Côte Saint-Luc born author pens debut novel

The Suburban
April 14, 2026

“Have you heard about the attacks on Jewish students?” Not at McGill, Concordia, or Columbia Universities, but in 1938 Poland, the setting of Judy Batalion’s debut novel, The Last Woman of Warsaw. The line is spoken by a character after a police raid on a café where a Jewish comedy duo had been performing, in a novel rich in history but tense with foreboding on almost every page.

The novel tells the story of two young women, Fanny Zelshinsky, a well-to-do socialite with dreams of becoming a photographer against her mother’s wishes that she marries, and Zosia Dror (not her real last name), a shtetl-born socialist activist with Zionist ambitions. The two form an unlikely friendship in the dwindling days of the “Paris of the north” that Warsaw once was.

talion lives and writes in New York. But she was born and raised in Côte Saint-Luc, attending JPPS-Bialik High School before pursuing higher education at Harvard, and then in London. She is the author of now three books, including White Walls: A Memoir About Motherhood, Daughterhood, and the Mess in Between, The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos, and pieces written for Time magazine, The Globe and Mail, The New York Times, and other publications.

Batalion was inspired to write the novel after writing The Light of Days, which was meticulously researched. She felt there was more to be written, but it was during the pandemic, when resources were limited and movement restricted. So, she decided on fiction. “The characters already lived in me,” she tells The Suburban. As did the setting. All that was needed was a story.