The eternal truth of Tolstoy's famous opening line in Anna Karenina - that all happy families resemble one another and each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way - is reinforced by this story about a family that survived some of the worst events of the 20th century. Eva Maria Chapman's traumatised parents were victims of the twin evils of Hitler and Stalin, and the effects of their suffering linger on to the present day.

Olga, the author's mother, was born in Ukraine. "Stalin had broken her body as a result of starvation and persecution in the 1930s; Hitler had broken her well-being by ripping her from her family's bosom at 17 years of age and forcing her to be a slave for the Reich." Chapman's father Sasha, an Odessa Jew who survived the Nazis in Ukraine, fared little better.

After escaping from the newly enlarged Soviet Union, the family, which included three-year-old Eva, migrated to Australia. "The fact that Australia was so distant appealed to Olga and the other hopefuls," writes Chapman. "They wanted to get away as far as possible from the terrible times and regimes they had endured." But of course they took their emotional baggage with them.

Though freed from persecution, the family's new life in Adelaide brought fresh problems, medical and cultural.

For one thing, Sasha expects Eva to take care of him when Olga becomes an invalid. "In the Russian tradition, if the mother is ill, the eldest girl stays and looks after the father and the family."

Eva rebels and eventually becomes estranged from her parents, but she is aware of how the dark European past intrudes on their Australian domestic life.

"I look at my father's rigid jaw and recall my mother screaming at him, 'Sasha, I can't stand your face. You look like you're going to be hanged tomorrow.' If only she knew how close to the truth that was."

Readers of Raimond Gaita's Romulus, My Father may find Sasha & Olga an interesting companion piece, though the prose lacks the crystalline brilliance and intellectual depth that distinguish Gaita's book.