Welcome to my blog!
My name is Helen Joyce and I am the author of the new historical fiction novel, Good for a Single Journey.
In this blog post, I want to start by sharing a question that has been on my mind for a while now:
How on earth did I get here?
I used to be a bog-standard wife, mother, grandmother, and High School teacher who embraced retirement as a time to relax and maybe, with luck, enjoy a few golden years.
But here I am, embarking on a new career as an author.
My family’s story is one of forced migration, tragedy and triumph. My mother's journey, in particular, has had a significant impact on my life.
She was thrown out of her home in Vienna by the Nazis after her father’s arrest. The family had to flee the country. Eventually, she ended up in London.
Her traumatic experiences left a mark on her and, increasingly, she struggled with depression and loneliness.
Growing up, I listened to my mother's stories and learned about my family's past. I realised that our story is not unique, and that it is a story that needs to be shared.
As I grew older, I knew I wanted to write this story - not just for myself but for future generations.
In this blog, I'll be sharing more about my family's journey and how it has shaped me.
I'll also be talking about my writing process and sharing updates on my novel. I hope you'll join me on my journey as I tell the story of my family and the Jewish people.
Contents
In this blog you will learn:
A Jewish Family's Journey: Fear and Forced Migration
Wandering Jews
Vienna to London: Memories of My Family's Past and Present
Writing a Memoir: How I Finally Told My Family's Story
A Jewish Family's Journey: Fear and Forced Migration
Our family is Jewish. Today, I can proudly, loudly, and confidently say that.
We are Jewish, we love our traditions and we are privileged to live in Israel; the land of our ancestors and our historic homeland. Not so my great grandparents. Not so my grandparents. Not so my parents.
My mother, Klari (pictured left), was literally kicked out of her home in Vienna by the Nazis while she sat alone with her younger brother Yosef waiting for her mother and older brother Raphael to return after a fruitless morning trying to get my grandfather Salamon (pictured below) out of jail.
His crime? He was a Jew.
And a prominent, wealthy one at that. The Nazis annexed Austria in the Anschluss on March 13th, 1938.
Loud, insistent knocks on the family’s door came a few weeks later. It was Seder night (the start of the Passover festival) and Salamon was unceremoniously hauled away.
For my mother, this was the beginning of the end of the world as she knew it.
Eventually, and with my then-teenage mother playing no small part in it, Salamon was temporarily released from custody. The family fled the same night, finally ending up in Prague.
Wandering Jews
The story of my family’s journey – every Jewish family’s journey – stretches back much further.
The ‘Wandering Jew’ is no literary myth.
When I looked back a generation or so, I saw that my great-grandparents had been forced to flee their home in Galicia for Vienna at the start of WWI. Of their five children, one, my grandmother Ida, ended up remaining in Vienna.
Two others, brothers Chiel and Beresh, made their way to British Mandate Palestine.
A third brother, Zissel, returned to Galicia with his parents. Sister Peppi married and settled in Belgium. Their respective journeys ended quite differently. Triumph for some; tragedy for others.
Vienna to London: Memories of My Family's Past and Present
But what about me, growing up safe and secure in London?
Born in 1953 almost ten years after the end of the war, what really had all this history to do with me? Many refugees and survivors adapted to their new circumstances with extraordinary courage and resilience.
However, I think my mother had used up all her reserves. She became depressed and socially withdrawn, never venturing far from home unless it was to buy food or take occasional trips to town on the 13 bus which passed by near our home.
She had no friends. No confidantes. She felt utterly alone and my father worked abroad – his is another story altogether!
My mother was beautiful, articulate, intelligent and an accomplished artist (how did that gene go astray?) but the strain of trying to raise her two daughters effectively single-handed without any social support was just too much for her.
Suspicious of strangers, no visitors were allowed in our house. We never asked our friends to visit. It would have been too much for her – and for us. She was burdened by memory and my sister and I were her only audience.
So, quite unlike many survivors of trauma, she talked. And talked.
Every memory spilled out in glorious – and not so glorious - technicolour.
Some recollections of her childhood were delightful. Her visits to her grandparents in Roswadów, Galicia were colourful adventures.
The crowded marketplace with squawking chickens purchased alive and taken to the ritual slaughterer for the Shabbat meal simultaneously excited and revolted her Viennese city sensibilities.
Waking on a trundle bed at the foot of her grandparents’ beds, seeing the snow piled high on the window frame as her grandfather with his flowing beard, wrapped in Tallit and Tefillin swayed gently back and forth and the treat of the delicious hot chocolate her grandmother served to warm her up – nothing was left out.
I could see, hear and smell the scenes she described so vividly.
However, most of her memories were not delightful. Nazi jackboots, flight from Vienna, flight from Prague and eventual refuge in London.
The loneliness. The fear. The Blitz.
The indifference of distant relatives. These all cut deep. In some ways, I feel like a fraud claiming to be the author of Good for a Single Journey.
In so many ways the book is truly hers.
Writing a Memoir: How I Finally Told My Family's Story
So, the question I started with remains.
How on earth did I get to write my book and why now?
Well, I am getting older. My children are grown and my grandchildren are growing up.
I always knew I wanted to write this story - and not just this story but an expanded story which makes some sense of where the Jewish people are today and how we got here. I started my story with my great-grandparents’ journey and tracked the fate of each of their five children. Each so different.
But what – or perhaps more accurately who – gave me the final ‘kick’ to open up my laptop and start at page one?
Well, so far three of our grandchildren have reached the Jewish age of majority – as the first three are all girls, this is at age 12 – bat mitzvah.
An age where young women are considered able to have some understanding of adult responsibilities, an awareness of right and wrong and responsibility for their own actions.
As doting grandparents, we have enjoyed taking each successive granddaughter on a special trip, to a special destination, to mark this rite of passage.
The first we took to Rome. History, imperial ruins, and the Arch of Titus with its carvings depicting the Jewish people crushed and exiled from the historic Land of Israel carrying the looted treasures of the temple seemed a meaningful destination.
The start of two millennia of diaspora.
The second we took to Barcelona. Who could fail to be enchanted by its beauty and history – the great disputation of Barcelona between a Christian sage (converted from Judaism) and Nachmanides?
Not just the fabulous shops but Jewish history on the very walls! But where to take number three?
We scratched our heads for a while, but the answer was staring us in the face!
Vienna of course!
So we went, the three of us.
A grandmother, grandfather and granddaughter. But uninvited and sitting on my shoulder the entire trip was a fourth. Not a tourist to the city, but a native. A ghost.
My mother Klari never let up.
She whispered in my ear at every destination, every museum, on the giant Ferris wheel in Prater Park.
And everywhere we counted the stones; gleaming brass Stolpersteine memorialising Jewish families who had lived there were rounded up on this or that date and subsequently murdered in one of the German death camps.
Despite these occasionally sombre moments, the trip was a great success.
We combined history with fun concerts, culture, and shopping. It proved to be a happy mix and we all enjoyed it.
I hope the ghost enjoyed it too. But the whispering in my ear did not stop. It grew louder.
As Hillel said ‘if not now, when?’
So, I wrote…
Pre-order Good for a Single Journey
Available now on Amazon Kindle for $2.99.
Official launch date: April 26th, 2023.
Comments