Two Jewish children. A world in flames. A harrowing quest to survive.

In the summer of 1941, the Abramov children have no idea their homeland will become ground zero for the extermination of the Jews. As Nazi forces sweep into the Soviet Union, an innocent fourteen-year-old Bronya dreams only of the violin. She has just earned a coveted place at the Moscow Conservatory. Her horizons are shattered all to quickly and she must carry her battered case into war, as both shield and promise. Her younger brother Avsey, precocious and lonely, hoards stolen family treasures in a birch box, his secret world his only defense against the chaos and displacement that will soon engulf him.

With their mother institutionalized and their father preparing to defend the Fatherland, the Jewish siblings are scattered, forced into choices no child should ever face. Bronya is sent to harvest wheat in the Ukrainian fields, armed only with her violin, while Avsey evacuates with neighbors who desert him, leaving him to survive on luck and wit. Around them, their country burns — and survival becomes both an act of resistance and a fragile hope.

You, With Your Waiting is a searing novel of childhood lost, of courage forged in terror, and of the haunting bonds that tether us to family, memory, and home.

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