Stories My Father Told Me: From Warsaw, Moscow, Algeria, Siberia, Kazakhstan, Dominican Republic
I wrote this book based on a memoir my father wrote for me
late in his life and stories I had heard at the dining table over the years. These
are stories from far off places, in far off and very different times. And yet
they are of everyday people doing everyday things. They are the stories of my
father, Rafał Feliks Buszejkin who was born in Warsaw in 1912.
In his stories he explained what he and the other children
did in Russia in the 1910s to entertain themselves in the winter. He never
attended cheder, but with a tutor, he memorized his speech for his Bar Mitzvah
at the Great Synagogue of Warsaw. In high school there was that band of youths
who played poker and got into mischief. He was one of them. He boxed, he worked
out and built his muscles, he did track and field, raced bicycles. He failed
his last year of high school. He was not a typical Eastern European Jew of that
time.
He told stories of wolves in the forest in 1917, and
bankruptcy at home in 1933. Stories of university days in France and months
spent with Sephardic Jews in a small desert town in Algeria where he set up a
Maccabi sports club.
There are love stories, stories of rich men who lose it all
and poor ones who become rich. Because he had studied agronomy, he was employed
all through the war and all through his life. His war-time stories from Siberia
tell of hard work, trying to have enough to eat, and avoiding the NKVD. The
Kazakh stories tell of a mix of western and eastern cultures, working for a
government agency supervising the agriculture at five kolkhozes, living among
the Kazakhs, sharing their food, drink, and yurts, and of spending two months
in a Soviet prison for refusing Soviet citizenship.
Postwar brought him from the steppes of Kazakhstan to the
French Riviera, then to the Dominican Republic where he farmed in a collective
Jewish refugee settlement. And finally, the United States, where there were
jobs, the possibility of making a good life, and no secret police.
The book is available as ebook or paperback on Amazon,
other online retailers, and your favorite bookshop where you would probably
need to order it. If you read it, please let me know what you think. And if you
like it, please leave a review on Amazon, Goodreads, or other social media if
you can. Thanks!
