Saga of the Risen From the Ashes

Saga of the Risen From the AshesYoung people are seldom interested in their forebears. Their concern about the present, worry about the future, their school, job, career, women, family, children leave little time to take a thorough look at the past; and two faced Januses able to look to the future and the past at the same time are quite rare. The people of the former Soviet Union had additional reasons not to show any special interest in their ancestry, for such curiosity could lead

Young people are seldom interested in their forebears. Their concern about the present, worry about the future, their school, job, career, women, family, children leave little time to take a thorough look at the past; and two-faced Januses able to look to the future and the past at the same time are quite rare.

The people of the former Soviet Union had additional reasons not to show any special interest in their ancestry, for such curiosity could lead to big trouble. The ancestors could turn out to be not of Òproletarian originÓ, or, God forbid, clerics, or Òenemies of the peopleÓ. Hiding non-proletarian ancestry or their connections to clergy could lead to the expulsion form the communist party, and then you lost your job Ð as the best case scenario. That is why many of us first sat down at the computer as old men, after leaving Russia, to write down the story of our fathers, to find the roots of the family tree, to tell our children about their great-great-grandmothers and great-great-grandfathers that lived in the Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian and Belarusian towns and villages.

Author would like to tell an incredible family saga, a story of a branch of the Okunev family that perished in the fire of Holocaust and yet rose from the ashes, like the fabulous Phoenix, and blossomed anew in Israel and America. The core of this story is a true miracle, the incredible discovery of a seemingly lost Okunev branch, the discovery that was made with the help of a certain book.

This story has two main characters. The first one is author's second cousin Michael (Moshe) Okunev, who was lost with the rest of his family somewhere around the Polish-Lithuanian city of Vilna in the bloody breaking of the Second World War, and suddenly reappeared after 50 years in the American city of Chicago as the head of a new large family. The second main character of this story isÉ a book called ÒLetters to Relatives from XX CenturyÓ. This book magically brought to us our first hero, as if one of the ten lost tribes of Israel that seemed to have forever disappeared was found at the tip of the writerÕs pen.

The part of yours truly, the author of this story, was to quite humbly put the two above mentioned characters together.