The Story of the Forest
In Latvia, 14-year-old Mina Mendel wanders into the forest gathering mushrooms when she meets a group of Bolsheviks who introduce her to new political thoughts about the bourgeois and common workers. “Like mushrooms in the dark,” big ideas begin to grow in her. She tells her older brother, Jossel, this fairytale-like story; he sees wolves lurking around his sister. He is concerned for her safety and virtue. Unable to convince his Jewish family to emigrate to America, Jossel is given permission to take Mina and leave behind their parents and three siblings. They make it as far as Liverpool. With funds lacking to continue, the start of World War I, and travel impossible across the Atlantic, they remain, raising their families.
We follow the Mendels in Liverpool along four generations. Blocked communications from the Soviet Union through two world wars and Stalin’s reign mean little to nothing is learned about the fate of their family left behind. Only two other siblings survive. Through the years, Mina’s story of the forest is told – by Mina, by family, by descendants. It is embellished and diluted; it is believed and dismissed.
This is a novel about the stories a family tells and passes on – memories, events, even objects. These stories, true or fable, give later generations a link to their past. Like any family saga, their foibles and successes, dreams and disappointments, births and marriages, even deaths make a great story. This is also a novel about fate – how one decision or one event determines the course of a person’s life. Not front and center, but present in the background is Jewish persecution, WWI, WWII, the Holocaust, Stalin’s oppression – all world events that play a role in separating families. A wonderful family saga.
