The Apothecary continues the story of the characters from The Walnut Tree, this time focusing on Felix. Like his sister Süssel, Felix is a pharmacist, and the book follows his life, and those of several other important characters, from the city of Czernowitz during the war years to Vienna in the 1960s.The forties are presented with the immediacy and reality that could only be supplied by someone who has lived this astonishing experience. Felix saves a young Jewish girl from being deported by the Russians, and procures the release of his own parents from cattle cars because a local Soviet official is in love with him. Then, when the German army moves in, Felix has to escape on his own, fleeing into the Caucasus Mountains to save his life.Twenty years on, Felix finds his childhood sweetheart, Martina, in Vienna, married to a former German soldier. Gerhardt is wracked by guilt because of his actions in Czernowitz during the war.The Apothecary is filled with fascinating characters and chilling circumstances. Its style and originality, its charm and vividness, its lovely imagery and its wisdom, all make it an important book. It is the third book in an informal trilogy dealing with Jewish life in both cosmopolitan cities and in an East European village in the first half of the 20th Century an outstanding literary accomplishment.

Martha Blum was born in 1913 in Czernowitz, Austria, (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine). With the defeat of Germany and Austria in 1918, the city became part of Romania and remained so while Blum was growing up. Her studies included pharmaceutical chemistry, languages, and music at the Universities of Bucharest, Prague, Strasbourg, and Paris. World War II found her family at the crossroads of warring and occupying forces, persecuted in turns by Soviet Russia and Germany. She immigrated to Canada in 1951 by way of Israel, and moved to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in 1954.Her novel The Walnut Tree, set during World War II, won two Saskatchewan Book Awards and was nominated for the Canadian Booksellers Association's Ex Libris Award. Her short story collection, Children Of Paper, portrayed the vibrant and compelling world of a small Jewish stetl in Ukraine in the early 1900s. In the fall of 1998, Martha was one of 50 Holocaust survivors – both Jewish and non-Jewish – who received national citations from the Human Rights Commission for their contributions to Canadian society: hers was in the area of the arts. "That was an especially beautiful thing," she recalls. "To have these people, who have survived what they survived and then have given so freely of themselves to the arts, or to science, recognized in this way, is wonderful."A student of pharmacy, languages and music at universities in Prague, Strasbourg and Paris, Martha Blum has lived in Saskatoon since 1954, working as a pharmacist and teaching musical interpretation. In 1998, Martha received the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Award from Human Rights Canada, recognizing her contribution to the cultural life of Canada.

Martha Blum's profile page

• Winner, Fiction Award, Saskatchewan Book Awards