Ellen Ullman

By Blood Ellen Ullman

1970s San Francisco. A disgraced professor takes a downtown office to plot his return but is distracted by voices from next door—those of his psychologist neighbor and a patient. Hearing about the patients romantic troubles, her conflicts with her adoptive family, and her quest to track down her birth mother, he is enraptured. The further he is pulled into the patients story—and questions of her own identity—the more he needs the story to go on. The patients questions about her birth family have led her to a Catholic charity that trafficked freshly baptized orphans out of Germany after World War II. But confronted with this new self, the patient finds her search stalled. Armed with the details hes gleaned, the professor takes up the quest. His research leads deep into the history of displaced-persons camps, postwar Zionism, and the Nazi Lebensborn program.