Arona Henderson, a Canadian born author, attended McGill University and the University of British Columbia. She received her medical degree from the University of California, Los Angeles. After a forty-year career as a beloved family practitioner, Arona faced her own devastating illness. Out of her resolve to survive emerged a story about courage, a compelling tale of a young Jewish girl, Caasi Lichman, born in Montreal. Lilacs in the Snow chronicles Caasi's passage from desolate childhood to impetuous adolescence to a shaken, yet solid adulthood, and is intertwined with the similarly volatile political, socio-economic, and racial climate of the mid-twentieth century.
The story begins when an adult Caasi returns to Montreal and visits her estranged father. The encounter rekindles fragments of her childhood chaos, and she takes the reader on a gripping journey through the world of her collected memories, which are illuminated by flashes of sensitivity, poignancy, budding sensuality, resilience, humor, and abiding love. The complexity of human relationships is portrayed with revealing conviction and secured at the point where truth and imagination collide. In Caasi's display of moral fortitude, we find an example of human excellence that can be a source of inspiration to all readers and provide hope for better tomorrows. Long after the book is closed, your mind and heart will linger in its powerful hold.
About the Author:During the years of her office medical practice and staff physician at Hoag Memorial Hospital, Newport Beach, California, Arona Henderson's poetry was published in small presses: Alura Quarterly and 'up against the wall, mother'. She authored articles and stories for Medical Economics and Cortlandt Forum. These publications received acclaim from fellow physicians worldwide and Medical Economics awarded her a certificate of merit for one of her stories. In spite of the demands on her time, she wrote a column titled Woman to Woman Medicine for Orange County Media, a monthly publication with a circulation of 120,000. Her style of professionalism and humor in the chosen topics was a favorable method of reaching a wide range of women who were otherwise reluctant to seek professional medical care.
Arona lectured on issues of adolescent medicine to women's groups to help improve relationships between mothers and daughters. She was dedicated to the physical and emotional health of young individuals and undertook a physician consultant position at an inpatient adolescent mental health facility. She served as a student health doctor at the University of California, Irvine and a teacher of family practice techniques to the medical school students at the University of California, Irvine Medical School.
Arona currently resides with her husband James in Blaine, Washington, close to the Canadian border.