Good for a Single Journey, by Helen Joyce

Amsterdam Publishers is very happy to announce the publication today of Good for a Single Journey by Helen Joyce. It is a memorable family chronicle; a reimagined story of the Spiegels from whom our author descends. It is based on the true story of her Polish Jewish family and charts their experiences as they strive to make a life for themselves in the beginning of the 20th century.

The author was born into a Jewish family in London in the 1950s. Her mother, Klari, was born into a wealthy family in Austria, and her father in turn was a self-made businessman with an empire of properties in Vienna. Joyce’s family were Hasidic Jews who lived in Poland for generations. Her mother fled Nazi persecution in 1939, leaving for London as a young woman on her own. Joyce’s grandparents could not obtain a visa; they were stripped of their assets and eventually deported to Theresienstadt. They were never heard from again. This is their story.

Good for a Single Journey is fundamentally a reconstruction of the lives of each of Joyce’s forebears, singling in on the critical decisions and tumultuous journeys they took that lead either to their survival, or proved fruitless in the face of the staggering Nazi machinations at play. The lives of every child and grandchild are examined and enlarged with thoughtful hindsight. With her stirring and serious writing, Joyce charts the growth, the tranquility and the destruction of entire family units. It is at once a sorrowful and hopeful read.

Joyce leads the reader on a journey through the annals of her family’s past. We begin in 1914 on a train bound for Vienna, as the Spiegel family’s matriarch Pessya, husband Shmaryahu and their five children flee the pogroms in Poland. They are a bustling, vibrant young family but they are fearful, coming as they are as refugees to a strange city where they know barely a soul. One of the few souls they do know, Salamon, meets them on the train’s platform, and so begins their fateful venture into the unknown.

The charismatic, frightfully intelligent Salamon is Joyce’s grandfather. He weds Ida Spiegel in Vienna, and the pair have three children. Their story of early romance, martial bliss, misfortune and success constitutes the crux of this novel. The reader is invited into the intimate daily life of the family as they struggle against adversity. While their lives develop, we are drawn to consider the nature of prejudice and bigotry. One memorable incident involves the Austrian government confiscating Salamon’s property during the First World War, purely because they could use it for financial gain, and because he was Jewish. There is no denying the state-sanctioned profiteering and indifference to the Jewish plight, and it is a revelatory, unexpected source of antisemitism.

Indeed, this memoir is unflinching in its portrayal of the antisemitic sentiment that was rife across Northern Europe in the first half of the 20th century. Violent pogroms in the east, state endorsed prejudice, the segregation of Jewish citizens, the progressive removal of rights and freedoms, civilian collaboration with persecutory Nazi policies, the deportation and mass murder of countless families in the Holocaust: all of these injustices and tragedies occur recurrently in this arresting tale, punctuating and shaping the lives of each beloved and missed aunt, uncle and grandparent.

While the generations of family members are plagued by societal animosity and apathy, their stories are not all disheartening. Those who fled east to Palestine experienced a relative calm and prospering in their respective households. Klari herself left for England and lead a happy, if not traumatized life. In contrast to the deteriorating circumstances in Europe, where war rages, most countries are occupied and Jews are being rounded up, never to be seen again, the experiences of those who set out for a new life elsewhere resembles a relative sanctuary of safety and prosperity.

Joyce bases this fictional interpretation of her family’s story on true events. The fate of her Pessya, Shmaryahu and their children are accurately recounted and expanded upon, with the result of making her family history one that engrosses and preoccupies the reader long after putting down the book. Where the narrative does veer away from the facts, it does so to shed a much-needed light on the little known political developments that had a ?significant historical impact. In the book, Pessya’s two young sons become intelligence agents for the Allies in the Middle East, and later on again for the Zionist movement. While this may have been an invention, it is a constructive and rewarding one. The Jewish battalions fighting in both wars, and the intricacies of the early Zionist movement bring the reader directly into the vital action, and reveals a part of world history that has been neglected and forgotten over the years, despite its contemporary relevance.

The overarching search for a new Jewish homeland is crucial to this novel. Joyce explores and lays bare the fight, from its political infancy all the way to the founding of the state of Israel. And indeed, the author explores her own attitude towards the country and what it stands for. She recounts how, as a child visiting her family in Israel, she fell in love with the land and its people. The book ends with the buoyant, unflagging hopes of a little girl who resolves then and there to chose her own way in life: “Right now, I don’t get to choose anything, but when it’s time for me to choose my own journey, I shall return.” This wish eventually came true, and Helen Joyce now lives in Israel with her family, children and grandchildren.

Good for a Single Journey is a gripping and moving chronicle, spanning multiple countries, continents, decades, and conflicts. Joyce retraces her family’s journey from Poland to Austria, Austria to Palestine, and Poland to Serbia. The elegant narrative connects Russian labor camps, Zionist espionage, Nazi concentration camps, Jewish ghettos, and British and French artilleries. It is seamless in its weaving together of personal life stories with towering geopolitical events, and the end effect is to create a memorable and salient family epic.

Good for a Single Journey, by Helen Joyce, Amsterdam Publishers, 346 pp, is available as ebook, paperback and hardcover in all bookstores, on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. You can purchase the ebook version here: https://mybook.to/vvvjW