The romanticized picture of childhood as a time of carefree innocence, of golden sunshine and worry-free bliss can be a dangerous illusion. In The Whale Surfaces, author Ruth Rotkowitz holds a microscope to those idealized years in the life of the protagonist she created in her debut novel, Escaping the Whale. This microscope, at times, becomes a sledgehammer. Marcia Gold is the daughter of Holocaust survivors whose lives have...