The Silver Music Box
2 primary works
Book 1
A captivating cross-generational novel from German author Mina Baites about a Jewish family divided by World War II and an inheritance with the power to bring them back together.
1914. For Paul, with love. Jewish silversmith Johann Blumenthal engraved those words on his most exquisite creation, a singing filigree bird inside a tiny ornamented box. He crafted this treasure for his young son before leaving to fight in a terrible war to honor his beloved country—a country that would soon turn against his own family.
A half century later, Londoner Lilian Morrison inherits the box after the death of her parents. Though the silver is tarnished and dented, this much-loved treasure is also a link to an astonishing past. With the keepsake is a letter from Lilian’s mother, telling her daughter for the first time that she was adopted. Too young to remember, Lilian was rescued from a Germany in the grips of the Holocaust. Now only she can trace what happened to a family who scattered to the reaches of the world, a family forced to choose between their heritage and their dreams for the future.
Book 2
A single treasured keepsake links one unforgettable family across continents in this enthralling saga by Mina Baites, the author of The Silver Music Box.
London, 1963. I dream about my sister almost every night.
Lilian Morrison has one memento of her beloved sister, Emma: a battered silver music box. A family heirloom that was passed down through two world wars, the box was the key to Lilian’s recent, joyous reunion with the surviving members of her birth family, whom she lost many years earlier when she and her sister fled Hitler’s Germany on the Kindertransport. Now Lilian is compelled to investigate Emma’s final days after the girls were shipped to separate foster families in Britain and the time before Emma was killed in the London Blitz.
In London, as she searches for clues to retrace the past, Lilian finds that the anguish of war still reverberates after two decades. In Cape Town, her grandmother courageously protects innocent victims of violence, and in Dublin, a gifted woodworker creates a music box that is strangely similar to the one that Lilian owns. Separate lives will intertwine on a path of healing and hope as the hazy secrets of the past finally come to light.