MONTREAL — Ami Sands Brodoff might never have written her award-winning novel The White Space Between (Second Story Press) if the New York native had not moved here with her family 10 years ago.

Ami Sands Brodoff signs copies of her novel The White Space Between at a Jewish Book Month event.

Just arrived from Princeton, N.J., they were unpacking boxes when her husband Michael came across a cassette tape. They put it in a player and suddenly his late mother’s voice filled the room.

Brodoff had never met her mother-in-law; she had died in 1972 at the age of 52 when Michael was 16. He knew little of her experience during the Holocaust.

A native of the Carpathian mountain village of Slatinskedaly in what was then Czechoslovakia, Brana Hoch had grown up in a poor chassidic family, one of nine children. She would survive three concentration camps: Treblinka, Mauthausen and Buchenwald. Of her large family, only she, a sister and a brother survived the war, and they are also since deceased.

“It was as if she was right in the room, as if her voice had lived on beyond her corporal life,” said Brodoff at Jewish Book Month in Montreal.

The White Space Between, which won the 2009 Canadian Jewish Book Award for fiction, is about a Holocaust survivor who tried to shield her only daughter from a painful past she pretends never happened.

Similarly, Brodoff’s mother-in-law did not speak to her two children about what she had experienced.

“The novel was written in honour and in memory of her and the millions of others like her. It’s a daunting task to write a novel about the impact of the Holocaust. How dare I write a novel when so many true-life tales are yet to be told?” said Brodoff, who spent a few years on the book.

Brodoff carried on because, as a fiction writer and teacher, she believes in the truth of literature. Readers can experience fictional characters’ emotions in a way they probably cannot in histories, she said.

Brodoff’s previous published works also have family, but not Holocaust, themes. They are the story collection Bloodknots (2005), which is peopled by orphans, strays and others who lost their family and must find it where they can; and her debut novel Can You See Me? (2000), which focuses on the impact of schizophrenia on a family. Brodoff said it is based, in part, on her own struggle to cope with the illness in a sibling.

The title The White Space Between refers to “the tension between void and voice” that characterizes Holocaust remembrance, as well as, of course, the blanks around words and sentences on a page, she explained.

The story, which is partially set in Montreal, is built on “the unbearable tension between silence and speech, remembering and forgetting, burying and excavating. It’s a dance between these polarities…that is never resolved.”

Her fictional character Jana, a native of Prague, has gone so far to cover up the past that her daughter, Willow, does not know who her father is, even if he is dead or alive. Instead, Jana recreates a palatable past through picture albums that are a mix of fact and fiction.

“It makes sense, it looks pretty (but)…it’s a kind of hiding, a negation of the truth and identity,” Brodoff said.

She describes the writing style she used as a “scrapbook collage,” rather than a linear structure, that alternates between the past and present.

As she grows up, Willow takes up puppetry, using them to create a fantasy family, talking through them about things she can’t discuss with her mother. The more her mother dissembles, the greater is the daughter’s yearning to know.

Guilt is part of the reason Jana is so secretive. She was a registrar in Auschwitz, one of a pool of Jewish women assigned to type up the death certificates of prisoners, providing phony causes from a prescribed list of diseases. They were known as “secretaries of death.”

The job allowed the women to survive, and they enjoyed such privileges as extra food and baths.

After the war, Jana settled in Montreal, and later near Princeton, N.J., and, as her creator says, “willed the suffering to fade” in her desperate search for a fresh start. She even gives herself a new anglicized name.

“My hope for this novel is that it will be a bridge, a force of connection, between the dead and the living, the lost and the found,” Brodoff said.