A family’s story of the Holocaust lies buried in the soil of a graveyard in Prague, in the old neighborhoods of Montréal, in the serenity of a small New Jersey town, and in the memory of Jana – a woman finally asked to bear witness

Far from the landscapes of her earlier life, Jana raised her daughter, Willow, on the beautiful scrapbooks she kept of her own childhood in Prague before World War II. But her stories end with the beginning of the Holocaust, and Willow knows little of her mother’s life during the war and its aftermath. Jana’s memories of this time are so guarded that Willow is uncertain who her father is – the answer left behind in Montréal, the city where Jana first settled after the war.

When both Willow and Jana find themselves back in Montréal, the past can no longer be hidden. New loves are found and lost loves rekindled, and mother and daughter decide to journey to Prague to unearth the stories that can no longer stay buried.

Ami Sands Brodoff is the award-winning author of three novels and two volumes of stories. Her latest novel, In Many Waters, grapples with our worldwide refugee crisis. The White Space Between, which focuses on a mother and daughter struggling with the impact of the Holocaust, won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Fiction (The Vine Award). Bloodknots, a volume of thematically-linked stories, was a finalist for The Re-Lit Award. Ami leads creative writing workshops to teens, adults, and seniors. She has also taught writing to formerly incarcerated women and to people grappling with mental illness. Ami has been awarded fellowships to Yaddo, The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ragdale Foundation, and St. James Cavalier Arts Centre (Malta). Ami lives in Montreal. The Sleep of Apples is her third short fiction collection.

Ami Sands Brodoff's profile page

The White Space Between portrays the fascinating struggle between forgetting and uncovering stunningly powerful and necessary memories, an extraordinary hide-and-seek game of personal and ethnic history. The novel abounds with wisdom and lyrical beauty.

Josip Novakovich

The novel examines the way that we create our identities from the stories we tell about our past, and questions the point at which the truth pushes its way out from the safe haven of denial. The structure of the narrative is well-paced and simmers gradually to a fully boil.

Quill & Quire

Ami Sands Brodoff powerfully explores the haunted terrain of memory. Brave in its disclosure of family truths, her latest novel centers on a mother struggling to bury history, while her daughter yearns to uncover it, a journey rich with secrets and reckonings. Brodoff renders this world - a Montreal of eternal snow, a Prague of eternal childhood - as beautifully as a cherished old photograph, once lost, not found.

Denise Roig

Brodoff allows art to speak the unspeakable softly. Ultimately, she weaves myth and reality into an honest story where the white spaces are a balm for the woes and wounds of the stories that shape us.

The Montreal Review of Books

...[Brodoff] weaves myth and reality into an honest story where the white spaces are a balm for the woes and wounds of the stories that shape us.

Montreal Review of Books

The White Space Between forms a crystalline menorah in one's mind. With meticulous power, Brodoff evinces from the ash and soil of the Holocaust, the transcendent flame of hope, timelessness, and truth. A deeply moving and memorable novel.

Suhayl Saadi

The White Space Between beautifully evokes one family's history and resilience, as it traces the mix of curiosity and self-protection that lead a mother and daughter into the past. The puppeteer heroine and her staunch and wry mother are wonderful, indelible characters, in a novel with a rare sunniness at it's heart.

Joan Silber