Red Quarter Moon: A Search for Family in the Shadow of Stalin. By Anne Konrad. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2012. Pp. 356. $35.

In this historical narrative, Anne Konrad has written a fascinating book about her search for her Russian-Mennonite relatives who were lost after the "Shadow of Stalin" had covered their homeland. Her parents, Peter J. Konrad and Luise Braun Konrad, had been able to escape from Moscow in 1929 arid subsequently immigrated to Canada. Her search for the rest of the Konrad and Braun relatives began after her father died in Abbotsford, British Columbia, in 1989. For the next twenty years she searched archives and collections of family papers, and with her husband, historian Harvey Dyck, she traveled thousands of miles that took her to Siberia in Russia, to Ukraine, South America, Germany, and back to Canada. She read countless letters and notes from relatives and other people, interviewed family members and friends, and when the former Soviet Union archives became more accessible after the collapse of that regime, she read the painful records of how many of her relatives were accused of crimes they had not committed, but still were tortured until they confessed to being guilty as charged of working against the Soviet state. Even after their "confessions," many of them were given long prison sentences, exiled, or summarily executed.

The mysterious title of the book, Red Quarter Moon, comes from a letter Agatha Wieler in Siberia wrote to the Konrads in Canada, in which she relates the appearance one evening of a strange-looking moon and a disappearing star beside it (262). For Wieler, the vision, no doubt a lunar eclipse, indicated future disasters and suffering; and the author uses the vision effectively to create a mood of doom and helplessness in the face of forces beyond human control.

The ten chapters of the book are arranged in more or less chronological order. In the first two chapters, Konrad begins with the "secrets" in a K.G.B. building in Ukraine, which contain some...