Never Twenty

By Frances Whitcombe

After her father’s funeral, Rachel Adler opens the red scrapbook he kept out of reach. Inside are wedding cards, telegrams and a photograph of her aunt Miri. Someone has carefully cut the groom out of the picture.

Miri died at nineteen. Rachel knows that much. The family has had more than fifty years to decide which parts of her life to tell.

In postwar Vancouver, David Adler comes home from Italy to a household that has learned to manage without him. His daughter has work, wages and plans of her own. When her marriage ends in murder, David pursues her husband through the city, putting his own future and his family’s at risk.

The Adlers go on living. Sam builds an ice-cream business, raises children and becomes a man people turn to for help. Decades later, his son’s conduct forces the family to confront another woman’s account of what happened. Rachel must decide what belongs in the record she is making.

Never Twenty follows three generations of a Jewish Vancouver family from the Second World War to 2006, through the lives they build and the truths they struggle to keep.