Always in My Mind

Like the young Catholic Dubliner in this first novel, the reader is a spectator at the tumultuous events in her life. Lia, a convent student, is early shut out from the love of her mother, a frivolous woman widowed by WW I. Though she finds comfort in the nurturance of her grandmother, it is in others that Lia seeks fulfillment. So her first, secret and only love is given to Tadek, son of a neighboring, equally poor, Jewish family. When war brings intimations of the Holocaust, Tadek, now a doctor, joins underground partisan friends on the continent. Lia is 30 before she is reunited with Tadek, who is dying as a result of Auschwitz internment, and in the passage of those years she experiences great emotional stress and spiritual loss. A continuing thread throughout her life is a love-hate relationship with her sexually abusive stepfather. Despite this conflict and the experience of religious hypocrisy in the tight-knit Irish community, Lia is buoyed by the consummation of her secret love. The mixed society of Dublin between the wars is warmly evoked by an author who has written for the Irish theater. (Feb.)