Synopsis
Jules Finn and Szaja Trautman know that sorrow can sink deeply--so deeply it can drown the soul.
Growing up in her parents’ crazy hippie household on a tiny island off the coast of Boston, Jules’s imaginative sense of humor is the weapon she wields as a defense against the chaos of her family’s household. Somewhere between routine discipline with horsewhips, gun-waving gambling debt collectors, and LSD-laced breakfast cereal adventures, tragedy strikes a blow from which Jules may never recover.
Jules’s story alternates with that of her grandfather, Szaja, an orthodox Jew who survives the murderous Ukranian pogroms of the 1920s, the Majdanek death camp, and the torpedoing of the Mefkura, a ship carrying refugees to Palestine. Unable to deal with the horrors he endures at the camp, Szaja develops a dissociative disorder and takes on the persona of a dead soldier from a burial ditch, using that man’s thoughts to devise a plan to escape to America.
While Szaja’s and Jules’s sorrows are different on the surface, adversity requires them both to find the will to live despite the suffering in their lives—and both encounter, in their darkest moments, what could be explained as serendipity or divine intervention. For Jules and Szaja, these experiences offer the hope the need in order to come to the rescue of their own fractured lives.
Excerpt
September 5th, 1923. Ivnitza, Russian Empire.
We lived near the Teteriv River in a small village called Ivnitza, which is surrounded by ancient forests. Zhytomyr, the nearest city, sat north of us.
This is the day my mater and foter left the Ukraine, which had, in recent years, been swallowed up like a pig’s dinner and become part of Russia. I am thirteen years old. Mater and Foter also left me, my two younger brothers Idel and your uncle Oizer, my two older twin sisters Ruchel and Sura, and my eldest sister, Reizel, your aunt Rose, eighteen and married to a young man named Berl. We are left on my Bubbe Chava’s farm.
That day they began their long travels to Turkey and to the eventual sailing to America. They are going to make a new life for us. My foter promised to send for us as soon as he could.
Every night, for weeks, we spent the evenings helping to pack. This involved much more laughing, singing, and making fun of my foter’s terrible dancing than actual work. The day before, we had finished the last of the apple harvesting from our orchards. It had been a good year for fruit. First the cherries in the spring, and now the apples. We made more money in the markets these two past seasons than in the years before—the years of the famine.
Since they are leaving before the Rosh Hashana holiday, my foter said we should say the religious poems, the piyyuttim, together. Mater, Reizel and the twins made a feast of food—apples dipped in honey, rodanchas, potato latkes, and delicious challah bread, finished with a delicious Lekach cake with cinnamon and raisins. This I remember as the first time my belly felt full in nearly two years.
The three youngest children—including Idessa, still a baby of five months—would leave on the journey with my parents. I am to take charge of my two younger brothers; Ruchel and Sura would help with their care. Reizel and Berl would take charge of all of us. My foter, Abram, like most of the people in our village, spoke Yiddish
