‘Klara’s Journey’ traverses Revolutionary Russia

Ben G. Frank, Klara’s Journey, Marion Street Press, © 2013, ISBN 978-1-936863-47-1, 222 pages, $17.95

By Donald H. Harrison

Donald H. Harrison
Donald H. Harrison

klara-s journeySAN DIEGO –According to computerized calculations, it is 707 miles between Odessa and Moscow, and another 3,989 miles from Moscow to Vladivostok.  But those are air miles, not rail miles, and the figures can’t account for the delays in which a rail car might sit on a siding for days to allow supply and troop trains to pass amid the chaos of war.

In the novel Klara’s Journey, a 17-year-old Jewish girl sets out alone to find her father, a cantor, who had promised to send for his family after he got situated in Canada, where he had relatives.  But World War I broke out after he left Odessa and therefore the way west, through Europe to North America, was blocked by Russia’s German enemy.

So Klara, the protagonist, heads from Odessa north to Moscow and then east for Vladivostok, hoping from there to catch a ship to Japan and then to go on to the Western United States and Canada.

Author Frank is an accomplished travel writer, so he is able to give readers the sense of the long journey, one which, while reading, I couldn’t help but remember the train ride scenes from the movie Dr. Zhivago.

This adventure novel examines how a young and pretty Jewish girl might be able to survive such a long trip amidst a savage war between “Reds” and “Whites” following the Bolshevik Revolution that brought the Communists of Vladimir Leon and Leon Trotsky to power.

As you might imagine, Klara had two problems to overcome.  She was a single female traveling in a land and time when rape was commonplace and typically unpunished.  And she was a Jew abroad in a country in which anti-Semitism is imbibed with mother’s milk.

She could wear a cross and pretend to be a Christian, although more than once she was told that she looks like a Jew—so she never could feel completely safe in her masquerade.  Even if she could, there was no way to hide her beauty or her gender, so she had to find a way to turn those two inheritances into an asset.

At first, she attached herself to a family with children, making herself useful to the mother.  But that solved the problem for only one leg of the trip.  Thereafter, she needed to find travel companions – sometimes other women, sometimes men.  Her path criss-crosses with that of her brother, who is a young commissar in the emerging Communist bureaucracy, and she also meets and travels with a non-Jewish Red Cross man with whom shares some intense and scary experiences.

As one might imagine, when such a trip extends to a year, there were times when Klara wearied of the travel, and wondered if she could possibly maintain the fortitude and persistence to get to her destination.  And furthermore, she fretted, what would happen if she did find her father in the New World?

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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World.  He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com