1979 "First Printing" stated on copyright page; Richard Marek Publishers, New York; hardbound; very good condition with unmarked pages; dust jacket very good with small crease on spine.
 
Description -
e've lost everything we ever had. . . . We must create anew an entire system of thought and feeling. . . ."" Like Elie Wiesel, Traub is concerned with that spectral plane of existence through which just-liberated survivors of concentration camps grope for past stability and present meaning. This story of 17-year-old Lisa's sturggle for sanity and substance, after release from Auschwitz in 1945, is both somberly responsible and sustained. The Matrushka Doll (a graduated series of wooden dolls locked one inside the other) is the gift of the man she will truly love, Leonid Yashenko, a Russian captain stationed in Lisa's Romanian town of Sighet. Leonid, like his cold-blooded superior and Marxist mentor who will destroy him, is a Jew, and he attempts to reconcile the imperatives of Jewish identity and Party loyalty. The love of Lisa and Leonid opens the heart of a girl who no longer even knows the names of feelings, must learn again to mourn and rage. The two attempt to flee together, but Leonid is arrested and sent away to Soviet prison. Now hardened, Lisa has learned to recognize the dead weight of injustice everywhere and to scent the rot of corruption that marks accommodation to it: she refuses to take Party orders, to condemn the memory of her adored, dead ""bourgeois"" father--and instead leaves Sighet forever, at last truly grieving for Leonid and her dead, but knowing that ""dying before one's time"" is a crime. With flashback insets detailing the bestial atrocities of the Nazis--an unoriginal but sad, painstaking tale tracing one individual's Matruska Doll of identities and feelings, from uncertainty to rage and sorrow.