A Place to Call Home?

A Place to Call Home? by Lynda Smith is set in 1936, a time between the two world wars, but Jacob's story begins in 1905. He is a Russian Jewish immigrant whose parents and younger sister are desperate to escape the escalating danger of the Russian pogroms. They embark on a long, perilous sea journey and arrive in the northwest of England where, at the age of ten years, Jacob starts a new life in his adopted country. His ambition is to be a successful businessman, and he achieves that goal. His life becomes even more complicated when he falls in love with one of his female employees. They enter into an affair, resulting in the birth of a son, who is blissfully unaware that Jacob is his father. Torn between his loyalty to his wife and daughters, his deeply embedded Jewish roots, and his mistress and his son, Jacob is in constant turmoil about what to do so as to cause the least amount of hurt and pain to all the people he holds dear. The story takes into account the horror of the Great War, in which Jacob enlisted as a boy solider in 1916. Threaded throughout this story are the themes of socio-economic disparity, religious bigotry, ignorance, and anti-Semitism.