A review by tbyers31
The Endless Steppe: Growing Up in Siberia by Esther Hautzig

4.0

This gem sat on my book table for weeks before I finally cracked it open. It recounts a slice of history previously unknown to me--the Soviets, after they had devoured eastern Poland in the devil's pact with Hitler in 1939, decided to deport Jews to Siberia as slave labor. Young Esther tells the story, which is both survival and coming-of-age tale. Exile to the brutal wilderness of the steppe becomes salvation from an even more unthinkable fate had they been left behind (at one point, Esther describes her mother's anguish that on the day they were taken from their home: her brother shows up, the soldiers ask if he's one of them; wishing to spare him from her own fate, his mother denies he's part of the family; later, as news of the holocaust emerges, carries it as her life's largest regret).

What I loved about this story was that despite her terrible ordeal, the physical hardship unimaginable to me (no winter coat or boots, knitting with frozen hands on a sweater made of worn out material, for a rich woman who has outgrown it by the time it's finished), Esther remains a young girl trying to find her place among her friends at school. To do so, she must move away from her culture toward the generic Soviet-Siberian one.

Reads like what I'd imagine to find if Dostoyevsky had written a YA novel.