Finding Ida by Marya Burgess - REVIEW
A story could take you anywhere – even into the shadows of your own family history no one ever talked about.
Sometimes a book arrives like a long-lost relative: unexpected, disarming, and bearing stories you didn’t realise you’d been waiting to hear.
Finding Ida is one of those rare works — a novel that draws you in with its intimate lens on two sisters and leaves you wondering how much of your own history still sits in the shadows, unspoken.
Marya Burgess has always been a keeper of stories — nearly four decades with the BBC will do that — but here she turns her attention to the one story she couldn’t tell until now. It’s the story of her mother, of identity split across borders, and of how the tremors of one family’s choices often echo across continents and generations. Her journalistic restraint meets a novelist’s tenderness, and the combination is quietly astonishing.
The novel opens in the 1930s, in a world where privilege, possibility and Polish summer light sit side-by-side with the early rumblings of catastrophe. Sisters Ida and Luiza Wolfer are opposites in the way only sisters can be: Ida is cultured and confident; Luiza is the tomboy, the substitute son, the one with dirt under her nails and loyalty in her bones. Burgess paints their childhood with a gentleness that makes what follows feel all the more devastating. War doesn’t arrive here as a dramatic stroke — it seeps in, slowly, methodically, the way it does in real families.
The strengths of Burgess’s writing quickly become apparent: the attention to emotional detail, the patience in how she builds identity, the deep empathy for the fractured loyalties that shaped so many Central European lives. She understands — perhaps better than most — that identity in this part of the world is rarely straightforward. Her characters move between languages, allegiances, and countries not out of choice but because history corrals them into impossible corners.
Luiza, raised speaking both German and Polish, becomes the embodiment of this divided world. When the occupation arrives, she must choose who she will be — or rather, which version of herself she can live with. Her struggle feels strikingly familiar to anyone descended from people whose loyalties were questioned simply because of the language they spoke, the accent they carried, or the border they lived on when the wrong army marched through.
For me, this part of the novel hit with particular force. As the grandchild of a Polish-born, German-speaking “Oma” who was expelled after the war, I grew up with silence where family history should have been. No explanations, no stories, only the barest outline: she walked with two small children all the way to Germany, a country they barely knew, and there they arrived as outsiders in a town that never fully became home.
My father grew up in that small town, in poverty and in mystery — no money for toys, no questions answered, no past to inherit. Reading Finding Ida, I could feel the familiar ache of those unspoken stories stirring again. Burgess manages to articulate what so many post-war families carry: the weight of survival without the luxury of explanation.
But the novel isn’t only about loss — it is also about pursuit. When Ida disappears with her baby during Soviet occupation, it triggers a search that defines Luiza’s life. Burgess gives this longing a shape that is emotionally precise but never sentimental. There is no melodrama, only the quiet endurance of someone who refuses to let the thread between sisters snap completely. And in an elegant irony, the same war that destroys Ida becomes the source of Luiza’s adventure, love, and eventual transformation. Burgess handles this paradox with great skill, allowing both tragedy and possibility to coexist on the page, much as they do in real memories of that time.
One of Burgess’s most powerful strengths lies in how she renders the rhythm of ordinary life against the backdrop of seismic events. Her years producing All in the Mind show in the psychological acuity she brings to each interaction; her documentary instincts inform the authenticity of the world; her work curating The Listening Project gives her a near-sacred respect for the ways real people tell their stories. You can feel all of this in the way she writes silence, loss, and belonging. It’s not just historically accurate — it’s emotionally accurate.
The novel’s structure, shifting between the turbulence of wartime Poland and later decades of searching, creates a sense of haunted momentum. Every chapter feels like opening another drawer in an old family cabinet, the kind filled with mismatched documents, faded photographs, and the occasional clue to a life half-lived. Burgess knows exactly when to reveal and when to withhold. She understands that the most gripping family sagas aren’t propelled by plot twists but by the gravity of unanswered questions.
Another of the book’s delights lies in its sensory detail. The mill at Zakątek, the noise of cotton machines, the scent of birch trees, the ripple of a lake in summer — these are rendered with such clarity that they almost feel like recovered memories. Burgess writes with an elegance that never draws attention to itself but quietly deepens the emotional landscape.
Although based on true events, Finding Ida never feels like a documentary or a memoir in disguise. It is, unmistakably, a novel — shaped by craftsmanship, guided by theme, and propelled by the universal question at its heart: Where do we belong when history tears our world in two? The answer shifts across the pages, and the reader is invited to sit inside its uncertainty.
What makes the book especially compelling is how it resonates across generations. For those of us who grew up in families where the past was swallowed by trauma, silence, and dislocation, this story becomes more than fiction. It becomes a mirror — one that shows not the specifics of our own histories, but the emotional truths beneath them. The Heimatlosigkeit, the shame, the quiet guilt, the longing to know — they are all here, rendered with clarity and compassion.
In the end, Finding Ida is a profoundly human novel. It is about sisterhood, survival, and the strange ways history decides who we become. It is about faith, forgiveness, and the instinct to search for those we love, even when hope has long since thinned. But above all, it is about identity — the kind we inherit, the kind we shape, and the kind we spend our entire lives trying to reclaim.
Burgess has written more than a family saga. She has restored a lost world and stitched together fragments of memory that gently reconnect us with the possibility of healing from collective trauma. Some books entertain, some educate — very few manage to feel like a homecoming. Finding Ida is one of them.
