Member Reviews
Reviewer 43423
I am grateful to Baraka Books for providing me with an advance reader copy of Ann Charney’s compelling autobiographical novel. As Peter McFarlane explains in the forward, this work was originally published in 1973. It was well received in Europe where the matter of liberation by the Soviets still resonated with many. This was not the case in North America, however. Readers there seem to have had trouble accepting the kind young Red Army soldier, Yuri, who befriends the Jewish family at the centre of the novel. At the time the story opens, that family—the narrator (a child of five), her mother, aunt, and cousin—have been in hiding for over two years. At first there were almost twenty other wealthy Jews in the cramped loft of a barn belonging to an opportunistic Ukrainian woman capitalizing on their misfortune. Now there are only seven, and a child. As Yuri and his comrades move west to force the Germans out of Eastern Poland, they liberate them. It is worth noting that there are some Jews and women in that unit.
Why the North American resistance to the novel and to Yuri in particular? McFarlane suggests it had quite a bit to do with the 1973 publication of Solzhenitsyn’s <i><b>The Gulag Archipelago</b></i> and its English translation, which appeared a year later. Readers reeled at the dark details Solzhenitsyn provided about the Soviet regime. It’s also widely known that during World War II the Soviets were guilty of atrocities in the territories they occupied and that the Red Army engaged in ruthless acts against civilians as it swept across Eastern Europe. McFarlane doesn’t mention these facts, but there’s little doubt they too made some readers resist the idea of a humane and generous Soviet soldier.
Charney’s novel does not focus much on the Jews’ life in hiding. Instead, the book deals with what comes after. The army unit first brings the debilitated survivors to farms, compelling Polish peasants to feed and care for them until they’ve sufficiently recovered. (An armed guard is posted to ensure this occurs). The narrator, her mother, and aunt are then returned to Dobryd (a fictionalized version of the town of Brody, 90 km —56 miles— NE of present-day Lviv in western Ukraine.) Most structures there have been razed by war, so refugees from the region are being temporarily sheltered in the army camp.
While the soldiers await orders to proceed west to rout out the enemy, they remove rubble and debris to make parts of Dobryd habitable. The novel documents the narrator and her family’s life in a section of a cleared-out apartment block there and a later move to Bylau, a town of relative plenty further west, in formerly German-occupied territory. Barely touched by war and abandoned by civilians terrified of the approaching Soviets, Bylau becomes the family’s home for some years. Contact with Yuri continues.
Ultimately, the adults, haunted by the betrayals of the past and the executions of many loved ones, know they must emigrate. The final section of the novel deals with the challenges of petitioning embassy officials in Warsaw, all of whom demand documents which no longer exist.
The most fascinating sections of the novel for me were the narrator’s aunt’s stories of a vanished world on an idyllic country estate. The author herself comes from an unusual Jewish family, and there is no reason to doubt these stories relate to her own maternal grandfather. In the novel we are told that he was originally a prosperous, thoroughly assimilated grain dealer who’d travelled widely in Europe. He had subsequently become a wealthy landowner—unusual for a cosmopolitan Jew—and chose to raise his children as citizens of Poland. Their first language was Polish, not Yiddish, and they were educated at Polish schools. Other Jewish families of the region kept to themselves, but the author/narrator’s family is presented as having had friendly relations with Christians.
The narrator later learns that when the rumblings of war were first heard, family members had mistakenly believed those Christian friends would stand up for them. However, antisemitism among Poles and Ukrainians ran—possibly still runs—deep, and no one came to their defence. A local guide apparently led the Germans directly to the estate of the narrator’s maternal uncle and his wife, who were murdered. Their dead bodies were suspended upside down and remained on public display for a week. In the end, this forward-thinking family belonged to no group in Dobryd. They were regarded with suspicion and resented by Christians and Jews alike.
Ostensibly the study of a child’s emergence into freedom and concluding with her emigration to Canada, Charney’s novel includes a lot of additional fascinating information I haven’t encountered elsewhere in other literature and memoirs of World War II and the Holocaust.
I believe that if the book were written today, it would be shaped and marketed as nonfiction. As a memoir piece, it would be easier for readers to accept some of the narrator’s reflections on her childhood experiences. In a fictional work, the very young protagonist seems too psychologically sophisticated, too precociously self-aware, for her age. The voice of a memoirist looking back can be integrated more seamlessly into a text. Furthermore, when events appear to be coincidental or contrived in a work of fiction, readers can be dismissive of the novel as a whole. We all know of or have experienced strange real-life coincidences that might be hard to credit if they were written into a work of fiction. As the cliché goes, truth can be stranger than fiction—including, the possibility of a Red Army soldier whose actions change the course of lives
I don’t know how Charney worked with, altered, and shaped the actual details of her early experience into fiction. What I can say is that I believed the story presented in this book, I was immersed in it, and I’m very glad to see it resurrected, especially in light of the current ongoing conflict in the part of the world where this novel is set.
Recommended.
