“She always felt her mother was in some ways ‘borrowed’ from another country and
culture, that she had an early life she never shared with her family.”

 

When Anna travels to Berlin to scatter her mother’s ashes on the grave of her Jewish fiancé who was killed during Kristallnacht in November 1938, she finally comes to understand her mother’s tragic past, and how it damaged her ability to truly love. As she
learns more about that fateful night, her mother’s subsequent breakdown, and her escape to Canada to avoid punishment for destroying a Nazi banner, Anna arrives at a deeper understanding of her mother’s life. She also learns more about the hardships of her extended family members who remained in Germany, and how the Berlin Wall, which fell on November 9, 1989, had divided them both physically and ideologically.

In a cosmic twist of fate, as Anna scatters her mother’s ashes 51 years to the very night that her fiancée was killed—and the same night that the Berlin Wall fell—she is caught up in the jubilation of this euphoric moment of hope. Yet, as she returns to her life in North America where she and her partner experience prejudice as a multiracial couple, and her gay brother has also felt the pain of discrimination, she realizes both how easy it is to let hatred win, and the need to be ever vigilant in the fight against it.