Dobryd

by Ann Charney, Peter McFarlane (Introduction)

BY THE TIME I was five years old I had spent half my life hidden away in a barn loft.


I had vague memories of the world outside and I listened to stories people around me told of that world, but it was hard for me to believe in its existence. Was there really anything beyond the wails of this barn? I knew that there were people out there, people other than my mother, my aunt, my cousin and another family who shared our hide-out, but it was hard for me to imagine them.


At certain times, when a German patrol passed nearby and I was forced to remain still, I would try very hard to see beyond the walls of our shelter. Curiosity, doubt and fear coloured my images. Within their spectrum I recreated the world from which I was banished. Half invented and half remembered, it grew in my mind and satisfied the longings that sometimes came over me.


Yet there was no urgency to my game; I was content to go on with my life indefinitely.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Adult Fiction, Jewish

180 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Ann Charney is an award winning Canadian novelist, short story writer and journalist. Her work has been published in Canada, the US, France, Germany and Italy.

Her most widely published novel is Dobryd, the story of a child discovering freedom amid the chaos of war’s aftermath. She is also the author of Rousseau's Garden, a novel of love and friendship set in the great gardens of France,and Distantly Related to Freud, the coming of age story of a young girl, who dreams of becoming a writer and a femme fatale.

Her most recent novel, Life Class, is a story of displacement and ambition played out in the art circles of Venice, New York and Montreal.

Ann Charney has been a columnist for Maclean's Magazine, a frequent contributor to Saturday Night, Ms. magazine, and other leading US and Canadian publications. She has won Canadian National Magazine Awards both for her fiction and non-fiction, and was made an officer of the French Order of Arts and Letters. A selection of her non-fiction was collected in a book entitled Defiance In Their Eyes: True Stories From The Margins.

She was married to artist Melvin Charney who died in September 2012.

Reviews

[Mary Soderstrom · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I recently read Emma Donoghue's best-selling novel Room, I couldn't help thinking of Ann Charney's novel Dobryd. Like Donoghue's narrator Jack, as well as the under-nourished living ghosts of refugee camps, Charney spent the first part of her life in peril. Dobryd in fact begins: "By the time I was five years old I had spent half my life hidden away in a barn loft."

Those words took my breath away when I first read them many years ago. The novel's unsentimental, clear-eyed vision offers hope that, with luck, the human spirit can blossom under the most dreadful circumstances.

Dobryd was published in Canada in the mid-1970s to a few, very good reviews. "One of the truly significant insights into the effects of war," said Books in Canada, but despite such praise, it wasn't a commercial success. Republished in the 1990s, it still is available from Permanent Press, and has been translated into French and German. Give the against continued violence against civilian populations all over the world, it should be read everywhere.

Dobryd is a simple story simply told. After two and a half years hiding outside a small town in Poland, a five-year-old girl, her mother, her aunt, and her cousin along with four other adults, all Jews, are rescued by Russian soldiers as World War II draws to a close.

The child is at first terrified by the reaction of the people in her little world: "Weeping and laughing at the same time, they hugged me and embraced one another. I felt smothered in their arms. These embraces were not the ones I was used to; too tight, too close. I was frightened." And, looking outside the barn for the first time, she says: "A large orange circle covered the sky and coloured the world below. The fields, the animals, the farmhouse, all were illuminated in this strange, intense, blood-like colour.I heard myself scream, again and again."

The scream is the one that she has been prevented from letting out during their long period of hiding. Finally Yuri, the Russian soldier who has been carrying her, calms her. "My new friend.carried me outside. All the while his soft voice reassured me, and the sound of those words made me feel safe.. The fresh air of the summer evening felt soothing against my skin. I looked around me. I was no longer afraid."

The girl's mother finds work as a translator for the Russians, while her aunt, older and less dynamic, takes the girl to the market which has sprung up as part of the barter economy. The two of them become extremely close, and the aunt recounts how the family arrived at the barn where they hid, and what it had lost. Her stories have a fairy-tale quality: the family was rich, educated, and refined, with cupboards full of linens and rooms full of books.

The little girl's world seems a universe away. She is delighted to help clear the rubble from their first lodgings in Dobryd. She gets her first taste of ice cream when her mother and Yuri decide after much discussion to trade a can of meat for it. Her treasures are a piece of white tulle and an empty perfume bottle that she and her friends use for their games of make-believe.

But these privations do not make an occasion for sorrow and regret. Charney says her book is an attempt to distance herself from the work of other survivors of Nazi oppression like Elie Wiesel and André Schwarz-Bart. "I didn't find my experience in their books, and I didn't want to spend my life following the narrow lane of lamentations," she says.

"I wanted to show that one can live through all that and still go on to be a whole human being. I wanted to have the world as my oyster the way it is for other people, and I wanted to feel free to go on to explore other things." She adds with emphasis: "One should really exalt life." That's why the book begins as it does with the liberation, and why there is so much about pleasure: the ice cream, the feel of air on skin, the joy of being able to see further than four walls.

She says she began to write the book in an attempt to capture the emotions she remembered from that time. At first she remembered very few details, which is the reason she chose to call this work fiction. The conversations are invented, and the background is fairly standard for educated, well-off Jews in Poland.

But as she wrote, she found more and more coming back to her. "Indeed some of the things I thought I was inventing are things people have written to me to say that they remember from their own lives," she says. "Which means, I guess, that the inventions are in some larger way true. Because the book is fiction, it grabs people and appears to speak to their experiences also. In a way it is a generic book, rather than a specific book, about childhood and war."

Dobryd is also remarkable for the clarity and simplicity of its language. Charney says she wanted to avoid sentimentality. "I tried to write as sparingly as possible. I went over the manuscript several times to review adjectives and other words that would tell the reader what to think." She adds that she is perhaps more conscious of language than writers who have spoken English from their earliest years. It wasn't until she, her mother, aunt, and stepfather arrived in Montreal, when she was eleven, that she learned English and then French: she'd read Anne of Green Gables, but in Polish.

There is a question why Dobryd, despite its excellent reviews, made such little impact when it was first published. One reason may be that it was issued just as the Canadian literature industry was revving up. Books in Canada only began in 1971, remember, and its first novel prize was established a few years later, too late for Dobryd to qualify. In addition, there is the warm portrayal of Yuri, the Russian soldier who rescues the heroine's family and becomes its protector. Young, cheerful, and enthusiastic, he urges them to be hopeful even though their home village has been destroyed. "You'll see-we know how to build in Russia. We'll build a new town for a new kind of life. Yes, today is a sad day for you. But in six months, I promise you, we'll all be working so hard rebuilding this town that no one will have time to grieve."

No matter that Yuri's faith does not overcome the suspicions of the heroine's much more sophisticated and better-educated mother. No matter that the family ultimately chooses life in Canada. When Dobryd was first published the Soviet Union was the Evil Empire, and this kind of portrayal was definitely out of fashion. Given the vagaries of the publishing world, that might have been enough to keep it from being more widely reviewed.

Times have changed since then, of course, but there are still children in peril from stife both political and personal. Will a few of them bear as eloquent witness to the strength of the human spirit as Charney has? One hopes that some of them will have the same sort of luck that she had.

Luck? Yes, Charney benefitted de la chance dans la malchance, as they say around here. She was lucky enough to be born to a mother who was strong and clever and had enough resources to pay for help. Then once they were in hiding, the adults around her doted on her, teaching her to read and write, to knit, to sing. Afterwards Yuri became her special friend, and the champion of the family. It is from these repeated experiences of love and attention that Charney has built a sensibility that allows her to say that she had a "happy childhood".

Like Jack in Room she is a survivor because of the love that surrounded her. And she continues to write compelling stories. Her latest novel Live Class will be published in November by Cormorant
Books.

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disclaimer: ARC via Netgalley.

This is a hard book to review because there are two ways to look at the book. The first way, is that of a thrilling narrative. Sadly, it isn’t really that. The book is a memoir and details Ann Charney’s memories of survival when she and her family were able to come out of hiding after the Russians invaded German controlled Poland in the waning days of WW II. Charney was under five when she and mother went into hiding and roughly five when they were “freed”. The book covers her mother and aunt’s journey after liberation. There isn’t a sense of danger or reflection that happens in the most well known Holocaust memoirs. There would be some justice in terming the narrative boring.
However, works and memoirs(autobiographical novels included) like this are important for a variety of reasons. The first is that as widely read as Frank’s narrative is, her family is unusual because of the number of people that not only were related but were in hiding together. Charney’s book details the ending of a far more common experience. The second is that any memoir detailing what people go though in time is historically valuable. In order to get a view of what life was like, the memories of “everyday” people are far more important and valuable than those who for whatever reason are able to transcend the everyday. Finally, the memoir of what her family went though after liberated is important for it does show what happened after. Too often in history classes, at least pre-college, the aftermath of Holocaust is ignored outside of the Cold War, division of Germany, and the founding of Israel. Charney’s memoir is a book that details this. True, it details this though memories of a narrator who was a young child at the time, but those memories are important. For instance, there are the stories Charney’s aunt told her, there is a description of her making friends and playing with items, such as photos, that people were forced to leave behind (or had them taken). There is the encounter her mother has with the woman who hid them. All these are everyday. All are necessary to get a clear picture of the time.
Important book that allows the reader to form a more detailed picture of the time.

[Lyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simple and beautiful prose. Read the first five pages and tell me this isn't breathtaking. At 170 pages not a word is wasted, yet the scope is vast while giving enough details that everything is fully-formed.

Dobryd is actually Brody, Ukraine. It's my understanding that Charney's reasons for doing this are multifaceted so I'll leave it to the reader to explore this if they are interested. Charney also recognized the unreliability of memory, especially for a very young child, so the book is listed as fiction or autobiographical novel. I read this book after having read Family Ties: How a Ukrainian Nazi and a living witness link Canada to the Ukraine today by Peter McFarlane, who discusses the horrors experienced by Ann and her family during and after the Holocaust when they eventually settled in Montreal, as a counterpoint to Canadian Nazi collaborators.

Baraka Books is supposed to republish Dobryd this year (2025). Ann Charney is currently 85 years old, and I hope she will get to see a much wider readership for her powerful storytelling. It seems to me that those who have and are currently perpetrating genocide are getting very sympathetic treatments. The people who suffer the most are now often seen as collateral damage, even when, in truth, they are the main targets. Dobryd reminds us of that, and the lasting damage to those who survive.

[Pam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yet another tale of survival in horrible conditions during WWII and how lives were rebuilt afterwards. Excellent memoir!

[Denise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dobryd, by Ann Charney, tells the story of Jewish survivors of WWII in Poland through the eyes of a young child. I really connected with the author, since I have been told, what my relatives lived through in their own village, located in Polish Galicia, close to that of the author. After living for over 2 years, hiding out in a barn, a 5 yr old girl is finally rescued by Russian soldiers along with her mother and aunt. We learn how the lives of this small family group have changed by the war and how they now have to adjust to their new circumstances. The mother and aunt were daughters of a wealthy Polish landowner. Now, their house and village are destroyed they, along with all the remaining inhabitants, struggle to regain a normal life. Not feeling comfortable in their home village, they move several times as bad memories, that never leave, make them fear a new life in Poland.
A very engaging story from a different perspective.

[Marjorie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Given To Me For An Honest Review


Dobyrd by Ann Charney will draw the reader in and they will then feel as though they are also in war torn Europe too. This is a simple story and an easy read. It is written from memories of a child of 5. It begins right after World War II. She, her mother, cousin and aunt, along with other Polish Jews hid out for two years in a false roof in a barn. Once liberated they tried to rebuild their lives. Was Ann and her mother able to rebuild their lives? Did they stay or leave the country to start a new life? I recommend this book. I look for more from Ann Charney.

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a memoir of Ann Charney's family's life just following WWII. She and her cousin, mother and aunt (Jewish) hid out in a false roof of a barn with other Polish Jews and they were amongst the lucky few who made it. They were liberated by the RUssians and then tried to rebuild their life, finding everything they once knew was gone. Charney was just a small child during all of this yet her memories are quite vivid and make the reader feel like they are in war-torn Europe. Well written and a fairly easy read.

[Polly Krize · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

A fine memoir detailing the harrowing after days of WWII and the basic rebuilding of Ann Charney’s life after Russian liberation from a hideout in Poland. One can feel the catharsis Ms. Charney goes through as she writes about this painful time in her life.

[Alexa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating look at a different side of the war- what it meant for those who survived to attempt to integrate themselves and live again.

[Michelle Kidwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dobryd

by Ann Charney

Open Road Integrated Media



Biographies & Memoirs

Pub Date 14 Apr 2015 | Archive Date 15 May 2017



I am reviewing Dobryd through the publisher and Netgalley:

By the time she was five, she had spent half her life hidden inside a barn where her family was hidden.

They left the loft in the middle of the night, after liberation her life begins anew, and she greedily gulps down the food she is offered, often getting sick for hours afterwards.

Two months later as the Russians advanced they were told to leave the village. They stayed in an army camp for a time but would go back to Dobryd.

Dobryd is the story of one families fight to get back to a normal life, after being hidden inside a barn for over two and a half years.

Five out of five stars.

Happy Reading.