Shelly Sanders's "The Night Sparrow," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Night Sparrow: A Novel by Shelly Sanders.

The entry begins:

The Night Sparrow opens just before dawn in Seelow, Germany, with Elena Bruskina lying on her stomach, “finger poised on the trigger of her rifle though she couldn’t see her own hand in the chilly darkness.” It’s April, 1945, and Elena, a university student before the war, has trekked thousands of miles from her home in Minsk, Belarus, as a Red Army sniper. She’s seeking vengeance, after the Nazis brutally murdered her family in the Minsk ghetto, but revenge by bullets is not as simple or as satisfying as she’d anticipated. When she’s injured and re-deployed as an interpreter, she finds herself on a hunt for the most dangerous Nazi of all—Hitler—and sees that retaliation comes in many forms.

If The Night Sparrow were made into a movie, Shira Haas would be my first choice as Elena, with her breadth as an actor. Her performance as Esther in Unorthodox was spectacular and riveting. The role of Elena is demanding, with its broad emotional scope from ghetto prisoner, to escapee, to partisan, to sniper, to interrogator. As well, Shira, like Elena, is young and she’s Jewish. With the current wave of antisemitism, having a non-Jew in such a pivotal role feels wrong and insensitive.

For Elena’s love interest, Major Purkayev...[read on]

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The Page 69 Test: The Night Sparrow.

Q&A with Shelly Sanders.

My Book, The Movie: The Night Sparrow.

--Marshal Zeringue