From the acclaimed author of The View from Stalin’s Head and Hotel Cuba, comes THE SHIVA BANDIT, a sweeping novel about a mother and her daughters escaping from Poland to Uzbekistan during World War II, a story of resilience and connection in the face of impossible odds.
ORDER NOW:
ABOUT THE BOOK
At the dawn of World War II, Devora Chesnok’s husband joins the fight, leaving her to care for her two daughters and run the family pharmacy. But when Germany invades her village, Devora and her daughters are forced to make a desperate escape eastward through the Soviet Union to reach Tashkent, Uzbekistan, the so-called “City of Bread.” Under the watchful eye of the Communist regime, they compete to survive among nearly a million artists, soldiers, and refugees who’ve overwhelmed the city, seeking shelter.
As Devora struggles to support her family and search for her missing husband, she must decide whether to trust the connections she makes in this new land, including Shimon and Sonya Barofsky, influential Soviet literary elites, and Maryam-Otin, a female Muslim poet whose unlikely friendship challenges Devora to reconsider her faith and family. Threaded through the story is the mysterious Shiva Bandit folktale from Devora’s childhood, which plays an uncanny and decisive role in her family’s ultimate fate.
The Shiva Bandit is a sweeping historical novel inspired by true events that spans decades and continents, examining exile and resilience, the challenges of mother-daughter relationships and female friendships, and the power of storytelling to shape our lives.
BOOK CLUB TOOL KIT:
Praise for THE SHIVA BANDIT
“A woman who refuses to mourn becomes, in Aaron Hamburger’s hands, a study in the stubbornness of love. The Shiva Bandit carries Devora and her daughters out of a vanishing Polish world and across the Soviet vastness, and never once lets us forget that survival can become its own kind of devotion.”
— Jai Chakrabarti, author of A Play for the End of the World
“Aaron Hamburger performs a miracle of understated storytelling in The Shiva Bandit, whose chronicle of suffering remains—thanks to the author’s sheer percipience and skill—always more vital than bleak. Drawn from the cruelties of scrupulously researched history, this is a novel that will seep into your dreams.”
— Thomas Mallon, author of The Very Heart of It and Up with the Sun
“A beautifully written, fascinating novel about female connection, creativity, and faith amid war’s horrors. The Shiva Bandit illuminates a largely untold aspect of WWII history as Devora and her two daughters flee Poland for Uzbekistan, where trust in others, in art and story, play a key role in the survival and resilience of a family. At once riveting, tender, and fully transporting, this novel will have you asking, what can be stolen and what restored?”
— Jennifer Rosner, author of The Yellow Bird Sings and Once We Were Home
“From a popular folktale about a woman who cheated death, Aaron Hamburger weaves an epic, haunting, mesmerizing novel of survival. Meticulously researched and emotionally piercing, The Shiva Bandit takes us on a harrowing and unforgettable journey from the shtetls of Poland to Soviet collective farms to wartime Tashkent, where a band of exiled artists remind us of the power of storytelling as a way to keep history alive—and to persevere.”
— Susan Coll, author of Bookish People and Word Salad
“In The Shiva Bandit, Aaron Hamburger tells an indelible story about the search for humanity amid unimaginable suffering, about perseverance in the face of shattering loss, and about the persistence of intolerance and the possibility of coexistence. Devora and her two daughters’ search for food, shelter, friends, family, and home across vast geographies is unforgettable. This is sweeping historical fiction that recaptures a lost past while elucidating the present.”
—Eman Quotah, author of Bride of the Sea and The Night Is Not for You
Author statement:
While researching my last novel Hotel Cuba, the story of my grandparents’ immigration from the Soviet Union to the United States, I discovered a stunning family secret.
I’d always thought my entire family were killed when the Nazis invaded their shtetl in 1941. However, an elderly relative of mine told me that in fact my grandfather’s cousin Dvaire escaped to the woods with her two daughters. After joining the partisans, they managed to cross the front lines of the war and then flee to Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Picture it: a mother and two young girls from a wintry shtetl crossing the desert to a city of mosques and camels, where the food, language, and customs were all unfamiliar, and Stalin’s secret police kept a watchful eye.
After the war, Dvaire wrote a letter in Yiddish to my grandparents’ family in Detroit, telling them none of their other relatives had survived. It included this haunting line, “I am alone as a stone.” When I read that, I knew I needed to tell her story, which became The Shiva Bandit.
