All In The Telling: A Somewhat True Story
By Saul Rubinek
Redwood Publishing, 324 pages, $35.50

Saul Rubinek’s new book opens with a nightmare: a pitch black void that is slowly filled with criss-crossing white bars until whiteness threatens to overwhelm him.

As a teenager, Rubinek, an actor known for his roles in films like Ticket to Heaven and Unforgiven, and in the play Playing Shylock, tells his mother about the dream. She responds casually that he’s likely remembering a harrowing incident from his childhood at the Föhrenwald displaced persons camp when a woman tried to kill him by force-feeding him cream.

This murder attempt thrusts readers into a story that is part memoir, part Holocaust history and part fiction, moving between past and present. Told with Rubinek’s characteristic dry wit, it’s a rewritten version of his parents’ Holocaust survival stories, which he published in a 1988 book titled So Many Miracles. His newest book explains how Rubinek came to tell the story in the first place, and how the process changed his relationship with his parents — and exposed long-hidden truths.

Rubinek writes that the initial book project was born from a lie. When Rubinek tells his parents that he’s dating a non-Jewish girl, they cut him out of their life, his dad even going so far as to say the mourner’s kaddish for his son right in front of him. Rubinek devises a plan to get the three of them talking again: He tells his parents that the massive publishing house Penguin wants him to write a book about their story as Holocaust survivors. No such deal exists, but the lie is convincing enough that his parents agree to meet regularly with Rubinek to talk about their history.

Rubinek’s parents were born in Poland and were dating when the war broke out. They spent more than two years hidden in the home of Ludwig, a Polish farmer, his wife, Zofia and their son, Maniek. Their story is a sharp portrait of the incomprehensible situations Jews found themselves in during the Holocaust, like hiding in holes covered by cow dung to avoid Nazi dogs and pretending to be members of the Polish secret police to prevent themselves from being murdered.

Rubinek also lies to his girlfriend about the book to explain why he keeps visiting his parents — who she believes accept her non-Jewishness — without her. Unfortunately, she works in publishing and insists on reading the book, forcing Rubinek to start writing a fake manuscript.

The book eventually becomes a reality, turning into So Many Miracles, and Penguin does publish it in the end, although he still eventually gets caught in his lie. Rubinek also makes a documentary with the same title — which All In The Telling readers can purchase through a QR code in the back of the book — in which he travels to Poland with his parents so they can reunite with Zofia.

If you’ve read or watched So Many Miracles, many of the stories that have been pulled from the recordings Rubinek made with his parents will feel familiar. Nevertheless, Rubinek’s personal touch, alternating the transcripts of his parents with his own storytelling, helps strengthen the connection between the past and the present, underscoring how our lives are shaped by the experiences of the generations before us.

The book is subtitled A Somewhat True Story because of some creative liberties Rubinek says he took to give the story a little more texture. In order to have the events in the book happen in a more condensed timeline, Rubinek changed the year he and his girlfriend began living together. The name of the Polish translator and government spy who accompanied him and his parents around Poland is an alias. There’s also a chapter that imagines the dialogue between officials of Poland’s Censorship Committee as they determine whether or not to let the documentary be screened in the country, loosely based on letters the translator sent to Rubinek.

However, the book ends with a true tale: Years after finishing So Many Miracles, when Rubinek’s daughter turns 13, he decides she’s old enough to learn about what her grandparents went through and shares So Many Miracles with her — although he doesn’t tell her about the lies that started the project. Her school invites him to show his documentary to her class, but he worries that her classmates will think her family’s story is no more interesting than theirs. He reaches an agreement with the school: The film will be shown as an introduction to a Personal History week for the students; they will be tasked with interviewing their own family members and bringing what they learned back to the class. For some of the students this is a fun exercise; for others, it brings up old family secrets — such as why their German great-grandfather had a skull and bones on his WWII uniform.

By writing All In The Telling, it seems Rubinek has learned his own lesson: his story is also worth telling.

The post How Saul Rubinek’s best lie helped him get to the truth about his family’s Holocaust history appeared first on The Forward.

The Wanderers
By Daniela Gerson
Grand Central, 336 pages, $30

Daniela Gerson is a journalist with years of experience reporting about immigration, in a time when immigrants are commonly derided as interlopers who will do anything to weasel into America, including by telling untruths. She is also the daughter of a father whose immigrant parents — Gerson’s paternal grandmother and grandfather — lied through their teeth to get here.

The long story leading to why they did this grounds Gerson’s fascinating memoir, which explores a chapter of the Holocaust that is largely unknown in America, even to Jews: about Polish Jews who went not to Auschwitz or to attics, but instead to the Soviet Union. The story defines her family and that of Talia Inlender, a Los Angeles immigration attorney whom Gerson met at a party several years ago. Chatting there, they realized that Inlender’s Jewish paternal grandfather was from the same Polish city as Gerson’s Jewish grandparents. The coincidence drew the two women together, and they ended up marrying, having kids, and digging further into their shared ancestral history. Their excavation has culminated in The Wanderers.

On the eve of World War II, about 3.3 million Jews lived in Poland — more than in any other country in Europe. By 1945, more than 90% of them were dead. About three quarters of the few who survived did so only because they’d spent the war in the Soviet Union. They escaped Nazi genocide but still lived through hell.

For years, Gerson knew this basic history. She knew that in 1939 Poland had been carved in two, west and east, by Germany and the Soviet Union when the two countries signed a non-aggression pact. In the immediate aftermath of the partition, hundreds of thousands of Poles felt more frightened of Hitler than Stalin, and they fled into Soviet territory. But their flight was chaotic. Many lived on the streets or in rooms with no heat, and with little to eat. In Lviv, now in Ukraine but then in the USSR, Gerson’s grandparents experienced their first devastation: Their eight-month-old son fell ill with pneumonia and died.

Inlender’s grandfather’s wife and young son, meanwhile, had opted to remain in Poland. Soon after making that decision, they were shot to death during a Nazi roundup of Jews.

As conditions on the Russian side worsened, almost everyone who’d fled Poland, including Jews, told the Soviets they wanted to go back to the German-run area. The Soviets responded by labeling such people untrustworthy, bourgeois, and traitorous. So, beginning in summer 1940, thousands of Poles, including eight Gersons and several Inlenders, were packed into boxcars and shipped thousands of miles east, to gulags and forced labor camps. There they were consigned to backbreaking work in mines and forests, fed very little, and crowded into vermin infested shacks with little heat in winter. Starving and exhausted, the prisoners were told by their overseers to get used to it, because they were never going home again. At least a quarter of them perished.

Then, after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in summer 1941, the enslaved Poles were freed from the gulags. Waves of them headed south to the USSR’s five Central Asian republics: Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Many wanted to enter Iran and proceed to Palestine. The Gersons tried this but the borders were closed. They backtracked to Uzbekistan. Inlender’s grandfather landed in Kazakhstan.

Again there was hunger and homelessness. Typhoid fever and other deadly epidemics raged. Polish Christians and Jews alike — as well as citizens of the Soviet Union whose homelands were overrun by Nazis — wandered the streets. Everyone suffered.

Some lied to stay alive. Mikhal Dekel, who wrote a book about her Polish-Jewish father’s survival under similar circumstances, noted that, in Central Asia, child refugees, including Jewish children, roamed alone and starving. The parents of others turned them over to Christian orphanages. Historian Gennady Estraikh has written about Jewish children running away from adult relatives, knocking on the doors of those orphanages, and falsely claiming they had no family. Their lies saved their lives.

Gerson doesn’t discuss this specifically,  but I imagine the two of us have some common experiences with lying. Like her, I am a longtime journalist focusing on immigration, mainly into the U.S. from Latin America. During the first Trump administration, I met parents who’d fled violence in their home countries, then walked or rode in boxcars to the southern U.S. border, only to be turned back by American immigration authorities and sent to languish in filthy, dangerous encampments on the Mexican side of the line. I saw teenagers in those camps steal away from their mothers and fathers and cross into Texas by claiming they were orphans — they did this because the U.S. was still accepting what immigration law calls “unaccompanied minors.” I saw parents weeping as they kissed their seven year olds goodbye and directed them over the international bridge, with instructions to falsely say they had no mother and father.

And I met adults with carefully planned confabulations. Once I talked with a man who was sifting through Google to study, he told me, how gay men act. He confessed that he wasn’t gay but was learning to walk, dress and behave as though he was, because the U.S. was letting people in who might be attacked in Mexico by homophobes. A woman told me she tried to buy urine from someone who was pregnant, because with a doctor’s certification of pregnancy, she might be let in, too.

What were these people really escaping from? Homicidal gangs? Murderous cartels? Hunger? Hopelessness? Whatever it was, they knew better than to tell truths that mean nothing in U.S. immigration law.

After World War II, most Polish Jewish survivors ended up in displaced persons camps in Europe. The Gersons wanted to get into one that was being run by the United States. But it did not allow new admissions, and the family had not left the Soviet Union until 1946. By then they had a baby boy, born in Uzbekistan. He would grow up to be Daniela’s father. The family wanted to go to America, but McCarthyist immigration restrictions defined Polish Jews, according to one Congress member, as “a gang of well-trained Communists” who would spread through America and plot to overthrow the government.

The Gersons finally made it into America via subterfuge. A couple who were named Blumstein, also with a baby boy, had received permission to enter the displaced persons camp but then abandoned the permission document. The Gersons got a hold of it and started masquerading as the Blumsteins. A few years later, when restrictions against Polish-Jewish immigration loosened, they sailed into New York Harbor under that surname. They spent the next decade in terror of being discovered. An expensive lawyer finally straightened everything out, and by the 1960s they were again the Gersons.

Daniela’s father, Allan Gerson, later became a Nazi-hunter prosecutor for the Department of Justice. His job was deporting Eastern Europeans who had assisted with Nazi atrocities. His method was ironic: He had merely to show that they lied when they applied to live in America — just as his parents had lied. Worried that low-level collaborators would be deported back to Communist countries, judged as criminals without due process, and put before firing squads, he quit the job.

According to his daughter’s memoir, Allan Gerson’s politics were neo-conservative. Nevertheless, he was outspokenly sympathetic toward today’s undocumented young people, the so-called “Dreamers” who came to the United States as children with their undocumented parents. “I was an illegal immigrant,” he wrote in 2017 in the Washington Post. He lamented that Dreamers “stand to be deprived of life as they know it, shipped off to some land they hardly recognize.”

He went to one of those lands in his later years. Did he connect with it spiritually? As a hobbyist art photographer before his death in 2019, he ranged up and down the U.S.-Mexico border, taking photo after photo after photo, almost obsessively, of border walls —those cruel, hard structures meant to exclude our new wandering generations. He shot the walls from the Mexico side, in extreme close up, rendering them almost abstract. But he often included their graffiti. It was giant and brilliantly colored. Likewise, those features in his daughter’s memoir illuminate a history that still shades our place and time.

The post They escaped the Nazi genocide, but these ‘Wanderers’ still went through hell appeared first on The Forward.

The great innovation of Shakespeare’s King Lear is that its patriarch has no sons. This problem — Lear has a vast estate, and only daughters to inherit it — marks the onset of a disaster. Because the king has no obvious heir, he is able to remake his world as he sees fit. But his choice to split his kingdom between his three daughters, based on the degree of fealty they express toward him, is catastrophic. It can be argued that Lear suffers from an excess of liberty. Without a rulebook to follow, he wreaks destruction on the country he had hoped to preserve in his image.

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is a kind of American Lear. In the midcentury United States, every man can be his own king, leaving Willy Loman suffering from a version of Lear’s affliction. Willy has arrived at a time in life at which he is keen to secure his own legacy. Unlike Lear, he has only sons, and is painfully committed to having his first-born take on his mantle. But in the land of the free, he has perversely and perhaps unconsciously spent his life glorying in his ability to make the wrong choices.

Spoilers: Willy’s choice of how to bequeath his kingdom, such as it is, will work out almost as tragically as Lear’s.

A new Broadway production of Death of a Salesman, starring an excellent Nathan Lane as the archetypal failed American father, leans into the quasi-Biblical nature of this story. It is a tale for Americans to pray over: May we become wiser and stronger as a people by learning from our forefather’s mistakes. And it is a tale to atone over, as well. Just shy of eight decades since the play’s debut in 1949, there is a great and ever-mounting body of evidence to suggest we have done very little learning at all.

Death of a Salesman follows two days in the life of the Loman family, who live in Brooklyn and have, at long last, very nearly paid off their mortgage. But they have perhaps never felt more insecure. Bills are piling up. Willy’s job as a traveling salesman has stopped paying him a salary. In his 60s, he is beginning to feel his age, and as he works for scant commissions, he’s started to exhibit a faltering grasp on reality, and an increasingly vigorous drive toward self-destruction. His wife Linda — played by Laurie Metcalf, who is, as always, stellar — senses terrible possibilities just around the corner.

Meanwhile, adult sons Biff (Christopher Abbot) and Happy (Ben Ahlers, although I caught Jake Silbermann in a fine understudy performance) are in the midst of the sort of drawn-out coming-of-age crisis that each generation seems to invent anew. They don’t know who they are. They can’t see a way toward making enough money. They’re unwilling to commit to anything or anyone. They yearn for big American lives — cattle ranches, an endless stream of available women, the dream of finally pulling one over on the boss — and are only just beginning to question whether that yearning has anything to do with the big American emptiness they feel.

The pressure created by the family’s unfulfilled dreams — of financial security, a sense of purpose, a bit of rest — turns most explosive between Willy and Biff. Willy yearns for his eldest son, once a promising boy who idolized his father, to become the business bigshot he never quite managed to become himself. But, at 34, Biff no longer seems able to stand anything about his father — up to and including the flashy American brilliance Willy sees himself as bequeathing. The tension between the father with a dream, and the son who refuses to fulfill it, comes to tragedy.

In this way, Willy’s problem is an inversion of Lear’s: His obsession with his firstborn son drives him and his family to a kind of ruin. (Youngest child Happy’s story is the quietest tragedy in Death of a Salesman; he is an overgrown boy, developmentally frozen by his desire for Willy’s never-forthcoming approval, or even attention.) And as Shakespeare’s great tragedy illustrated certain formative flaws in the English national character — I cannot recommend James Shapiro’s The Year of Lear enough — so Willy’s obsession casts a damning light on the country that created him.

Willy is all-American: He loves cars, football, fantastic get-rich-quick schemes and womanizing. He sees his chosen profession as evincing great American values: “respect, and comradeship, and gratitude,” not to mention the glory of the open road.

He’s also an individualist who has abundantly reaped the costs of that posture. He has exactly one friend, a neighbor called Charley, whom he appears not to actually like. He sees himself in constant competition with his fellow man, and carries a strain of exceptionalism that borders on the delusional. His conviction that he lives in a land of boundless opportunity has poisoned him against reality. He understands, on some level, that he hasn’t completely succeeded in achieving glory, but he can’t let himself accept that understanding. As it turns out, he would rather die.

These flaws are particularly painful to encounter at this moment, when the country has less a president than a salesman-in-chief. Willy’s preoccupation with a certain kind of smoke-and-mirrors business success now seems less like a reflection of the country Miller knew than a prediction of the ways in which it would decline. The fallacy that liberty is inherently tied to financial success has warped the nation, just as it warped Willy himself.

Biff rejects the exceptionalist mindset Willy strives to instill in him: “Pop, I’m a dime a dozen, and so are you!” he rages in a climactic argument. But Happy buys into his father’s worldview, celebrating him as a great possessor of “the only dream you can have — to come out number-one man.” When Happy insists that he will follow in Willy’s footsteps and “beat this racket” — the obscure American system that seems to keep the common man down, despite the country’s promise — the audience can easily imagine what will follow: a lifetime of disappointed entitlement, and, in the end, a legacy as meager as his father’s.

Willy might see it as an insult for Happy, whom he’s always treated as an afterthought, to seize the title of his true heir. Like Lear, his preoccupation with the question of what he’ll leave behind, and who will treasure it, has prevented him from understanding the truth about his children and himself. Lear is too attached to the concept of his own majesty to bother with effective governance; Willy is so devoted to his false idol of success that he departs the world without knowing much about it. In both cases, the playwrights understood what their characters couldn’t: that children, like countries, learn by example.

The post They told Willy Loman he was everything; ’twas a great American lie appeared first on The Forward.