WALK THE EARTH AS BROTHERS

In Rozycki’s historical novel, Jewish brothers in 1939 Poland are forced to abandon their professional ambitions when the Nazis invade.

Brothers Daniel and Ian Ciszek both have big futures planned: Daniel, the older of the pair, is a budding architect and has just written a manifesto that he hopes will change the face of the industry and attract enviable commissions in Warsaw. Ian is headed to Nancy, France, to begin studying engineering. However, these aspirations are waylaid by historical forces bigger than both of them when Hitler’s forces invade Poland, a catastrophe affectingly depicted by the author. In dire need of money and a place to live, Ian joins a group of communist revolutionaries and is drawn into a dangerous plan to hijack a cigarette truck. He falls in love with the beautiful Alicia, but she remains an exasperating enigma to him; even her name, he learns, isn’t real. Meanwhile, en route to see his father Joseph and transport him to safety, Daniel, in short order, finds himself a solider in the Polish Army, captured by the Germans, and sent to a gulag in Siberia. He manages to lift himself out of the “endless line of identical days” by joining a group of engineers building a secret tunnel and also finds love with Nadhya, a literary scholar pushed into exile. Rozycki doesn’t break any new historical or literary ground here—in fact, this is a pastiche of wartime tales with which most readers will be familiar. However, the story doesn’t read as stale because the plight of the brothers is conveyed so poignantly. Ian is the more fascinating of the two protagonists—on the one hand, he was raised to take great pride in his Polish citizenship, and on the other, he is stung by the vicious antisemitism of his fellow countrymen, a predicament that leaves him conflicted about his nation’s fate at the hands of Hitler. This is a dramatically lively novel as well as a historically rigorous one.

A moving tale about the irrepressible tide of history and the fates of the individuals subjected to it.