Under Review

Reviews by Robert Blaisdell

How My Grandfather Stole a Shoe and Survived The Holocaust in Ukraine

Julie Masis
Cherry Orchard Books; 260 pp; $24.95

How My Grandfather Stole a Shoe and Survived the Holocaust in Ukraine is an exquisite memoir – and a model of how to write one. That is, be modest; collect any story you can get about or by the subject; if the tales have discrepancies, question them; provide the context of the recollections’ retellings; do some research, but don’t let that material block your readers’ sight of the memoir’s star. Julie Masis, a Russian-born, Boston-based journalist, writes:

… I tried to learn more by searching in the archives and traveling to the places where my ancestors lived in Ukraine and Moldova. But mostly I ended up recording the stories I heard from my parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles. I wrote them down because I wanted to save other people’s memories.
 

Her grandfather, Shlomo Masis, born in 1913 in a small, mostly Jewish village in Moldova, survived until 2019.  He only left Russia and the newly dissolved Soviet Union in 1992, when he joined his son’s family in Lynn, Massachusetts, where he ended his days in a nursing home.

Shlomo’s story is revealed not only when the events occurred, but also when and how the events were recalled. Asked for clarifying details, Shlomo couldn’t always elaborate: “… it seemed that his memories were made up of stories that he had retold many times, and he couldn’t find the answers to the questions that he hadn’t already answered before.”

Masis’s memoir has been a long-term project:

… when my father was reading this book, he asked grandpa what gave him the strength during the war.
Grandpa Shlomo replied that he wanted to find out who would win the war.
It was curiosity that kept him going.
 

This means it was curiosity that didn’t kill the cat.

The miniature chapters (most are less than 500 words), interspersed with drawings and sketches by the Soviet artist Felix Lembersky (1913-1970), is affecting by sheer accumulation. Masis writes deliberately plainly, concentrating her efforts on evoking complicated feelings in the plainest of terms:

“And how did your father die, grandpa?” I asked.
“I will tell you,” grandpa Shlomo said, which is the way he often began his stories.
 

Besides the passages about consequential, life-changing moments and the humorous and seemingly inconsequential but enlivening moments from Shlomo’s long life, Masis vividly recounts her travels to Zguritsa and Obodovka. She also presents some historical background that her grandfather may not have fully known:

When I consulted a reference book, I learned that between 9,000 and 10,000 Jews (most of them deported from Moldova, like my grandparents) were imprisoned at the Obodovka ghetto between the fall of 1941 and the spring of 1944.
 

Dispensing with the illusion of completeness or comprehensiveness, Masis has created a portrait that acknowledges the vast gaps of knowledge about Shlomo’s life, but also shows how memory is illuminated in the present. A particularly touching moment occurs when she goes to visit her 102-year-old grandfather after her trip to Moldova:

He wanted to know which towns I visited — Chisinau, Edinets, Zguritsa, Balti, Chernivtsi — but even more he wanted to know who I had met in Moldova. I wasn’t sure who he wanted me to meet, but it seemed that he wanted to know if I met any of his old friends or neighbors, anyone who remembered him.
 

Maybe if we exist in others’ memories, we really have survived.

But how did Shlomo steal that shoe? … Well, he’ll tell you, but you’ll have to read this excellent book to find out.

And Other Stories

By Michael Ishenko
Translated by Liv Bliss
Andrii Vovk Publishing House; 296 pp.; $20

These autobiographical tales (originally published in Ukraine as И другие рассказы) flow in the vein of Mark Twain, and I would guess and assess, as Huck Finn remarks of Twain’s efforts, “There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.”

Ishenko hails from Odessa (as he spells it), where he was born in the late fall of 1953: “The way Mom told it, the view through the window was white, celebratory, truly festive. The nurse caught her eye and wished her newborn a life as beautiful as the view. I thank them both. Odessa is a good place to be born. It’s flat. If you turn to face the sea, there’ll be nothing behind you but a level grassland, the steppe. No forests; no mountains or hills.”

And Other Stories is essentially a collection of episodes of, I would say, a thoroughly, marvelously conversational picaresque novel. The most amusing and extended of the tales are about Ishenko (or his fictional double, also named Michael Ishenko) serving as an English-to-Russian (and back again) translator from 1984-86 in Nigeria, in a compound populated by a couple of thousand Soviet specialists who were helping to build a steel works plant. Though he and the others were earning what they considered astronomical salaries, the Soviet government took about 95% off the top. Ishenko had more freedom to see the countryside and Lagos than the others, because one of his primary duties was negotiating for his superiors with various Nigerian big-men in order to smooth over business and legal issues and to pay them off with officially sanctioned bribes.

After emigrating to San Francisco in 1992, Ishenko and his wife, also a translator, had to decide whether or not to continue their practice of raising their young son in two languages. I’ll quote at length from this, one of my favorite passages:

Irina and I were on different shifts, so that our little one would always have someone there without us having to call in outside help. When she was home, Irina continued speaking Russian with him, while with me it was English and nothing else. That’s how he became bilingual. It was interesting to watch him. For example, he was sitting at his play-table one day, drawing something. I was standing behind him, and he knew it, or felt it, so the drawing was accompanied by a running commentary in English. I left the room (our one and only room), and Irina came in. Mitya didn’t turn around but instinctively felt the change and switched to Russian in mid-sentence. He didn’t yet know he was speaking in Russian and English. But he never confused the languages and was strict about the allocation of linguistic functions in our family. One time, when Irina tried to say something to him in English, he cut her short, with: “Don’t talk to me like Daddy!” He knew two languages, and they were called Mommy’s and Daddy’s.
 

An interesting, unusual but regular feature of the tales, which have a tendency towards around-the-world coincidental remeetings, is a question and answer between an unnamed and curious reader and the narrator:

“And what was in the package?”
“How should I know? I wasn’t about to open it. I passed it on to Krotov and forgot about it.”
“Weren’t you even a little bit curious?”
“I was. But I didn’t act on it. Besides, many years later, I did learn what was in there.”
“How exactly?”
 

And so on.

Ishenko concludes the book with a dialogue between him and his delightful, witty and pitch-perfect translator, Liv Bliss.