Having read a few books set in those years recently, and consisting of mostly memoirs of people who survived and chose to tell only years, decades, close to half a century later, when they could do so without breaking down, it always comes as a surprise that yet another tells one of things one didn't know.
One expects, having read a little by a very good writer, that one has had a bird's eye view of it all. And one does, that. But the details, the particular experiences, the personal specifics differ, of course. And what one begins to realise, after a while, is how far from uniform Europe was, has always been, despite the efforts of Roman empire and later conquerors to flatten it all out into a convenient plane for their carriages it tanks to roll over.
No, people, countries, regions small or large, all have their individualities. And so stories differ, not just in names.
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This story is of a young Jewish girl growing up in Cernovitz, a city in a region called Bucovina, that then was part of Romania but is now across border, and was part of the Austrian empire not too long before the young girl's life began, so there is a wealth of details that's quite kaleidoscopic in its mind boggling variety.
This family escaped being sent to concentration camps or otherwise to death only by a hairs breadth, several times, chiefly because mist of them were already in US before the onslaught began. Pearl and her old parents - she was the youngest of several children - were by themselves as the war arrived at their town, and the hardships consisted of starvation, escaping being sent to camps, surviving, and enduring the back and forth occupations by the two powers - USSR, Germany and again by USSR. Experiencing the two first hand brought disillusioning regarding benefits of leftist regimes, and romania was no picnic in any case for jewish people.
The three managed with great efforts to finally make it to U.S. after the war, which was highly non trivial, but surprisingly it wasn't the happy ending - and the surprise is only because one is taken in by the idea that it's all good once one is there, as promised by the Statue of Liberty - but it can only be as good as the people, and that they can be antisemitic amongst the best of them - academics of New England and New York included - is the disheartening part.
Fortunately for the young Pearl there was another possibility then newly available, Israel, and someone she could go to meet and marry. Her siblings had known her only as a child, and her living through the horrors of holocaust was not shared by them, so they couldn't accept the young woman so grown. And the colleagues including some with definite anti semiotics was perhaps the final straw in the decision to leave US, although the question of passport and so on did play a large part as well.
Pearl Fichman writes with an upstanding stoicism, albeit without hiding or pretending that it was all good, that makes one experience it with her as one reads it. So much so, one can't really read it at a go, and perhaps that was also the effect of other factors for this reader, but while so reasonably sized a book shouldn't take more than a week it has taken half a year for me to go over half of it.
Some of the heartbreaking parts are later, as a collection of incidents or memories of various things lost back in Cernovitz, people, places, social behaviours, beliefs, and more. There is a part about a young girl of the age Pearl was, and her poetry. It's quite startlingly good, and some of the things superlative about it are obvious when the author mentions them but otherwise seem just normally good.
Then there are the following kind of things:-
"I don't know, it is a moot question, whether Erich or Paul would have been happy, had they remained at home. But home, as it used to be, did not exist any longer. Paul went to the West and felt "déraciné," uprooted; the other to Moscow and felt "deracine" and we, the others who survived? We are all uprooted, just a matter of degree, depending on the individual sensibilities. We all remained D.P.s, displaced persons - yet the place, the home, the anchor, it itself had disappeared.
"In 1987, my friend Rosl, who resides in Germany, visited me for a few days. She read my reminiscences and filled me in on some facts about Erich. In the 70s Rosl's daughter was studying in Moscow. On a visit there, Rosl visited Erich, who was suffering from a severe heart condition and could not climb the stairs, was confined to the apartment.
"When she saw him, he was alone and deeply despondent. He told her about his only daughter, who had reached the age when a teenager had to apply for her own "passport," the identification card carried on one's person at all times. She had filled out her date of birth and other personal information, but when it came to "nationality," she asked her father what to fill in. She knew that he had come from Czernovitz, which is in the Ukraine. In the Soviet Union, a person born in Uzbekistan writes Uzbek or if born in Armenia writes nationality Armenian and this applies to all the republics, but if he is a Jew, no matter where he was born, he has to write Jewish. This has never been a great asset.
"When she inquired about his nationality, he answered her "Jewish." She thought that he was joking and repeated her question and got the same answer, whereupon she burst out in shrieks: "You are telling me that you are a Jew? You are telling me that I am Jewish?" The scream was of anger, disappointment, distress, fury and hatred.
""That, he said, happened this week." A few days later Erich died of a heart attack or of a broken heart. "
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Later part, after the arrival in Israel, Pearl Fichman goes from the straight narrative to a colkection of memories about varios people and events, relationships and more. And that is where the last two parts, mentioned above, belong.
A life time isn't easy to recollect and write about, making choices about just what to emphasize and how to describe, all the more so when the said lifetime being written about was in East Europe during WWII years with repeated occupations of ones hometown and region by various powers, all with disastrous effects. So the bouquet of the later chapters, about the young poet or the boyfriend, a variety of friends, or pen, is just as precious as the straight narrative before, for the reader.
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