Michael G. Kesler METUCHEN — Surviving tragedies was a common subject among five authors who gathered Jan. 16 at Congregation Neve Shalom to discuss their work.
Author Michael G. Kesler is a resident of East Brunswick and congregant at the Metuchen synagogue. His “Shards of War, Fleeing to & from Uzbekistan” is about the journey he and his sister took as teens fleeing east from their home in Dubno, Poland (now in Ukraine), just hours ahead of the German army during World War II.
As his mother packed sandwiches and told them to dress in their warmest sweaters, Kesler recalled her telling them that “maybe she’d see us in a couple of days, or maybe never.”
Kesler told of jumping trains, hiding among wounded Russian soldiers. One of the young men asked them to go to Kiev to tell his parents he was alive and well. This was fortuitous, as the man’s parents would house the siblings for two weeks before they caught a train to Stalingrad. Eventually, they took up residence in rural Uzbekistan, eking out a living as a teacher and vet assistant. After his sister almost died in 1943 of typhoid fever, they moved to a nearby city, where Kesler worked as a weaver. After the war, they moved to Krakow before making their way to the Czech Republic and Austria, then a West German displaced persons camp, Paris, and then to the U.S. to attend college in Maine and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kesler eventually became an engineer and settled in New Jersey.
Kesler said he wanted to write his book to let the world know how he and many others from Poland survived the Holocaust by escaping to the Soviet Union. There are reports stating that only 300,000 Jews, out of more than 3 million, survived in Poland.
“But they didn’t do it living in Poland,” Kesler said. “They lived in Soviet Russia to stay alive.”
Martin Lemelman depicted his youth as the child of parents who ran a candy store in his graphic novel, “Two Cents Plain: My Brooklyn Boyhood.” He also was the child of Holocaust survivors who married in a displaced persons camp.
“My life was formed by their experiences,” Lemelman said. “There were many marriages [in the camp] because people really did want to start over.”
Characters in the story include his mother, who “was always trying to feed me”; his father, who wanted to be wealthy but always seemed to be an outsider; and the candy store, a character in itself. The title is from the cheapest drink one could get, a plain seltzer for 2 cents. Lemelman would get to read all the comic books the store sold, but he had to keep them in mint condition so they could be sold when he was finished.
Haya Leah Molnar also chronicled a childhood in the postwar period. She spent the first 10 years of her life under communist rule in a family of Jews for whom Soviet religious oppression was better than Nazi-influenced anti-Semitism.
“I’m amazed, listening to the other authors, about how much we have in common,” Molnar said.
Her book, “Under a Red Sky,” was originally a response to her daughter’s need to interview an immigrant for a school project.
“There were one child and seven adults living under one roof. I had no idea I was Jewish; I just had this understanding it was dangerous to be Jewish,” Molnar said.
Frederick Reiken’s “Day for Night,” the New Jersey native’s third book, ties together a Holocaust survivor, an FBI agent, a Massachusetts veterinarian, a teenager in Utah and others as events around the world unfold. He said the story began as he researched an incident reported duringWorldWar II about 100 Jewish scholars who were gathered in one city for what they thought was archival work. Tragically, they were marched to a pit outside of town and shot.
“This is my most unconventional novel so far,” Reiken said of “Day for Night,” and how it is written from the points of view of 10 characters speaking in monologues. “My approach was to imagine, what if one or two of those men survived?”
Reiken added, “This book tells the story of intergenerational issues and how they stay with us. Sometimes you can’t get closure … how do you reconcile that?”
In “Wherever You Go: A Novel,” Joan Leegant, an American living in Israel, follows three young Americans living in Israel. One becomes seduced by religious fervor. Leegant also depicts two estranged sisters meeting for the first time in 10 years as their lives intersect with extremism.“ How are we supposed to live our lives?” Leegant asked. “For some greater movement or cause, or do we live for our own happiness? … At what point, no matter what your upbringing, are you responsible for your actions?
“If we were to look at issues plaguing our planet right now, religious extremism is on top,” she said.