Bloodhound

I looked up the name in the phone book and rang the number. I tried to imagine the conversation that might ensue. 'Hello? I was wondering if you're the man who was recently at an auction and asked a woman named Mary if I was married and had children and was happy - and if you are, are you my real father?

Ramona Koval's parents were Holocaust survivors who fled their homeland and settled in Melbourne. As a child, Koval learned little about their lives - only snippets from traumatic tales of destruction and escape. But she always suspected that the man who raised her was not her biological father.

One day in the 1990s, long after her mother's death, she decides she must know the truth. A phone call leads to a photograph in the mail, then tea with strangers. Before long Koval is interrogating a nursing-home patient, meeting a horse whisperer in tropical Queensland, journeying to rural Poland, learning other languages and dealing with Kafkaesque bureaucracy, all in the hope of finding an answer.

A quest for identity recounted with Koval's customary humour, Bloodhound takes hold of the reader and never lets go. It is a moving story of the terrible cost of war and of family secrets.

Read Caroline Baum's Review

Ramona Koval's title for this new volume of memoir (her first By the Book was largely about her reading, though it drifted tangentially into other fascinating corners of her life as a scientist etc.,) is perfect: it captures the driven element of following the scent in her attempt to hunt down the identity of her father.

Written in the same jaunty, crisp but personal voice that made her so beloved as a broadcaster, Koval shares her perplexity at how little she has in common with her father, a short dark Polish tailor who survived the Treblinka death camp. Did her beloved mother perhaps have an affair and become pregnant?

Twenty years after her mother's early death, she decides to investigate the mystery: a phone call leads to a photograph, which leads to tea with strangers and to further unexpected revelations.

By the end of her quest, Koval has acquired a new passport but still has many unanswered questions. While she may envy others their detailed family tree and complete set of photographs of their relatives, Koval's fate is mixed up with that of people who washed across Europe in a tide of humanity, often attempting to rinse away the past with new names as they made fresh beginnings in new countries.

About the Author

Ramona Koval is a Melbourne writer, journalist, broadcaster and editor. From 2006 to 2011 she presented Radio National's Book Show, and she has written for Age and the Australian. She is the author of By the Book: A Reader's Guide to Life, and Bloodhound: Searching For My Father.