Beach Moose & Amber is an unusual title for this unusual book about Sharon Easton’s journey of finding her Jewish history. Just as the ampersand connects the two parts of her title, so the book connects two family trees and her family’s Lithuanian past in the first half of the twentieth century with her settling in rural Nova Scotia in the second half. These geographic locations and dislocations make for an intriguing family history across generations. “Before the Holocaust, my mother holidayed at her grandfather’s cottage in the village of Schwarzort on the Curonian Spit, where the elite – both Jews and Gentiles from Germany and Lithuania went to play. There were wild moose roaming on the beaches and a moose sanctuary on the peninsula. The beaches were also famous for their amber and my mother had a large amber collection which she had to leave behind when they fled.” Privileged yet persecuted, her Nafthal and Isserlin families suffer after the Nazis come to power and abruptly end these idyllic vacations. The Baltic Sea serves as one focal point, as well as the source for precious amber stones that take on symbolic value. When amber is rubbed with cloth, it exchanges magnetic qualities, and this magnetism attracts the various stories that make up the book.
The author’s mother, Vera Olga (Nafthal) Goldston, has left behind notes with the instructions, “All I ask from you is not to forget me,” and Easton’s book is a moving testimony to her family’s memories. Vera’s notes appear with a vertical line in the left margin to signal a historic structure, while her daughter’s commentary follows a horizontal line of inquiry and intervention.
The story begins with the birth of Elizabeth Isserlin in 1898, yet the second chapter goes back even earlier to Vera’s grandparents, Eli and Olga Isserlin. “My grandfather was a wealthy merchant in St. Petersburg.” With the help of family trees, we follow the fates of different generations from St. Petersburg to Memel on the Baltic Sea. Eli Isserlin’s fortune is connected to his control of RCA Victor for all of Russia. With World War I and the Russian Revolution, the family’s fortune and fate changed. All of the personal and historical details are fascinating, yet occasionally some of the sentences are problematic: “Poverty existed all over Russia” and “Even more, people would die during the Revolution.”
Her grandmother Liza hides family jewels in the door jams [sic] of their home, and later she smuggles jewellery sewed into her fox stole across borders. Easton’s descriptions of Memel on the Baltic coast and the dynamics of her family’s narrow escape from the Nazis are always riveting.
The second half of the book, which is set in Nova Scotia, is as interesting as the earlier history in Europe. After a series of harrowing escapes from various parts of Europe, Vera and her parents (Liza and Max) set sail from Liverpool to arrive in Quebec City shortly before the outbreak of World War II. After a brief stay in Montreal, they set sail for Halifax, followed by a train journey to the Annapolis Valley where they find a farm with 1000 acres. Of the apple orchard on the premises, Easton writes: “The trucks, moved in and out of the orchid, leaving with their red-cheeked fruit.” Amber is an apt symbol for the entire book, which is filled with precious memories that need further polishing before publishing.
Self-publishing always runs the risk of committing errors that a publisher usually corrects, and this book is no exception. Mistakes in spelling and punctuation damage the quality of memory and family history. From the repeated shetl (instead of shtetl) to morning (instead of mourning), the book calls out for a proofreader. Otherwise, Beach Moose & Amber is a pleasure to read.
Sharon Easton is among the first generation of Jews born after the Holocaust. Her birthplace was rural Nova Scotia, Canada, where her Jewish grandparents and mother immigrated after they fled their home in Lithuania — arriving in Canada six weeks before World War II was declared. Sharon lives by the sea on beautiful Vancouver Island with her husband and two wonderful Labradoodles.
- Publisher : Beach Moose & Amber Publishing (April 13 2023)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 302 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1777942101
- ISBN-13 : 978-1777942106
