The Length of a String

By Elissa Brent Weissman (Author)

Paperback

Imani is adopted, and she's ready to search for her birth parents. Anna has left behind her family to escape from Holocaust-era Europe to meet a new family--two journeys, one shared family history, and the bonds that make us who we are.

Imani knows exactly what she wants as her big bat mitzvah gift: to find her birth parents. She loves her family and her Jewish community in Baltimore, but she has always wondered where she came from, especially since she's black and almost everyone she knows is white.

Then her mom's grandmother--Imani's great-grandma Anna--passes away, and Imani discovers an old journal among her books. It's Anna's diary from 1941, the year she was twelve and fled Nazi-occupied Luxembourg alone, sent by her parents to seek refuge in Brooklyn, New York.

Anna's diary records her journey to America and her new life with an adoptive family of her own. And as Imani reads the diary, she begins to see her family, and her place in it, in a whole new way.