The wife of a mashgih in a yeshiva near Mea Shearim, the wife of a Haredi accountant from Netanya, a couple of Chabad emissaries in Moscow, a dentist approaching from the Ein Kerem neighborhood, a former Russian secret service officer and a Jewish professor of social history from the University of St. Petersburg - join together in an almost hopeless search for Aunt Menichella, who, as a two-month-old baby, was fraudulently taken from her family to a labor camp in Siberia, and has been missing ever since.
All this in the new fiction book by the well-known and respected author R. Zalman Ruderman, who presents "Lost" to young people.
This is the story of Menchala, the daughter of Rabbi Yitzhak David and Shoshana Katzenlbogen, who, when she was only two months old, was kidnapped from her family to a labor camp in distant and frozen Siberia, during World War II.
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Her disappearance deeply saddens her mother and siblings, who are also forced to fight their daily battle for survival.
Some fifty years later, with the fall of the Iron Curtain that separated the Soviet Union from the rest of the world, the family members scattered across several countries are given the opportunity to try to search for their lost aunt. It is an almost impossible task, reminiscent of looking for a needle in a haystack.
The main plot of the book encompasses several subplots, and together they weave an exciting, tense, and eventful Jewish story that provides its readers with important historical knowledge and instills in them a wide range of fundamental values such as dedication, bringing hearts closer together, and mutual responsibility.
In the book's "Foreword," the author writes, among other things: "The book was written for teenagers, but even adults may find themselves captivated by its plot, if they only give themselves the opportunity to glance at it and start reading its lines.".
