Caroline Topperman’s book Your Roots Cast Your Shadow is a MUST READ.

In Your Roots Cast a Shadow, author Caroline Topperman takes her reader down into the chasms of her family history and proves that finding your roots can be both enlightening and liberating.

So many of us who are descended from damaged, displaced families find ourselves left with mere snippets of our forebears’ memories, carefully curated glimpses of what they deemed acceptable for future generations to know.  We wallow in guesswork and strive to build our sense of self from the shadows they cast. So much is left out that we find ourselves veritably blind, searching through a dark forest of innuendo that leads as much to speculation as to revelation.

Caroline Topperman has had considerably more success than some of us. Her remarkable parents and grandparents, who suffered through years of hardship that required travels to the far corners of the world, were less guarded. As they went, they scattered enough carefully chosen, indestructible truths behind them that Topperman was able to build a network of paths to meticulously follow.  At the end of the end of her multiple trails, she has found rich morsels of story, kernels of history that have provided the means with which she could build a memoir of one family’s struggle to assert their right to live happily ever and leave behind a meaningful legacy.

Topperman’s examination of her multi-rooted family tree, opens with glimpses of her maternal grandparents’  life in Lwow, Poland, just before WWII.  They were young, Jewish, intellectual, and proudly unwilling to put up with Nazi or Communist maltreatment. The odds they were up against are all too familiar, but  Topperman spins the tale with ever-expanding dramatic flair that is able to surprise, shock, and comfort even the most knowing among us. Both her grandparents found voices, became activists, and prevail. Of her maternal grandparents,  Topperman writes, “So many people are blinded by religion, and communism was my grandparents’ religion. . . . They weren’t part of a conspiracy to overthrow the western world; they were simply looking for a way to make the world a better place.”

Direr circumstances surrounded Topperman’s paternal grandparents, who fled from Warsaw to Kabul, Afghanistan, where her grandfather led the construction of Highway AH1 through the Kyber pass, where her grandmother taught gym in a local school, and where her father was born. Eventually, they returned to Poland by way of Uzbekistan, but their journeys were far from over.  By the time Topperman and her sister were born in Ontario, Canada, both her parents’ families had nearly traversed the world. 

Topperman’s story has many branches emanating from the roots she discloses here.  Without sycophancy or flattery, she honestly presents the stalwart men and pioneering feminists who were her predecessors, and she shares her own quest to find her place among them.  “Home,” she concludes in the title of her final chapter, “is where the compass lands.”  That may be true. But having read the book, I would add that home is where the compass lands. . . but first we must learn how to turn on the light.