Songa's Story
Natalie Green Giles
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2003 iUniverse
ISBN: 0595656838

How a shtetl Jew found the American Dream.

Hundreds of thousands of Jews were conscripted to fight in the Eastern European battlefields of World War II, yet their story has rarely been told. Songa was one of these Jews, serving in Stalin's army for five long years, fighting against Hitler's Fascism.

When it is over, Songa has little more than his life as an army officer: his town has been destroyed, his home razed, his family massacred, his allegiance to a ruthless dictator coerced through imprisonment, & his sense of purpose in the world unclear.

Songa's Story takes us from the quiet farmlands of an idyllic childhood in a shtetl, a Jewish village, in Ukraine, located along the national borders drawn in 1919 during the Versailles Peace Treaty; through Soviet & Nazi occupation; the bloodiest battles of WWII; postwar rebuilding, & the oppressive expansion of Communism across Eastern Europe. It is a story with an unlikely ending, in America, where Songa is allowed to transform himself from a Soviet military intelligence officer, to a loyal patriot, & an enormously successful businessman in his adopted country.

That having been writ, it does not begin to describe this astonishingly familiar yet deeply moving biography of the first born son of a close-knit secular Jewish family, dwelling for generations in Ozeryany, in the breadbasket of Europe, in what had been for almost a century under Czarist rule, the Pale of Russia. Here anti-semitism has been rife for hundreds of years, yet an uneasy social peace has developed within strictly adhered to communities.

Songa's Story starts out as he gallops homeward on a short leave, eager to embrace his family, longing for some sanity. Coming up during the interwar years, he is a country boy with a keen mind for history & commerce, & when Germany breaks its alliance with the Soviet Union, he has to choose between fleeing to America, as his uncles had, or joining up in the Red Army & fighting.

Leon chooses to fight, & leaves his little town & his beloved family on a train bound for a training camp. Far from being a Communist, Leon has a cosmopolitan flair, speaks five languages (none of them English), has studied at university & started his own business. Now he must learn the military ropes to survive on the Front against Nazi Germany. In 1942 he is sent to the siege of Stalingrad. Afterwards, as one of the last officers left standing, Stalin's dread secret police (NKVD) accuse him of being a Nazi spy & transport him to a gulag in Uzbekistan. When he does not confess after months of torture, they send him to a regular prison, which in comparison feels like a hotel. & then, strangely, he is set free. With his village still held by the Germans, Leon returns to his army unit, receives a letter absolving him of any wrongdoing, & continues to force the invaders out of his homeland, only to stumble upon the unimaginable horror of Majdanek, a Jewish death camp. & then his orders are to take Berlin.

After the war, after he has returned to his beloved home town only to find it in ruins, his family home razed, its orchards scorched, & all the Jews slaughtered in mass graves, including all his family, he has nothing left to live for. Now in the Polish Army, he must work at the reconstruction (read Communization) of his devastated country. It is then that he is reunited with the one survivor from his childhood, his beloved Auntie Ruchel, with her husband & daughter, living in a Displaced Persons camp. The miracle of their survival is one of the few shining moments when compassion overwhelmed corruption during that horrendous battle between evil & good: World War II.

From a conversation Songa overhears in a cafe, the idea grows of how he might break through the Iron Curtain to the New World where his remaining relatives are thriving. As a high ranking Red Army officer with a chestful of medals, Leon Ajces is far from the poor & downtrodden masses America enjoys embracing. & as the Cold War is heating up, Songa's only way to make a new life, is to juggle a three month attache's visa & once on there, defect.

In America at last this man, who has already survived enough for one lifetime, yearns for the American Dream, except he does not speak English, & Americans are wary of this strange immigrant & defector. Not surprisingly, Songa falls into a depression & wallows in his ashes. This is long, long before grief counselors, during a time when mental health services were shunned. Even though his relatives offer help, this man cannot get a toehold in the workforce, & his visa is about to expire & the time for deportation draws ever nearer.

How Leon not only made it in America, he also made a millionaire out of himself, found a good woman to love & thrived well into his 70s, is the stuff of all us immigrants' legends.

Natalie Green Giles, with the aid of Leon's American wife, Betty, unfolds her Uncle's story with all the elegance & insight of an adventure, complete with poignant family photos: the handful Songa was able to bring with him in 1948, on his secret escape to the New World.

Outstanding! Could not put it down! An extraordinarily well written tribute to a larger-than-life man, & a story that needs not to be forgotten. I hope it becomes a movie, for the sweep of Songa's Story is monumental!

Songa's Story is a slice of history you will never hear about in text books: it tells of a time few of us now remember, & is therefore, all the more vital to our collective story, lest we ever forget ... again.

Do catch my Interview with Natalie Green Giles, Leon Ajces' niece & the author of Songa's Story.
(09/12/04)

Rebecca