"That's how we lived, surrounded by ghosts. They sat at the table while we ate our Sunday meal. They lay beside us in the bed as we slept..." Author Gina Roitman has captured her own experience as the daughter of Holocaust survivors in the character of Leah...

Posing the question: who packed the baggage we carry from birth?Don't Ask poses the question: who packed the suitcase we carry from birth? In this literary thriller, a woman agonizes over her mother's suicide and is thrown into turmoil over her attraction to a German. Hannah Baran is 45, a successful Montreal real estate broker with a highly lucrative client who, like her parents, is a Holocaust survivor. Born in a German DP camp, she is the only child of Rokhl and the late Barak. One day, she arrives to take her mother to the doctor's but Rokhl is gone, leaving behind a mystifying note that reads: I am not her. Throughout Hannah's life, Rokhl's notes have been all the guidance she received from a laconic, distant mother, a foil to Hannah's voluble father who rescued Rokhl from Auschwitz. When Hannah announces that she must travel to Germany on business, Rokhl threatens that should Hannah 'go to that land of murderers,' it would be over her dead...