The Apocalypse is a Personal Affair

World War Two. A fourteen-year-old boy of German-Polish descent is sent by Stalin into exile thousands of miles from his home – merely because of his heritage. The boy’s parents are missing – his mother who is half-Polish was arrested because of her marriage to a German while his father has been sent to a gulag… The boy is alone. Somewhere to the south on the border between Kazakhstan and China he miraculously survives and grows up. There he marries a Ukrainian woman whose family was also sent to Central Asia. Two of their daughters are born in exile the second during the year of Stalin’s death – 1953. The third is born two years later in Georgia on the shores of the Black Sea where the boy’s forefathers had long ago built a mineral water spa. During the communist era the German becomes the furnace stoker and handyman at his own grandfather’s spa complex. Yet he is still required to check in with the police as a “criminal” for years after his return from exile. The novel’s narrator and main character is the grandson of that exiled German. He lives in Bulgaria and is the son of the second daughter who was born in 1953. His life his thoughts and feelings his path has been determined by his forefathers – a fact which he realizes as his everyday life unfolds with all of its surprises: first love first friendships trips to visit distant relatives becoming a man the university love marriage children. And questions so many questions about the meaning of existence about that original meaning given by God because without God things are meaningless… Faith is every paragraph and in every question. But there are different religions and faiths. What does the narrator believe in? The novel is a family saga scattered and fragmented inconsistent in time and space because life itself is inconsistent and no matter how chronologically we try to order the world it always remains a frozen fragment in an individual’s mind. Time is an illusion for this reason the novel’s chronology is inconsistent. What is consistent are the main character’s feelings. These feelings are the guiding elements from beginning to end. From the moment he has begun to think until the moment he has to teach his own children about thinking. In Bulgaria the narrator grows up in a small magical house. It is magical thanks to his grandmother whom he visits often during weekends and vacations far from civilization next to a wild field beyond which lies the Gypsy quarter. Years later the words of his now-deceased grandmother still sound as strongly guiding him through the twists and turns of life. The other sounds of his childhood also resound strongly. His other grandmother is somewhere in Georgia. His maternal grandfather the German exiled by Stalin journeys back to his roots in Germany in the late 20th century where he dies in a workplace accident in 2000. His two aunts manage to emigrate from their homes in St. Petersburg and Georgia and to gain German citizenship even though they don’t speak a word of German. They speak Russian a fact which has also defined their characters. They live out their old age in Germany. The narrator visits his aunts and gradually pieces together the whole picture. Or at least he would like to piece it together. Life is more colorful and far-reaching than literature. While people are like specks of dust blown about by fate to all corners of the planet. One such speck of dust is the narrator’s uncle the son of the German grandfather and his Jewish second wife who is now living somewhere on the shores of Israel. The narrator’s friends and acquaintances are other specks of dust. There are no objective laws governing our existence. There is only mercy and compassion.