The emotional core of Edeet Ravel’s latest book, Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth (Viking Canada), a novel that examines the emotional impact of the Holocaust on children of survivors, is rooted in a childhood memory that has haunted  the author for decades.

She recalls how helpless she felt watching  her Grade 4 classmates taunt a new choir director at the Hebrew Academy of Montreal.

She was struck by the vulnerability of the eastern European man, who clearly could not control the class. “I didn’t realize he was a Holocaust survivor, but instinctively I knew that he had been traumatized.

 “The kids were so nasty. They were throwing things at him. I could not believe that these kids could not see how vulnerable he was. I was so sad for him.”

The Israeli-born Ravel, who spent seven years on a kibbutz before her Canadian parents re-established themselves in Montreal, set her new book in Montreal  during the 1960s and ’70s, the era of her own coming of age. At that time, discussion about the Holocaust in schools was discouraged, because educators feared the horrific history would traumatize children, she explains.

“The teachers were not allowed to teach or even talk about the Holocaust. I remember one teacher saying, ‘I wish I could tell you. I wish I could tell you.’

“I had only the vaguest notion of what the Holocaust was.”

She says many of her classmates were children of survivors. “Some of them did not know about the Holocaust and some knew, but they didn’t talk about it.”

The experiences of Ravel’s second husband, John Detre – he grew up with seven Holocaust survivors in his home– was the inspiration for the narrative, she says.

The character, Patrick, one of the male protagonists, is based on Detre. “He had no complaints about the way I depicted him. He liked the novel very much.”

One of Detre’s aunts, she adds,  was the model for brothers Anthony and Patrick’s mother.

Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth follows the lives of four youngsters – Maya, Rosie, Patrick and Anthony – during their formative preteen and adolescent years. Aside from Patrick, the other characters are composites of people Ravel grew up with, she says.

 While the characters’ childhood experiences are all different, as children of Holocaust survivors, the four are emotionally wounded by their respective parents’ painful histories, told and untold.

Maya, the narrator is raised by her overprotective grandmother and mother. While the grandmother is silent about the war, the mother constantly talks about it. She has trouble containing her emotions. In contrast, Rosie’s father talks about his war-time experiences from a rational perspective. Unlike the other parents, the mother of Patrick and Anthony tries to escape her past by hiding her Jewish roots.

Ravel, 53, who has written five works of adult fiction and four children’s novels, was catapulted from virtual anonymity to literary stardom in 2003, when Ten Thousand Lovers, the first book of her acclaimed Tel Aviv Trilogy, was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for literature, the Koret Jewish Book Award, the Quebec Writers Federation Award and Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award .

The following year her second novel, Look for Me, received the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction, while her third book, Wall of Light, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize in 2005. It won a Canadian Jewish Book Award – the Martin and Beatrice Fischer Prize for Fiction – in 2006.

Ravel, who  lives in Guelph near her daughter Larissa, a 21-year-old university student, is not spending much time there these days. She’s been on the road promoting her new book, which  was launched in September at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto.

In October, the tour included readings at Books and Brunch in Montreal and at the Barbara Frum Library in Toronto and she was a featured writer at the Ottawa Writers Festival. This month, she heads to Vancouver for the Jewish Book Fair, which runs from Nov. 22 to 27.

When asked how she came to write Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth, Ravel says she listened to a voice in her head. “I never choose a story. It chooses me.

“A voice says, ‘Write me, Write me.’ If the voice doesn’t let go, I write it.”