Title: This is how it begins
Description: "In 2009, eighty-five-year-old art professor Ludka Zeilonka gets drawn into a political firestorm when her grandson Tommy is among a group of gay Massachusetts teachers fired for allegedly silencing Christian kids in high school classrooms. The ensuing battle to reinstate the teachers raises the specter of Ludka's World War II past--a past she's spent a lifetime trying to forget ... As Ludka's influential family defends Tommy under increasingly vicious conditions, a stranger with connections to her past shows up and threatens to expose her for illegally hoarding a valuable painting presumed stolen by the Nazis. Only one other person knew about the painting--a man Ludka's been trying to find for sixty years"--Amazon.com.
Subjects: Gay teachers, Art teachers, Dismissal of, Art treasures in war, Fiction, Confiscations and contributions, World War, 1939-1945, Art thefts, Destruction and pillage, Painting, History, FICTION / LGBT, FICTION / Literary, FICTION / Political
Places: Europe, Germany, Massachusetts
Time periods: 20th century