Book Club Guide for
You, With Your Waiting

A guide for book clubs, synagogue reading circles, and Holocaust education groups.

About the Novel

You, With Your Waiting follows two Jewish siblings struggling to survive in the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Through music, memory, and resilience, the novel explores the fragile bonds of family and the moral choices forced by war.

Author's Note

You, With Your Waiting grew out of a long engagement with the history of Jewish life in Eastern Europe during the Second World War — especially the lesser-told stories of Jewish families caught in the shifting wartime landscape of the Soviet Union. While much Holocaust literature focuses on Western Europe, the experience of Jews displaced across the Soviet Union remains less visible, though no less devastating.

I was drawn to the perspective of children, and to the ways young people absorb fear, uncertainty, and rupture differently from adults. Bronya and Avsey's story explores not only survival, but uncertainty: waiting for news, for safety, for return, for a future that cannot yet be imagined. In times of upheaval, waiting becomes its own form of endurance.

This novel is a work of fiction, but it is grounded in historical research and in the testimonies of those who lived through displacement, loss, and rebuilding. My hope is that the story invites reflection on resilience, memory, and the fragile threads that hold families — and societies — together.

As survivors' voices grow fewer, our responsibility to history grows greater. If this book sparks conversation across generations, within communities, and in classrooms, then it has done its work.

Historical Timeline

• 1941 — Nazi Germany invades the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa). Mobile killing squads (Einsatzgruppen) begin mass shootings of Jewish civilians.
• 1941–42 — Millions of Jews are murdered in the first two years of the war. In 1942 the Holocaust reaches the North Caucasus, where much of the novel is set.
• August 1942 — Thirty-two orphaned Jewish children find shelter in Beslenei, a Circassian village in the Caucasus.
• 1942–43 — The Battle of Stalingrad becomes a turning point in the war. Soviet forces begin pushing German troops back westward.
• 1944 — Soviet troops liberate the death camps of Poland. Vasily Grossman witnesses Treblinka and publishes The Hell of Treblinka.
• 1945 — The war ends. More than 2.2 million Soviet Jews have been murdered. Survivors begin the long search for family and home.

Discussion Questions

1. Bronya and Avsey experience the war differently. What factors shape their understanding of danger, loss, and hope?
2. The title You, With Your Waiting comes from Konstantin Simonov's enormously popular Soviet wartime poem "Wait for Me." Its final lines suggest something almost irrational about waiting: "You, with your waiting, saved me. Only you and I will know how I survived: It's because you waited, as no one else did." What do these lines mean for the characters in the novel? Who waits, who refuses to wait, and what do their different responses tell us about war?
3. Avsey treasures his stamp collection, carrying it with him far from home. Why? In a world coming apart, what does collecting represent?
4. The novel brings Bronya and Avsey into contact with people from many different ethnic and cultural groups. Which secondary character most surprised or moved you? How do these encounters affect the children's chances of survival?
5. What factors influence who survives in the novel? Luck? Faith? Something else?
6. Helping Jews under German occupation could mean risking one's own life and the lives of one's family. Why do some characters in the novel nevertheless choose to help, while others remain bystanders? What do you think people owe one another in circumstances of extreme danger?
7. How does adversity alter identity? Are Bronya and Avsey the same people at the end of the story as they were at the beginning? What about Lev, Nazim, and Sara? More broadly, what role does adversity play in determining who we become?
8. Did the novel challenge or expand your understanding of Jewish survival in the Soviet Union during World War II? If so, how?
9. Objects carry particular meaning in the novel, most obviously for Avsey — but also for Bronya, whose violin becomes almost a character itself. What does the violin bring to the story? How does it tell Bronya's story and, more broadly, the story of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union? Why do objects matter so deeply to us?
10. Does the novel suggest that healing is possible after catastrophe, or only endurance? What is the difference? And beyond the final page, how do you imagine these characters lived?
11. The narrative moves between the present and the recent past. How does this shifting tense affect the reader's experience?
12. Why is it important that stories like this continue to be told — or have there been too many Holocaust stories? What, if anything, does a new Holocaust narrative need to reveal that previous ones have not?
13. During the war, Soviet newspapers such as Red Star and Pravda, as well as widely circulated propaganda posters, portrayed the German enemy in intensely emotional and often dehumanizing terms. What role does hatred play in war? Can hatred be necessary for survival or resistance? What happens to it when the war ends?

The Geography of the Novel

The geography of the novel spans from Ukraine to the Caucasus Mountains. Key locations include:

• Rostov-on-Don — The siblings' home before the invasion, and the gateway to the North Caucasus. The Germans took the city in November 1941, were driven out within a week, then recaptured it on 24 July 1942, opening the road south. In August 1942, more than 27,000 people — most of them Jews — were murdered at Zmievskaya Balka, the Snake Ravine, the largest single Holocaust killing site on Russian soil. The city was liberated on 14 February 1943.
• Salsk — A railway junction in the Rostov region where refugees crowded the station, waiting for trains east in the summer of 1942. The Germans occupied the town that July; its Jewish community was murdered with the region's others, and the town was liberated in January 1943.
• Krasny Lyman — A key railway hub in the Donbas, where trains from the east and west met. It was occupied by the Germans from 7 July 1942 until its liberation on 3 February 1943.
• Beslenei — The Circassian village that adopted thirty-two Jewish orphans
• The Caucasus Mountain region and the spa towns — Many Jews sought refuge in the mountains, but the Germans occupied the region in August 1942. They planted a flag on Mt. Elbrus on August 1, 1942.
• Pyatigorsk — The most famous of the spa towns, known for its mineral waters. The Germans reached it on 10 August 1942; its Jewish community, swelled by refugees from the west, was murdered during the occupation, and the town was liberated in January 1943.
• Tbilisi — The capital of Soviet Georgia, beyond the mountains and never occupied. It was a destination of evacuation for refugees and factories alike, its railway a lifeline to the Caucasus front. Thousands of Jewish evacuees found shelter in the city and survived the war there.