Mysteries of Survival

The final denouement of the cataclysms of 20th-century European history have a way of being played out within the immigrant communities of Canada. Mariska, the Canadian-born narrator of one of the stories in Tamas Dobozy’s Siege 13, longs to know about her disappeared mother. Around 1980, she is being raised by her Hungarian-born single dad, Miklos or Mike, who works in a vinyl factory in Kitchener. In vain, she plies Mike for information.

“It was one of the many things he didn’t speak about,” Mariska tells us in “Rosewood Queens.” “No matter how hard I pressed, even when I was older and confronted him head-on, saying it was important, I needed to hear about the past, my father either muttered that I should drop it, or started making up stories he knew were too ridiculous to believe, or grabbed me around the waist saying it was time to dance a paso doble.”