BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Funeral Party
Medea and Her Children
Sonechka
COPYRIGHT
This edition first published in hardcover in the United States and Great Britain in 2011 by Overlook Duckworth, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
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Copyright © 2006 Ludmila Ulitskaya
English translation copyright © 2011 Arch Tait
First published in Russia in 2006 by Eksmo
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN 978-1-46830-081-9
FOREWORD
This world in which we have such difficulty living is filled with misunderstanding at every level. Within the family, parents and children often fail completely to hear each other. Between individuals teachers do not understand their pupils, neighbors do not understand their neighbors, cat lovers do not understand dog lovers. At the level of society the rich, as ever, do not understand the poor, the poor do not understand the penniless, and the police do not understand the homeless. To this we must add relations between states, ethnicities, and religions. The totality of this mutual misunderstanding and rejection breeds mistrust, fear, and aggression.
This book is devoted to a man who tried all his life to break down the wall of misunderstanding. The real-life hero, Brother Daniel, Oswald Rufeisen in the world, and Daniel Stein, the hero of this novel, are not the same person. Most of the novel’s characters are fictitious, at least in part. It is they who tell us about Brother Daniel Stein, and through them the personality is revealed of someone who throughout his life, consciously and consistently, worked to promote understanding and reconciliation.
For all that, the story of the fictional character coincides almost entirely with the biography of the man. The historical setting has been retained but those peopling it have been changed. While many documents used in the book are authentic, many are fictitious, and the intention has been to allow the truth of literature to transcend the truth of mundane reality.
Brother Daniel was a Jew born in Poland who received a German education. When Poland was occupied he worked as a translator and interpreter in the Gestapo, and after Belorussia was liberated by the Red Army he served in the NKVD. In between he was a partisan in the forests of Belorussia. Sentenced on three occasions to be shot, he outwitted death many times. While working as an interpreter in the Gestapo he organized the escape of three hundred Jews from the ghetto, and after the war was awarded a medal by Russia.
He survived through a fortunate concatenation of circumstances, but was personally convinced that he had been saved by God’s help. He was nobody’s secret agent, and found his true vocation when he became a Christian—a Catholic monk and a priest.
Books, articles, and dissertations have been written about him. His wartime biography could provide the screenplay for a cliff-hanger of an action movie. Yet the second half of his life, after he emigrated in 1959 to a Carmelite monastery in Israel, although relatively quieter and more settled, saw him bearing a different kind of witness that is far less easily defined.
Through his love and compassion he built bridges between people afflicted by mutual incomprehension and loneliness. Polish Catholics turned to him for support and spiritual and practical assistance, as did Russian Jews and Orthodox Christians, Arabs, and people who would have been hard pressed to identify their national and religious affiliations even to themselves. He had a gift for understanding and empathizing.
His main mission in life he considered to be the creation of a Catholic community modeled on the Church of St. James, that first Christian church in Jerusalem before the great schism occurred between Judaism and Christianity. In the members of a single community, united in their worship of the One God, back at that remote moment in time, Brother Daniel saw his ideal for the relationship between man and God, and for relations between people. He was convinced that good acts matter more than dogma, and that a righteous life counts for more than any number of doctrines, declarations, or papal bulls.
In the eyes of conservative Jews he was not a real Jew, and in the eyes of the Roman Catholic Church he was a questionable priest. The State of Israel did not want to recognize him as a citizen, and he is buried in the Arab cemetery in Haifa. He was loved not only by his friends but by his enemies: an SS major helped him escape from arrest, and partisans who condemned him to death later gave him a medal. His views irritated the ecclesiastical hierarchy, but Pope John Paul II gave his blessing to Brother Daniel’s ministry.
The community he created lasted several decades, but in effect dispersed after the death of its priest. What he left behind is the figure of an idealist—the world still smiles knowingly at this amazing type of human being—and what lingers is the memory of someone who radiated a climate of love, joy, and sympathy.
By the fact of his existence Daniel demonstrated that contemporary Christianity, for all its historical and moral ills, is still alive, and that beneath the crust of corruption and hypocrisy, beneath the formulas and adjudications now bereft of meaning, the spirit of Love, Compassion, and Mercy lives on. Brother Daniel professed a Christianity of the poor that retained the link with its Source, the same Christianity professed by St. Francis of Assisi and St. Seraphim of Sarov.
Oswald Rufeisen, like his literary alter ego Daniel Stein, was a builder of bridges between people from different streets and neighborhoods, races and religions. With his whole life he showed that understanding is possible.
I would like to thank everybody who takes the trouble to consider the great life of this humble man.
—LUDMILA ULITSKAYA
CONTENTS
B
Y THE SAME AUTHOR
C
OPYRIGHT
F
OREWORD BY
L
UDMILA
U
LITSKAYA
PART ONE
1.
December 1985, Boston. Ewa Manukyan
2.
January 1986, Boston. Esther Gantman
3.
1959–83, Boston. From Isaak Gantman’s notes
4.
January 1946, Wrocław. Letter from Efraim Cwyk to Avigdor Stein
5.
1959, Naples. Port of Mergellina. Letter from Daniel Stein to Władysław Klech
6.
1959, Naples. Telegram from Daniel Stein to Avigdor Stein
7.
Tourist brochure. “Visit Haifa”
8.
1996, Galilee, Moshav Nof a-Galil. From a conversation between Ewa Manukyan and Avigdor Stein.