Haunted and quiet, she continues to masquerade as Lily until the day, two months after giving birth to Nathan’s daughter, Ruth, that she walks out of their apartment and out of Nathan and Ruth’s lives. She is not Lily Azerov, even though she has Lily’s identity papers, her diary and her other possessions. The bride, on the other hand, is an imposter, a secret she manages to keep from almost everyone. The groom, then, is a substitute, and this substitution is well known to all who attend their traditional Jewish wedding. However, his younger brother, Nathan, visits her to apologize on his behalf and is immediately smitten with her, so much so that she and Nathan are soon married. Despite Lily’s beauty, Sol has second thoughts as soon as he sees her and refuses to go through with the wedding. The wedding is supposed to benefit both parties: cash for him, a Canadian visa for her.
After years hiding in the forests of wartime Europe, she arrives, via a brief stop in Tel Aviv, in Montreal, where it has been arranged that she will marry a young Canadian Jewish stranger named Sol. The title character in Nancy Richler’s The Imposter Bride is one of these thousands of DPs, a young woman named Lily Azerov who has survived incomprehensible losses and who now needs to find a new home and to create a new life. They stayed in those camps, fed and clothed first by the American and British military and then by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, until they could get visas for such exotic destinations as Canada, the United States, Argentina, Cuba, South Africa and Australia or-depending on their political persuasion-find a way to smuggle themselves into the British Mandate of Palestine. Homeless, penniless and often alone, up to 250,000 Jewish displaced persons gathered in refugee camps set up by the Allies in Germany, Austria and Italy.
Their homes had either been destroyed or taken over by others they were at risk of further massacres (as occurred particularly in Poland) and there was nothing and nobody to return. Although many of the small number of survivors from Western and Northern Europe went back to their previous communities, very few of the vast majority who were from Eastern Europe were able to do so. In the years after the end of the Second World War, Holocaust survivors dispersed themselves widely.
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