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Montreal Gazette

1973 novel set during Second World War is ‘just as timely today,' Montreal author Ann Charney says

By Montreal author Ann Charney is delighted that her acclaimed 1973 novel Dobryd has just been published in Canada, after being out of print here for years. 'I think it's just as timely today as it was then,' said Charney in a recent phone interview from her home in Westmount. 'I mean, war is a constant element of our lives no matter in what decade we live or what century. It's interesting that the area that the book is set in, which used to be Poland and is now Ukraine, is at war again.' Dobryd is an extraordinary novel, a powerful story inspired by Charney's own life, about a young girl who spends the first few years of her life hiding from Nazis with her mother and aunt in a haystack in a barn somewhere in rural Poland. Like all good books, it starts with a killer first line: 'By the time I was five years old I had spent half my life hidden away in a barn loft.' The novel begins in 1944 with Soviet Red Army soldiers liberating the Polish town of Dobryd — a fictional name for Charney's hometown of Brody — from Nazi occupation. (The town was in Poland at the time, became part of the Soviet Union after the war and is now in Ukraine.) The girl comes down from the hayloft and is carried outside by the Soviet soldiers and she simply can't believe what she sees — a wide world that she doesn't know at all. Running in the sun, playing with other children, going to the market, these are all things she has never experienced. And that's the genius of the novel. Unlike so many stories told of the horrors experienced in Europe during World War II, Charney doesn't write it as a tragedy. That's because the young Jewish girl doesn't think those years in the barn were tragic. It was the only life she knew until that point. Charney notes that at the time of its release, some called it the story of a happy childhood in unbearable circumstances. Charney doesn't like to talk too much about how close the novel is to her own life story. 'I want people to read it as a story,' Charney said. 'Certainly I was born in that part of the world, I was a baby during the war, we had been hidden in that barn, so all that is true. But it goes beyond that. It's about what you can do in different circumstances.' And she especially doesn't want people to see her or the main character as victims. 'I was deliberate in not being melodramatic,' Charney said. 'I didn't want to write about victimhood. I didn't want the child to be a victim. I wanted a description of a strange childhood and very unusual circumstances, which in this case worked to help the child flourish. It was grim, it was terrible but (she) was also surrounded by people who paid a lot of attention to (her) and told her stories. … All the other books I'd read that had depicted that time and that area of the world were books that made people cry. And I didn't want to do that. I wanted to do the opposite.' Charney feels that the reaction to the book in North America was hurt because it contains a very positive view of the Soviet soldiers who rescued them. One of those soldiers, Yuri, is a hero in the story, doing everything he can to protect the child and her mother and aunt. 'Russians and communism weren't very popular at the time and … if you wanted to publish a book in … North America, it had to be Americans,' Charney said. The new edition of Dobryd published by Montreal's Baraka Books includes a foreword by Peter McFarlane. McFarlane is the author of Family Ties, a book about two people tied to Ukrainian history — Charney and Mikael Chomiak, who was the editor of an influential pro-Nazi Ukrainian newspaper during the war. Charney, her mother, aunt and stepfather arrived in Montreal in 1952, living in an apartment near the corner of St.-Joseph Blvd. and Hutchison St. It wasn't an easy adjustment for Ann, an 11-year-old who spoke neither French nor English. But that outsider's perspective served her well. She eventually published several novels and became an award-winning journalist who found her niche trying to explain Quebec to the rest of Canada. Her most recent novel was Life Class, from 2013, which she dedicated to her husband, the noted artist and architect Melvin Charney, who had died the previous year. She had a column in MacLean's back in the '70s called View From Quebec and wrote for years for Saturday Night magazine. One of her best-known pieces was a profile of Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) terrorist Paul Rose. Another was on filmmaker Claude Jutra's suicide. Some of those pieces are included in the 1998 Véhicule Press book Defiance in Their Eyes: True Stories from the Margins. 'I wrote (in the introduction) that I was attracted to all these people because they were marginal characters and I saw myself as a marginal character,' Charney said. 'When I came to Canada, I neither had the desire nor the possibility to become totally Canadian because my background was so different. And I saw that as a great asset as a writer, to observe things from the edges rather than from the centre.'