India, July 13 -- How did you decide to write a memoir about your mother?

In a way, I didn't choose to write it. It chose to be written. I had known for a long time that my mother's story was extraordinary. A girl forced to flee from Warsaw to Lvov, then deported to a Siberian labour camp before being resettled for five years in the Fergana Valley in Central Asia, then moving to Palestine and, later, to New Zealand: the sheer global scope of that story was astonishing, and the storms of twentieth-century history that blew through it - the rise of fascism, World War 2, the Holocaust, and three political partitions (of Poland, Soviet Central Asia, and Palestine) - had haunted me all my life. But I didn't know all the details of the story, ...