Bela's Story (Schinnar) - Discussion Questions

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.)

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