The Leaves Are Falling: A Novel

by Lucy Beckett

Winner of the 2015 Aquinas Award for Fiction! An octogenarian bookseller living alone in London has found a description of his father, as a young doctor in 1920s Breslau, in a story about Weimar Germany. Perhaps his own story might be worth telling? In 1945, as a sixteen-year-old boy rescued from the ruins of Europe, he arrives at a Yorkshire farmhouse. Working on the farm for two years in the strange atmosphere of rural England immediately after World War II, he learns to deal with his memories of what happened to him and to his family and to trust, up to a point, those around him in a foreign country. London in 1947 is stranger still. But the boy is lucky, as he has been since 1941, when marksmen tried to shoot him into a pit full of corpses in a Lithuanian forest. The year before, different executioners in a different forest further east had shot and killed his father. Those who faced the worst atrocities of World War II, which were inflicted on people in the "bloodlands" of eastern Poland and western Russia, knew that there was little to choose between the two mighty machines, Nazi and Soviet. How was it possible for the individual to survive the crushing wheels of ideology, terror, and mass murder with his integrity intact?  The Leaves Are Falling , a sequel to  A Postcard from the Volcano  but a stand-alone story, explores this question.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Catholic

314 pages, Hardcover

First published April 14, 2014

Reviews

[Jodie Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book Review: The Leaves Are Falling: A Novel by Lucy Beckett

I have read numerous novels and nonfiction works about World War II. It is a fascinating period in world history and marks the end of the Modern movement in the arts. It is simultaneously heartbreaking because of the the lows human beings sank to and awe-inspiring because of the selflessness and sacrifice of so many men, women, and children. It is, in truth, one period of history with which I am fascinated, and I have devoured as many stories as I can—fictional and nonfictional—about humans confronted with some of the worst situations we can create in this era. Yet, as much as I have read about World War II, I find I have always focused on the Allied forces vs. Germany, but there is so much more to this era.

So, it was with appreciation, excitement, and a visceral cringe that I approached The Leaves Are Falling by Lucy Beckett, published by Ignatius Press. And, it is with indebtedness, relief, and questions that I have finished this novel about the impact of the Poland-German-Russia-Lithuania component of World War II.

Beckett writes the novel in two parts, with two prologues, to introduce the stories of two men of the Halpern family—the son’s first and the father’s second. The stories these men, Polish Jews, recount is of the tenuous existence of not only European Jews, but of the country of Poland itself. Linking the two seemingly separate stories is the bridge story of the temporally brief, but rich relationship between a writer and the son, Joseph Halpern.

Joseph’s story of being orphaned—truly his whole family is eradicated—is filled with neglected history. In fact, his story often contradicts the story told by the victors about which country, ruler, or commander perpetrated which massacre. Joseph seeks to set the story straight, to seek truth in historical accounts, so that his experiences and his family members’ deaths are validated.

The second half of the story is the story of Dr. Jacob Halpern’s imprisonment by the Russians, fictionalized by the unnamed writer at Joseph’s request, to provide for Joseph some idea of what his father endured and ultimately how he met his end at the hands of the Russians.

Things I Love:
1. Quest for Truth: Both through the men’s stories and through Dr. Halpern’s conversations with fellow prisoners about faith, this story is concerned with Truth (capital “T”), with dignity, and with the reality that individuals matter. This is really the cornerstone of the entire novel and I appreciate the rawness of this aspect of the story.
2. Characterization: Beckett creates unique voices for Joseph and the unnamed writer, as well as for Dr. Halpern, his interrogator, and the rabbi. Joseph’s speech patterns in particular caused me to hear his voice as the narrator throughout more than half the novel. Such rich and moving attention to detail through Beckett’s careful characterization is endearing.
3. History: I hear the echo Winston Churchill saying “History is written by the victors” throughout this novel. The winners are ignored. Those who are pawns in the bigger game are ignored. There is so much history in this novel of which I was only in the most cursory way aware that has caused me to become so much more curious about the things I don’t know: the ways history has been manipulated to represent the “truth” (small “t”) we come to know and the ways the victors attempt to minimize their parts in their less savory deeds.
4. Values: Joseph and Jacob Halpern are only two of Beckett’s characters who exhibit values their moms and grandmothers would be proud of. Even in the face of outrageous events, they never resort to vengeance or hatred. However, they are not the only ones to exhibit courage, selflessness, charity, and honor.
5. Appreciation of Intellect: Beckett emphasizes appreciating intellectual activities, especially difficult intellectual questions, that I find incredibly appealing. She doesn’t back down from serious conversations and, especially with Jacob Halpern, tackles the existential dilemma of the Modern man: the existence of God. Beckett allows several characters to wrestle with their position in the universe and the science vs. religion binary people still wrestle with. Observing the characters engaging in this struggle is beautiful and Beckett boldly captured this element of humanity.
6. Language: Beckett builds a beautiful interrogation of language—etiquette, bigotry, expectations—that I see echoed in how she uses language to create her characters. This is especially true in Joseph’s half of the story.
7. Nods to Russian authors and works: Mention of The Brothers Karamazov and War and Peace and Anton Chekhov’s works thrilled me. Many of these works I had read; some are still on my to-read list. Now, I am reinvigorated to visit these works.
8. Contemporary political tie-in: The final conversation between the writer and Joseph stunned me for its contemporary references and insights. Especially in light of the recent happenings between Ukraine and Russia, Israel and Iran, I am intrigued by how many of these conflicts have roots in unresolved issues stemming from World War II.

Things I Like Less:
1. Title Significance: I felt I didn’t have a good grasp on the significance of the title until the last few pages, at which point it became clear to me. I am concerned that the subtlety of the title’s significance causes the richness of the metaphor it creates to become lost. I would appreciate a better building of the title’s significance throughout the text and I think there is plenty of room in which to do this through both Jacob’s and Joseph’s stories.
2. Incompleteness of Joseph’s story: Although we do find out more about Joseph’s story, I feel somewhat let down that we don’t learn more of Joseph’s story after his marriage. This left me feeling incomplete, but perhaps that was intentional.

After having finished this novel, I find myself musing about the characters somewhat more than after finishing other novels. I keep asking myself, “what if…” and “what about…,” questions which I cannot find answers for. I keep wanting a happier ending for Jacob, and for Joseph, too. However, Beckett gave Joseph the happiest of endings he thought he could possibly receive and, while it was a fictional truth, Joseph found Truth in the homage rising from the contemptuous situation Jacob was placed in.

Although filled with a lot of traditionally historical dates and places, at the heart of the story—both men’s stories—is the quest for the truth, and it is this heart of the story that compels me to rank this book among my favorites in historical fiction dealing with World War II.

[Patricia Mckenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a beautiful work of historical fiction with descriptive detail. It is not my usual genre I read but has challenged me to investigate the real history behind the story. It is as if you are sitting at the feet of your grandfather as he tells you a gripping personal account of his life. The geopolitical background was at times hard to follow for a novice like myself in World War II history. It did make me want to learn more about post World War II Europe. I read more about the true story of the Katyn massacre and the 25,000 Polish soldiers who were murdered in Russia in 1940. The author has done well at putting herself into the story and making you feel like you were there.
Most interesting, in the story of the Dad (Jacob Halpern) was a religious conversation with a Rabbi in a Russian prison. Jacob had met God in his time of need, when pushed up against the wall of denial by Russian interrogators. He allowed himself to witness to the truth of God. It brought him peace in a greater truth during a time of confusion about what is right and wrong and what are allegiances and deceit. There was a great truth that no political leader or ideology could drown out that of God himself. Jacob tells us that “God is to be met not discussed”. We are called to know God not just about God and it is through extreme challenges that we understand this best.
The major theme of the book without spoiling the end is from a quote “If we were to live as good Christians and good Jewish people there would not have been these horrors down through the centuries.” I recommend this book as a beautiful way to enter into this interesting time period in history and what binds us all together even with different backgrounds of religion and nationalities

[Diane · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel tells the story of a young Jewish boy from Vilna during and after the Second World War. He escapes to Britain, and eventually builds a new life there. The novel follows his telling his story to a writer when he is an old man. The second half of the story is him telling about his father's imprisonment and execution by Soviet Russia. The writing is good, and the characters are well-drawn, but the book is very heavy on dialogue and characters having deep philosophical discussions with each other. I appreciated the fact that a Catholic author was able to write about a Jewish character with deep feeling and sensitivity.

[Isabella · Rating 3 out of 5]

Started out great but took me forever to finish. This book was full of factual history of WWII Polish Jews and what they went through but the message got lost in the over abundance of words and conversation between the characters. I love her different scenes of world events that are normally not the ones presented.

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the fourth book by Lucy Beckett I've read, all published by Ignatius Press (she has also written about Wagnerian opera and Wallace Stevens). Her "Light of Christ: Writings in the Western Tradition" is a tremendous overview of Western literature; I read it through and still refer to it as a reference. It's a really great accomplishment from a teacher and lover of literature. "The Time Before You Die" is her novel set in England from the Dissolution of the Monasteries to the death of Mary I and Reginald Cardinal Pole, the last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, and effectively delineates the religious changes through that era. "A Postcard from the Volcano" is in some ways the prequel to this novel, and although it is also often made up of conversation, Beckett creates relationships and personal conflicts throughout the novel. As the stories of the seven friends develop, they face the coming danger of the Nazi regime and of the Soviet system, setting up the conflict of World War II. It was also an effective exploration, this time of the period between World War I and World War II, with discussions of philosophy, music and the arts, politics and ideology.

Beckett continues her exploration of the two great destructive ideologies of the twentieth century in this novel, but less successfully in my opinion. While I know and grant that she is writing in a certain genre, a novel of ideas, I wanted more depth from at least one of her main characters. As I read the book I kept waiting for something to happen. Beckett delivers her ideas through long conversations and indirection. The centerpiece of the novel is the Massacre at Katyn, in which almost 22,000 Polish prisoners of war were executed by the Soviets, who blamed the Nazis. In the first part, the surviving son of a Jewish (though not religiously Jewish) family from Vilnius, which was in Poland when he lived there, is a refugee in England, working on a farm. He tells the landowner, his sponsor, that the Soviets killed the Polish officers, including his father, and of course, is not believed. Josef Halpern, son of Jacob Halpern, lives in England, marries and has a child. In the framing device of the novel, he asks the narrator to tell his story. He then asks the narrator to tell his father's story, as she imagines Jacob Halpern's last days as a prisoner of war before his execution at Katyn. The novel closes with the novelist's last visit to Joseph in a nursing home and his reported death.

Although religion and God are often mentioned in the conversations, neither of the main characters practices any faith or worships God in prayer or ritual. Josef and Jacob are cultural Jews, knowing their history and its traditions, but not incorporating them in their lives. Thus the discussions about the evils of Nazism, or Communism, or Zionism never transcend the philosophical or theoretical, because they are not answered by lives of faith and action. Josef's family life, for example, is described, not depicted or dramatized, in four pages, with the anodyne comment that he and his wife were "as happy as most married people are who care for each other and have a little more than enough money to live on"! There is little passion or life in the characters and that's where the novel fails, at least in the section about Josef. I think it is because his confrontations with evil are always reported from the past as memories, not as something we see happening to him.

In part two, as Josef's father struggles for survival in the Soviet prisoner of war camp, there is some greater love and passion, particularly when a rabbi comforts a Christian prisoner on his deathbed. It was the one moment of the novel that moved me, as the rabbi recites the Lord's Prayer and helps the dying man reconcile with God by the confession of his sins. That act of faith, witnessed by Jacob, experienced by the Catholic Radek Dobrowski, and mediated by the Rabbi Baruch Steinberg, is the one great transcendent moment of love and faith in the novel. Jacob, perhaps moved by this example, is then able to comfort the young Catholic Pole with him before their executions at Katyn, "They can kill us. They can't hurt us."

"The Leaves are Falling" needed more such moments to exalt the true dignity and freedom of the human person beyond discussions of political systems. I think historical fiction needs to be more than a vehicle for the expression of ideas or verisimilitude of historical setting, with details about shortages and rationing in post war Britain, or the endlessly cited example of Vilna or Vilnius being first in Poland and then in Lithuania. For all the human tragedy depicted in "The Leaves are Falling", I was not involved in the life of Josef Halpern because he was not fleshed out as a person beyond being a character and vehicle for discussion of the past or even of the errors of the present. Jacob Halpern emerges more fully as a person, growing in awareness, coming closer to something great. He becomes the hero of his story; his son does not.

[Jgarcia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book, especially the first story about Joseph Halpern. Joseph spent his childhood in Lithuania, which was so decimated in World War II but yet I had never heard this story. He was sent to Great Britain after the war, where he knew no one, to begin a new life. After Joseph story they tell the story of his father, which to me was not as interesting as it was all in the camp and was more political. Very tragic. It was a good book, I recommend it.

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book caught my eye in a religious goods store several weeks ago. I picked it up, having never heard of Lucy Beckett or her books before.

It is a novel of ideas, a roman philosophique et historique, as the inner dust jacket description reads. The tale is of Josef Halpern, a Jewish refugee from Vilna (Vilnius), who escapes Nazis and Soviets during the fighting in the Eastern Front during World War II. He comes to Great Britain, where he builds a life, though never speaking of his experiences or the now-vanished and destroyed world of his youth. He engages an unnamed author to write not his only story, but the conjectural story of his father, a Polish reservist officer killed in the massacre in the Katyn Forest.

It's a good novel. There are discussions of religion, nationality, ideology, suffering... for someone like me, who often finds fiction tiresome and repetitive, the discussion intrigued me.

As I wrote: it's a good novel. But I didn't find it great. Other reviewers have suggested that Beckett's first novel, A Postcard from the Volcano, is a prequel of sorts to this novel and the better work. I hope to read it and find out if this is so.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is incredible, in part for the storytelling. Is this how people felt when they were reading Dickens or Salinger or Steinbeck or Hemingway for the first time? Beckett is nothing less than masterful, and her characters are robust, breathing off the pages.

This is a tale, not of suspense, but of history. And it's the history of people, of geography, of so much more than the dates I hated memorizing in high school. There's a texture to Beckett's writing that's compelling and memorable.

Highly, highly recommended. I'll be checking out her other books, and in fact, I have A Postcard from the Volcano already on my Kindle...

[Christy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A thoughtful, poignant historical novel about the horrific realities of war, toxic ideologies, and the high cost of keeping your soul. I appreciated the well done historical recounting of how closely Nazism and Communism were during WWII and after. My only fault with the book were the pieces of dialogue which went on for a bit too long at times. Also, I kept waiting to go anther level deeper with these characters. It would have made the novel great, but as it is it is a novel worth reading for any history buff or those interested in Eastern Europe.

[Virginia Bonnett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, this book was good. A historic novel, we learn about Josef Halpern, a young Polish Jew who at the age of 15 is a refugee in England after WWII. Beckett's way of writing is so full of beauty. her descriptions of things and emotions is poetic. I loved this book for so many reasons--its history, teh way it led me to research and seek to learn more about the true happenings of Poland during the World Wars, Beckett's writing style. This book has a sequel that I am greatly anticipating.

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written historical fiction. I learned a lot about the borderlands between Russia and Europe and the impact of WW2 politics on the people of Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine. I think Beckett's writing is vivid and engaging, so I bumped it up from a 3. But I did feel that the dialogue occasionally tended to "tell" instead of show. Still, an eye-opening story.

[Susan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting story about a Jewish boy who survives the Second World War, but Beckett tries to be fair to the good Germans and British anti-Semites. The story-telling is awkward, repetitive and self-congratulating, with much anti-Israeli sentiment. A serious flaw: why didn't the lonely Josef think to go to a synagogue?

[Clare]

Currently being reviewed for www.GoodReadingGuide.com

[Dawna Richardson · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story is good however, the style is overly wordy. Also. The second prologue and continuation from there was a difficult--and not necessarily pleasant transition.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author gave the reader a feel how a person may have viewed the world after experiencing unbelievable horrors of WWII.

[Emily Jeffries · Rating 4 out of 5]

Find my review on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/XqvKXITftJQ
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