Judith Kalman’s The County of Birches is a collection of 14 linked stories that attempts to transform history into fiction, to make biography into art.

The names are different, but the characters are those found in Kalman’s non-fiction narrative about her family’s flight from Hungary, which won the 1995 Tilden Canadian Literary Award. You’ll find the same people also in Journey to Vaja by Kalman’s sister Elaine Kalman Naves, which was shortlisted for the 1997 QSPELL Prize for Non-Fiction.

Like Naves, Kalman writes about the grandfather who was a prosperous farmer in Hungary in a golden time before the Second World War, the father whose first daughter and wife were killed by the Nazis in the last days of the war, and the second family that immigrated to Canada and learned how to be Jewish in the New World.

Kalman has rethought and reimagined her family’s history so that the first three-quarters of her book reads like a novel. Each detail builds on the previous ones, each subsequent incident sheds light on what has gone before. But when she begins to tell stories set after the family immigrated and to write about a time she herself remembers, the book’s forward motion stumbles.

Part of this is a problem inherent in linked stories. One writes stories rather than a novel because stories give more room to play with incidents, to explore points of view. But because the first part of The County of Birches seems so much of one piece, the reader is disoriented when suddenly details don’t match up between stories. The rhythm is broken, and the poignant image of the father saying Kaddish – the Jewish prayers for the dead – while he digs holes for fruit trees in his Canadian backyard, is lessened because it is not clear when he did this.

Yet in some respects the last of these engaging stories are the best. Certainly the descriptions of things Kalman knows first-hand are more apt. For example, the cook in the lost, prewar paradise “might glimpse a yellow hairbow winking through the elm’s flame-shaped leaves,” but in the Canadian spring “the town smelled like running water.” The first, while perhaps true, is a standard description. The second is as fresh as the season Kalman is describing.