33,000 Jews from Kiev took place in late September 1941; this novel is set two months later in a small Ukrainian village, where a German engineer under SS orders is supervising the difficult task of building a road through the marshes while the Jews of the town are being rounded up and killed, using the same methods reported by witnesses at Babi Yar. But two children, teenage Yankel and his much younger brother Momik, evade the round-up and find a place to hide. Sieffert's story is told with what is perhaps a technically necessary flatness of affect; it's pure narrative without much emotive authorial intervention. This is such an unbearable story that any stylistic decoration would seem an insult. The engineer Pohl and the young girl Yasia who hides the boys are essentially sympathetic characters in impossible situations, and the novel is a painful but compelling read.