A young girl who finds an antique wooden doll that had passed from hand to hand and survived some of the worst wars of the last century is the subject of a debut novel titled Soldier Doll.

Jennifer Gold, a 34-year-old lawyer with the Ontario Medical Association, and now a published writer, told The CJN about the inspiration behind her young adult novel, published by Second Story Press and released this month.

“I had the idea about a year and a half before I started writing. I was in Prague with my husband, and I was at the Jewish Museum. There was an art exhibit by children from the Terezin concentration camp,” Gold said.

“We were looking at the art, and I sort of had this idea that maybe one of these children was living in a concentration camp and someone offered her this toy, this doll, and it would provide her with some comfort. The idea kind of grew from there. That was where I first had the idea, and that was the first chapter I wrote.”

Soldier Doll is a story with two narratives – one told through the perspective of a 15-year-old girl named Elizabeth who just moved from Vancouver to Toronto, and another narrative set in the past in different wartime settings.

While rummaging through a garage sale, Elizabeth finds an antique, wooden, hand-painted doll in a soldier’s uniform. She decides to buy it for her father, a military contractor who is preparing to ship out for Afghanistan.

“She realizes, through an encounter with a boy at a local used book store, that it might actually be the soldier doll that is the subject of a famous World War I poem,” Gold said.

“The poem is fictional, but I envisioned it as sort of an In Flanders Fields type of poem, a poem that everyone would have studied in school. So the idea was that this was the actual soldier doll that inspired the famous poem of the same name. So, that had Elizabeth and this boy, Evan, trying to locate the various owners and the history and trying to place the soldier doll.”

The book, told through flashbacks, takes the reader back to World War I, when the doll is first given to a British solider by his girlfriend. Following the British soldier’s death, it’s found by a Jewish German soldier in Ypres, who, years later, gives it to a young child in Terezin. The soldier doll later finds its way to Vietnam, then to Afghanistan following the Sept. 11 World Trade Center attacks, before being discovered by Elizabeth in 2007.

Gold said the book is completely fictional, but as a product of the Jewish day school system, she was more informed and able to write about concentration camps and about Kristallnacht, a pre-Holocaust event that is also mentioned in her book.

“That was drawing on the education I had growing up. I don’t have any Holocaust survivors that I know of in my family, but it was a big part of my education. I was able to draw on that when I was writing.”

In addition to wanting to tell a coming-of-age story, Gold said she also wanted her book to include lessons about history, and the idea that war is not as “black and white” as one might think.

“I think a lot of teenagers today would have the message that war is bad, and ‘no blood for oil,’ etc., etc., but what I wanted to show was it’s not black and white… I wanted to get across that soldiers who go to war are often teenagers themselves, and they have their own reasons for going that may be different from the government’s reason for going to war.”

Soldier Doll is available on Amazon.ca and at Indigo bookstores.