Lilli Chernofsky - Softcover

Nina Vida's writing career began when her children went off to college and she enrolled in the University Without Walls program at California State University Dominguez Hills to pursue a long-deferred degree in English. One of the requirements of the degree was a semester of creative writing. Nina, who had never written fiction before, decided to write a story about her thirty-eight-year-old sister's open-heart surgery. The professor said it brought her to tears. Nina's husband had been a Navy journalist in the Korean War, and when he read the story he said he thought Nina had the makings of a writer and should try her hand at a novel. That was in 1980. Lilli Chernofsky is her ninth published novel.

She is a native-born Californian, and lives with her husband in Huntington Beach, California.

"In breathtaking detail, novelist Nina Vida draws you into the world of the Jews exiled in Shanghai during World War Two, a world inhospitable and violent, and too often overlooked in history. While others fall victim to despair or avarice, Lilli Chernofsky, an unlikely heroine, navigates a dangerous world without losing her honor or compassion. Lilli Chernofsky is a story of treachery and deceit, brutality and bigotry, and, yet in the midst of the harshness and indignities visited upon the Jewish refugees, Lilli's story remains a triumph of love and loyalty."
--Cynthia A. Graham, author of Beneath Still Waters and Behind Every Door

"Nina Vida has written an astonishingly good book. By bribery and skill, Lilli outlasts the cruelty and degradation of Shanghai's Japanese occupiers. I found myself transfixed by a master class of absolutely brilliant writing; descriptions of illicit wheeling and dealing brings each character into focus using a clever mixture of narrative and dialogue."
--John Newton, publisher, Next Century Books, England