ECHOES AND PROMISES (KISHINEV THREADS Book 1)

ECHOES AND PROMISES is a project that has taken several years to complete. The idea to write a historical fiction novel came to me after teaching and lecturing for more than three decades about Jewish history and the events leading to the establishment of the State of Israel. The obvious starting point for such a tale could only be the 1903 Kishinev pogrom. Historians have identified this event as a decisive moment in Jewish history; the catalyst that led to mass emigration from Eastern Europe, where Jews had lived for over nine centuries. I utilised family history and personal experiences to compile the story. Most of the events covered in the book are real. One of my aims is to share with my readers quirks and vignettes of little-known history.
The establishment of the State of Israel is the most momentous historical event for the Jewish people in the last two thousand years. The cost paid is the focus of this book.
ECHOES AND PROMISES is my personal memorial to the millions of Jews murdered during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – their only crime being being born Jews.
ECHOES AND PROMISES is a work of fiction. The details surrounding the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in Petrograd in 1881 are historically accurate. The Cossack mob carried out a pogrom in Kishinev in 1903, and the militia actively aided in the plundering and murder of the local Jewish community. The Wigoder Inn existed. The battles of the First and Second World Wars, as described in the book, are precise. The massacre of Jews in Maiseikiai on 3 August 1941 occurred as portrayed. The Sydir Kovpak Partisan Unit in the Chernihiv region existed and successfully fought the Germans in the forest. The KGB persecuted refuseniks, and the cases presented in the novel accurately depict the situation Jews faced in the USSR. The Gulag system was, and remains, centred in the wastelands of Siberia. The Declaration of Independence of the State of Israel took place as narrated in the novel. I have endeavoured to depict as accurately as possible all the wars between Arab and Israeli forces mentioned in the book. Many of the political leaders named in the text truly lived; others exist only in my imagination.
An author cannot write a novel without a support group. My wife, Reeva, encouraged me and convinced me to persevere when I was about to give up. Our children are my biggest fans and my harshest critics, and for that I thank them. Elchanan and Paula Brown, Pnina and Noah Rappeport, Tehilla and David Lewin, Avishai and Michelle, Ayelet and Josh, and our ten grandchildren.
My wife and I made aliyah to the State of Israel in 2013, where we have a front-row seat to the unfolding events of the twenty-first century and the future of the Jewish people, whose destiny we embrace. We feel that we are living a dream; the fulfilment of a prayer recited countless times, and thousands of years old, to dwell again in our ancestral homeland in the Land of Israel.