Bela's Story: A Brave Journey Through Unforgiving Times
Rita Schinnar and William A. Meis Jr., 2016
Fallen Bros Press
177 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780997672817
Summary
Born into a family of modest means in a small village in eastern Hungary, Adalbert Izsak—or Bela as everyone called him—might have expected to encounter some hurdles in life, but he hardly expected any great adventures.
As things turned out, the deck was stacked against him from the start and Bela’s life became a dramatic journey constantly endangered by forces beyond his control. The political struggles in Europe that brought on wars, persecution, perils, and dislocation affected Bela directly, and being Jewish created experiences that were doubly challenging.
There were occasions when Bela miraculously escaped certain death and other occasions when hopelessness caused him to lose faith in life and almost end it by his own doing. There was a desperate time following the loss of his beloved mother and his first wife, then a fortuitous time when Bela found a new love.
Each time when Bela’s dream to be in charge of his own life was realized, circumstances intervened to prevent this. Bela was forced into a cycle of building a new life and then having it taken away from him. He was forced to move to new places, from Europe to the Middle East to the US. He was forced to adjust to new cultures. He was forced to be resilient and brave, and accept with amusement, but never with complete resignation, that, “Man proposes and God disposes.”
Bela’s life took many wild turns, some comical and some sad. In the end, despite the challenges and hardships, despite the disappointments and heartaches, Bela overcame these with grit and the force of his personality. He lived to enjoy a comfortable and loving old age by retaining a joyful spirit that sought out and embraced new friendships.
Bela’s story is also a sad reflection on the senseless arbitrariness with which political regimes treat their populations and the capacity of humans to cause unbearable suffering. But ultimately, Bela’s story is a testament to the human spirit than can overcome adversity. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Rucharest, Romania
• Raised—Israel
• Education—B.A., State University of New York-Buffalo; M.P.A., University of Pittsburgh
• Currently—lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Rita Schinnar moved from Romania to Israel when she was a toddler. After completing her high school education and two years of studies at Levinsky College of Education in Tel Aviv, she moved to the U.S. to pursue further university studies. She started at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, majoring in psychology, with a minor in European History, and transferred to the State University of New York at Buffalo where she earned her BA degree in psychology. She also earned a MPA degree in public administration from the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA) at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and completed her doctoral studies except for a dissertation, also from GSPIA.
After graduating from college, Rita Schinnar began a long career working at the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Perlman School of medicine of the University of Pennsylvania. She learned epidemiology and research methods on the job and worked on numerous epidemiologic and pharmacoepidemiologic studies, co-authoring papers in scientific journals, contributing chapters to a book and textbook in pharmacoepidemiology, teaching research methods to fellows and medical students, and serving as managing editor for a journal in the field.
In retirement since 2014, Rita Schinnar is a writer of travelogues, short stories, and this first memoir. Her hobbies include photography and films.
William A. Meis Jr., co-author, is an editor, novelist, poet and publisher of Fallen Bros Press catalogue of fiction, essays and memoirs. He was the co-founder of the journal, New Perspectives Quarterly and a long-time Director of Publications for the Witers Guild of America (west). He holds an MFA degree from Goddard College, and lives in Southern California. (Author bios from the authors.)
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Discussion Questions
1. How do the principal characters change over time?
2. How would you have handled the shocking discovery that a spouse thought to be long-deceased reappears into your life and complicates your current life?
3. Why is it easier to open-up one’s inner thoughts and feelings in a correspondence compared to talking about these things face-to-face?
4. How have you been helped by one or more friendships over your life time
5. What might explain the transformation in the principal character, from a mostly angry man in his mid-life (because of guilt? struggles?) into a funnier, easy-going person in his later years?
6. How to understand a dominant trait in the principal character, described as “generously offering to help and share with virtual strangers what limited resources he had”? Is it more likely to be an innate trait or pay-back for feeling guilty or feeling lucky?
7. What challenges confront new immigrants in a country that is vastly different from the country they escaped from?
8. Why can’t societies change? Why can’t humanity advance beyond base impulses and behaviors such as bigotry, wars, harsh ruling by governments? Why does history have to repeat itself? What must change in humans to hope to transcend the conditions of human misery?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)