CHANCE AND CONSEQUENCE

A Jewish woman is forced to flee her native Poland after the invasion of Nazi Germany and tries desperately to keep her family together. 

Rachel Jonish grows up in Zarki, Poland, a small town where her father owned a leather-curing factory. In 1918, the 17-year-old is “exploding with silent restlessness,” torturously split between a genuine devotion to her family and an implacable wanderlust, a longing beautifully captured by novelist Smoller (Biostatistics and Epidemiology, 4th Ed., 2015, etc.): “She alternated between despair, at the thought she would live, marry and die in Zarki, and a firm conviction that she would escape, with the certain knowledge that she was on the verge of something.” Rachel’s first forays into romance, with a Jewish man who leaves for Palestine and a non-Jew, are heartbreakingly unsuccessful—until she falls in love with Aleks Mischler, a writer and older man who impresses her with his combination of passion and erudition. They eventually marry and have a daughter, Rilka, but she’s never confident of his attachment to her. Aleks can be aloof, and he encourages her independence. But she interprets his own independence and immersion in work as a sign of indifference or even infidelity. At one point, Rachel jealously accuses her sister, Sofie, of having an affair with him, a hypocritical stance since she’d had an affair of her own. But the pair is compelled to resolve their differences in the midst of crisis. Once Germany invades Poland in 1939, they leave for New York by way of Moscow and Japan, now refugees newly addled by poverty. The author deftly depicts the pernicious rise of anti-Semitism in Poland—both its intellectual dimensions and the urgent existential stakes. Rachel and Aleks are based on Smoller’s parents—black-and-white family photographs are included—and the author’s closeness to the story expresses itself in poignantly intimate terms. The plot is moving and sometimes soap-operatic but never contrived; the accounts of the heights and depths of love radiate verisimilitude. 

An emotionally stirring and historically realistic story.