What a simply lovely gorgeous little gem of a book this is. As soon as it dropped through my post box and I ripped open the package and looked at the front cover, I knew I was going to love reading it and I was right.
We meet the passengers on the SS Danzig, refugees fleeing their country and heading to America where they hope to begin a new and better life. They have to survive the voyage in steerage, filthy and overcrowded and somehow survive and hold onto hope.
"We put down our lives, like suitcases, and tomorrow we will take them up again. All the things that were of such importance to us here on the ship will fade into insignificance before the problems and pleasures of real life. That's where life is, there, on land. This has been an interval, a space between two worlds, and when it's over it will be like a dream"
As an army child I was used to moving around and spent the happiest hours of my childhood aboard troop 
ships sailing from one place to another. I remember so well the feeling of being suspended in time, my entire life was on the ship with no thought of what was to come. When I travelled to and from Australia by sea many years later, I had the same experience, the world is out there somewhere but no need to worry about it just yet. This book captures these feelings and though these traveller's circumstances and mine are poles apart in terms of hardship and suffering, I was caught up in nostalgia for ship board life.
Everybody on board the SS Danzig has their own hopes and fears, sorrows and joys as their individual stories are told to us and we love them all, yes even the horrid bully Yankel, who seems in reality to be a sad, lonely unloved child. We live with them during their voyage and feel their excitement and apprehension as they see the Statue of Liberty and realise that they have arrived. We know there will be disappointments and sorrows ahead and that expectations may not be realised, but oh how we hope that they will all live happily every after.
Please do read this book. I think it is just perfect. Meant to be for ages 12 and up and that is all of us let's face it. I also love the cover, whoever chose this photograph had a stroke of genius.
Thank you Adele for sending this to me. One of my books of 2007.
