The Singing Forest, Judith McCormack
The Singing Forest, Judith McCormack
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The Singing Forest

Author: Judith McCormack

Narrator: Carlotta Brentan

Unabridged: 10 hr 48 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/23/2021


Synopsis

In attempting to bring a suspected war criminal to justice, a lawyer wrestles with power, accountability, and her Jewish identity.

In a quiet forest in Belarus, two boys stumble across a long-kept secret: the mass grave where Stalin's police secretly murdered thousands in the 1930s. The results of the subsequent investigation have far-reaching effects, and across the Atlantic in Toronto, Leah Jarvis, a lively, curious young lawyer, finds herself tasked with an impossible case: the deportation of elderly Stefan Drozd, who fled his crimes in Kurapaty for a new identity in Canada. Leah is convinced of Drozd's guilt, but she needs hard facts. She travels to Belarus in search of witnesses only to find herself asking increasingly complex questions. What is the relationship between chance, inheritance, and justice? Between her own history—her mother's death, her father's absence, the shadows of her Jewish heritage—and the challenges that now confront her?

Beautiful and wrenching by turns, The Singing Forest is a profound investigation of truth and memory—and the moving story of one man's past and one woman's determination to reckon with it.

About Judith McCormack

Judith McCormack was born in Evanston, and grew up in Toronto, with several years in Montreal and Vancouver. She is Jewish through her mother, and her maternal grandparents came from Belarus and Lithuania, with her father contributing his Scots-Irish heritage. Her writing has been shortlisted for the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the Commonwealth Writers' Fiction Prize, the Journey Prize, and the Amazon First Novel Award, and her stories have appeared in the Harvard Review, Descant, the Fiddlehead, Coming Attractions, and Best Canadian Stories. She also has several law degrees, which first introduced her to storytelling, and she is a recipient of the Law Society Medal and the Guthrie Award for access to justice.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Andy

This concerns a young Jewish lawyer, Leah, presented with a transformative case. In 1937, Stalin’s Politburo ordered a purge of "anti-Soviet elements" in society, targeting anti-Stalin Bolsheviks, former Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, priests, ex-White Army soldiers,and common criminals.......more

Goodreads review by Andrea

The opening chapter of The Singing Forest has the best narrative description of collective denial I think I've ever found, of an entire town that both knows and doesn't know about a mass grave in the nearby forest, and for that alone I'm happy to have read it. The novel continues as an exploration o......more

Goodreads review by Russell

This is a wise book, and an excellent second novel from McCormack, whose first was a runner up for Canada's best first novel award. The protagonist, Leah Jarvis, is a young female lawyer uncertainly finding her way into the profession by working in a small firm headed by a talented but difficult old......more

The Singing Forest is set between contemporary Toronto and pre-war Belarus. The two main characters, Leah, a young lawyer, and Drozd, former NKVD chauffeur from Belarus. Both characters have fathers who have failed them. Both are trying to prove themselves. Leah, through justice; Drozd, by instillin......more

Goodreads review by Amanda

I had very high hopes for this book, but had to force myself to finish it. The writing was pretty good, and the plot was good too, but overall the book was very, very slow. I found it hard to follow at times, with no quotation marks in the dialogue, and a lot of skipping around between past and pres......more