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Fiction Stories my mother would never tell The Ivan By Erin Eldridge 189 pp. Austin Macauley Publishers  Reviewed by Dennis C. Rizzo The Ivan is set in Berlin at the very end of World War Two, during the occupation of the city by Russian troops and just prior to the division of the city following formal surrender. I was drawn to this book by stories told to me by my father, stories my mother would never tell. My mother was born and lived in Vienna and went through the Nazification and then the Russian occupation of that city. She had friends and relatives who disappeared. She had a cousin who wandered back virtually catatonic from an SS unit he had been conscripted into – he was sixteen. The experiences she never would discuss are summed up well in Eldridge’s story of Elise, Erich and Valery (the Ivan), including life in the shelters and basements. They had no news of events outside of their hiding place, no way of knowing anything about the status of the final battle for Berlin. ...