A couple of weeks ago I read that the author Ursula Hegi had died. I remembered reading her “Stones from the River” back in the 1990s—it was one of Oprah’s Book Club picks in 1997, which resulted in a position on the New York Times best seller list and a print run of two million copies. I still had mine.

The story takes place in the small fictional town of Burgdorf in Germany, where Hegi…