The Endless Steppe

Esther Hautzig

It’s Sasha’s cousin Suzy who recommends The Endless Steppe. ‘We enjoyed it a lot!’ she tells us, arms round her 12-year-old twin sons. Suzy and her husband, George, an artist, and their boys, live on the picturesque curve of the Regents Park Road, a neighborhood that especially at night looks like a film-set. It’s the quaint London of movies like The Lady in the Van or Paddington Bear 2. I stroll down with the girls on a lovely day, during our summer in Belsize Park, and everybody gets on well. Suzy is warm, quick and zany, and I’d forgotten how funny. What books has she read with her kids?

I order an old copy of The Endless Steppe and put it aside and eventually try it with Millie. It’s a paperback in the Puffin Plus series – a ‘young adult’ book in other words – the series that includes the superb A Parcel of Patterns by Jill Paton Walsh. Reading these books with Mill has not gone well. What I’ve realized, quite late, is the key word is not young but adult. These are actually sophisticated, literary books that expect a lot of the reader.

The result: Just as with A Parcel of Patterns we soon jumped wagon – in this case to The Boy in Striped Pajamas by John Boyne (which went extremely well). However I decided to go on alone. The Endless Steppe was just too interesting to put down.

It’s a Second World War memoir, the true story of a Polish Jewish girl, Esther Rudomin, who in 1941 was deported with her family to Siberia. This was after Russia occupied East Poland. Esther narrates the story, which ends in 1946, when she was fifteen.

Before the Russians come, Esther’s childhood is idyllic. She lives in a beautiful city, in a beautiful compound, in the warm glow of her parents’ and her grandparents’ love. She goes to the local Polish school, where she’s thriving. Her life is full of good things – books, cooking, walks across town, family occasions. The end is abrupt. One summer’s morning she wakes up planning to water her grandfather’s rose garden. Out of the blue arrive the Russian soldiers. By late afternoon the family is assembling at the train station with just a few possessions.

The reasons for their deportation from Poland (Vilna) are confusing to the family. Officially it’s because they are “capitalists” – and in fact they were factory owners with a prosperous life – but on the train to Siberia they find themselves among not only their own kind but also gypsies and peasants. It’s never quite clear what the Russians are thinking.

After many weeks on the train, in dreadful conditions, no idea where they’re heading, the deportees are disembarked at a small outpost in the Siberian wilderness. The light is dazzling. Soon they are put to work in a gypsum-mine. In Esther’s account, their prison life is not without sweet moments, but very, very tough. Many of the deportees die, mostly of typhus. However the Russian planning is unpredictable. At some point in the war, the deportees are simply released into the local town.

The town, going by the name of Rubtsovsk, is no than a mining village on the edge of the giant steppe, but it develops during their time there. Esther takes a kind of strange pride in the way her family helped to build it. Despite all the hardship, too, the lodging with hard-bitten locals, the scrapping for food, and the bargaining for winter boots, such is the wish to fit in with her peers, once she starts attending school, that Esther becomes an adoptive Siberian girl. And the Steppe, with its wolves, its waving grasses and its tremendous storms, becomes almost a character in its own right and takes her under its spell.

In this way the book is like a cross between The Diary of Anne Frank and Little House on the Prairie – a common link being the young female adolescent narrator. Come to think of it, there is a whole genre of books narrated by young women of this age – girls full of life and emotional intelligence, trying to flourish in adversity. Often in these books, it seems to me, the narrator, like Esther, has a wonderful father.

Esther has a great capacity for life – an ability to connect and be grateful. Take this description of her first pair of decent Siberian boots: “The shoes worked; merely possessing them made me feel rich, elegant, and the equal of anyone in the village. As for wearing them, this I did only rarely, on very special occasions. When one owned such beautiful shoes, one could afford to go barefoot. But when I did wear them, as I walked the dusty roads I stopped every other step to wipe them with the edge of my dress. I used to come home from these walks with a dusty hem, but shining shoes.”

The great irony of the story: their deportation from Poland meant that Esther and her family survived the war. In the final pages the family return to Poland, only to find their home stolen, and the indigenous Poles bristling with anti-Semitism. It seems unlikely that they stayed. However that’s where the story ends – with their return from exile.

The book was first published in the USA in 1968, when Esther would have been aged 37. By then her surname was Hautzig. If she were still alive now she’d be aged 85 – not even that old. Since the book is not translated, Esther must have learnt English. How so? My fantasy is from Poland the family found their way to America, ideally to Nebraska or Iowa – somewhere on the Great Plains. Should I click to find out? That’s just what I’m not going to do.