A Book Review . . . Finding Meaning In Historic Suffering
By MITCHELL KALPAKGIAN
The Leaves Are Falling, by Lucy Beckett (Ignatius Press: San Francisco, 2014), 314 pp. $19.95. Available from www.ignatius.com or 1-800-651-1531.
A beautifully crafted novel, work of profound human interest, and a moving story about Josef Halpern (Joe), a Jewish refugee and an orphan who witnessed the mass executions perpetrated by both Hitler’s army and Stalin’s Russian forces, The Leaves Are Falling begins with an 82-year-old man who narrowly escaped death, left Poland at age 17, and lived in England for the remainder of his life.
Remembering his tragic past, Joe constantly recalls the traumatic events he witnessed that have gone unknown, unrecorded, and untaught in history classes. Throughout the novel he ponders many questions about the cause of evil, the existence of God, the lies of propaganda, political ideologies like socialism and Communism, and the purpose and meaning of his life in the aftermath of the unspeakable destruction of millions of innocent human lives perpetrated by Hitler and Stalin that left him an orphan.
Owing his survival to chance, luck, kind people, and divine Providence, Joe feels profound gratitude for the gift of life and his miraculous escape. As a boy he stood in a firing line and feigned death when all the victims fell from the shots of rifles: “I was in the last row at the pits. They missed me with the bullets. . . . I pretended to be shot.”
Throughout the story Joe struggles to make sense of the suffering of the Jews at the hands of the Germans and Russians and to form a philosophy of life that honors his Jewish religious heritage and confronts the sordid realties of war and politics.
With great poignancy the novel traces the stages of Joe’s intellectual and moral development as he begins a new life in a foreign land and seeks the whole truth about the tragedies inflicted on the Jews. Hearing testimonies from survivors, gathering all the historical knowledge of the events in his native Poland during the war, and learning all the biographical facts about his mother’s and father’s backgrounds, Joe forges a philosophy of life that gives moral purpose and noble ideals for him to follow as a displaced refugee with a family history and culture he wishes to honor.
In the Prologue to the story, Joe, to his great amazement in his old age, learns of a published account of his father’s life, a surgeon and an officer in the Polish army imprisoned by the Russians and then later killed in the Katyn massacre for not championing the utopian promises of the Communist Revolution.
As the novel begins with Joe learning of the publication of the book about his father, Jacob, it concludes with his reading and rereading of the biography of the father he loved — the physician, the violinist, the captain, and the Jew who lived and died with integrity rather than feign belief in the propaganda of political ideologies to escape prison and death.
Between the Prologue and the Epilogue the middle portion of the novel narrates the course of Joe’s own life from his boyhood in Old Europe before the war to the scene of near death before a firing squad to the struggle of survival in a forest with other refugees to a new beginning in England that finally saves him from the atrocities of the Holocaust. Finally, Joe lives a normal human life of safety and security centered in honest work, a happy marriage, a son, and contentment.
Throughout the remainder of his life in England, however, Joe’s existence is overshadowed by the trauma of the horrors of war and by the hatred, Anti-Semitism, rejection, and persecution that his early life exposed him to at the hands of Germans, Poles, Russians, and Lithuanians. While his new life in England offers a reprieve from these sufferings and Joe adapts to his adoptive country, he never forgets his Jewish identity and always cherishes a deep respect for that heritage that forms the center of his life.
During an interlude of almost two years, while Joe works as a stable boy on the farm of Col. Robertson in Yorkshire, he relaxes from the fear of starvation in the forest and death from the Germans and Russians. However, this temporary situation is only transitional, and Joe receives the news that he must relocate. When the colonel informs him that all the Jews must return to their native lands or consider the newly established state of Israel as their home (“you must go back to your own country and start a new life, a new Jewish life in a new Jewish place,” Joe protests.
These choices are not true choices that promise a new beginning or life of dignity and hope because “Jewish Vilna is dead. The Russians and Germans have killed it.” Joe remembers the Russians closing the synagogues and Jewish schools, he witnessed the Germans killing the Jews in the streets, and he knows the Lithuanians were mercenaries ordered to kill the Jews for the Germans: “I saw it. I cannot be a Lithuanian.”
He cannot forget the Russians taking his mother and sister away on a train or learning that his father was imprisoned in Kozelsk and later shot after promised his freedom.
While Joe does not suffer overt discrimination or mistreatment while working on the Robertson farm, he realizes that he is not wanted when the son returns home from the war and resents Joe’s presence, protesting, “If it weren’t for the Jews, there might never have been no war.”
After nearly two years in Yorkshire, Joe realizes that the wife never once smiled, spoke to him with friendliness, or extended one act of kindness. Realizing that he cannot continue on the farm where he not welcome, Joe reaches a turning point in his life.
Because of his knowledge of languages, Joe receives an offer to work for the government as “a secret policeman,” a position that he absolutely refuses despite all its prestige and benefits because he compares the work to the espionage of the Gestapo and the Russian secret police (the NKVD).
Like his father who refused to gain release from prison by submission to Communist ideology and its futuristic vision of utopia, Joe — a man of integrity like his father — cannot live a lie and feign insincere belief.
Rejecting the attractive offer, Joe finally decides to accept assistance from a Jewish organization in London that provides aid to displaced persons in the form of board, room, and employment. After a few weeks of hard labor clearing the rubble from the war, the Jewish relief committee finds Joe a position as an assistant to a dealer of old books, music, and manuscripts — work that requires him to sort, catalogue, and describe the merchandise for sale.
Finally, the son of a physician finds a position consistent with his love of music, culture, and education that he has been deprived since the war: “Five weeks later, he knew that, for the first time since he was eleven years old in the summer of 1941, he had stopped escaping.”
Joe can only marvel at this fortuitous turn of events and pray “Blessed be God” and feel indebted to all the kind people who contributed to this new chapter in life: the goodness of his parents, the kindness of a peasant woman who hid him and gave him a horse to escape, the people on the farm who gave him a temporary home, and the employer who hired him as an assistant.
Though Joe does not identify as a religious Jew, his awareness of God’s presence deepens and grows in the course of his life.
Victims Of War
One day a German gentleman, Max Hofman, a person who coincidentally comes to the shop to purchase the music of Schubert, recognizes Joe by his Polish accent and resemblance to a woman Hofman once loved and wished to marry.
This woman is Joe’s beloved Aunt Anna, the sister of his father who disapproved of their romance. As Hofman recalls the past in Breslau where Joe’s father attended medical school, he asks questions about Joe’s Aunt Anna, assuming that she is alive, happily married, and enjoying her growing family only to learn from Joe that she, her husband, and her three boys were the victims of war, shot by the Lithuanians: “They were shot into pits in the forest of Ponary. I was there. I was supposed to die too.”
When they say farewell, Hofman poses a question to Joe that makes him ponder further the existence of God: “Is it possible that the dead may be closer to us than the living if the living had been a thousand miles away? It depends, does it not, on whether there is a God, to care for the souls of the dead?”
Joe, even though he lost his entire family at age eleven, never ceases to feel the nearness of his beloved parents, sister, and his Aunt Anna’s family — a hint of God’s presence that he never considered.
In another episode when Joe travels by train on business, he observes an old man reading a Polish journal that initiates a conversation. They discuss aspects of the war that have not been fully reported or explained to Joe.
The old man laments the history of his people, decrying the fact that the Germans in the west and the Russians to the east were both hostile to Poland. The agreement between Stalin and Hitler to divide Poland between them was “the most iniquitous treaty of European history,” and the “most iniquitous betrayal of European history” was America and England’s decision to award Stalin half of Poland.
Though an ally of America and England in the war those nations won, Poland lost: “And the English would not allow us to march in the victory parades. And would not give our soldiers pensions.” Joe also learns from their conversation that the Poles gave the Jews a home but never desired to exterminate or imprison them. The old man explains that Hitler’s propaganda and the Russian invention of the pogrom were responsible for the plight of the Jews — historical facts that deepen Joe’s understanding of the ugliness of evil and viciousness of ideology.
When Max Hofman returns to the shop to complete the purchase the music of Schubert, he and Joe speak of the past they share in common. Hofman mentions Joe’s father’s religious sensibility even though the physician disavowed belief in God. Hofman remembers Joe’s mother often accusing her husband “of being religious when he said he was not religious.” Even though Jacob argued he was not a believer but a man of science and a rationalist, Hofman recalls his mastery of the violin and passion for classical music: “He played like a man who was sometimes near to God,” explaining to Joe that “music may open a soul that has otherwise decided to be closed.”
Father and son remain bonded not only as religious Jews and men of integrity but also as lovers of the beautiful that hints of God.
Hofman was always impressed by Jacob’s dedication to music and regarded it as “dedication to something outside the self, something which is good and beautiful, and even true.” In Hofman’s mind, Jacob, a talented musician, was a soul touched by the grace of God despite his claim to be a scientist uninfluenced by religion. He discloses to Joe that “your father was a soul not far from God, not far from the secret of his wings.”
Joe then confesses that his father wanted him to learn Hebrew from his rabbi uncle, another hint of Jacob’s affinity for God that he wished to transmit to his son. Although Joe himself confesses that he has not been in a synagogue since he was eleven years old, his admiration for his father’s character and love for his goodness as a parent deeply affect him and lead him closer to God.
When Hofman admits that he joined a political organization, Young Socialist Zionists, he says he was soon disillusioned by the hollow slogans that governed the entire thinking of the members, the party line that glorified Marx, proclaimed “God is dead,” and boasted “Israel is the future” or “Russia is the future.”
Like Joe’s father, Hofman exemplifies a noble, intelligent man who would not compromise the truth and sell his soul for political favors: “But I knew that religion was good — ancient and holy and sacred.” Joe also remembers his father’s distrust of Zionist ideology — a distrust that Hofman shares, especially condemning the terrorists who burned the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and killed British soldiers. Hofman observes, “Didn’t they learn how to do these things, learn about assassination and terror, in Russia, from the NKVD?”
When Joe and Hofman say goodbye, they both experience a relief from “the weight of memory” they have carried for years, and Hofman’s final words are “it is not good that you should be too much in the past.” To relive tragic memories, the old German said to the young Joseph about to be married, is to give words to the experience and then “wrap it up and throw it away” like a person going to Confession — another religious idea that penetrates Joe’s consciousness.
The Faith Of The Ages
When this part of the novel finishes, the second part gives an account of the final days of Joe’s father as an officer in the Polish army imprisoned by the Russians and eventually executed because he refused to join the Communist Party, renounce God, and pretend there is no truth to Jewish or Christian religion “as though the faith of the ages had never been.”
As a Russian prisoner Jacob faced an existential decision — either become a Communist or become “disintegrated.” The discovery of these facts and truths forms Joe’s conscience that is repelled by evil in all its barbaric forms.
However, Jacob, more aware than ever of God’s reality and presence in the prison when Catholic priests secretly offered Mass in the absolute stillness of God’s sacred presence, encountered the same sense of the holy which classical music evoked. Instead of the fear of being on the wrong side of history as the commissar warns him, Capt. Halpern chooses the fear of the Lord rather than live a lie or sell his soul — the great lesson that gives meaning to his life and his son Joe’s life.
The words that Joe once overheard his father speak that as a boy he struggled to understand — “I am a doctor. . . . I know that God does not exist. I am a Jew, so I pray for my father on the day he died” — now make sense. Without God no one can make sense of the human condition or appreciate the mystery of the human person as a noble being of inestimable worth and as the image of God who will not sell his soul for the whole world.
