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Scenes of the Father: A Novel of a Jewish Family Survival in Wartime Europe
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jan 28 2026
Pages: 362
Weight: 0.96
Height: 0.90 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Scenes of the Father is a historical literary novel set against the Holocaust-era persecution of Jews in Eastern Europe, tracing the fragmentation and survival of a single Orthodox Jewish family during the Second World War. After fleeing into the forests of Lithuania during the Nazi invasion of 1941, a widowed father and his five children are separated during a violent pursuit by German forces and local collaborators. The father, gravely injured and left with partial amnesia, survives in isolation, sustained by faith and prayer. His children escape along divergent paths-some toward wartime London, others toward the United States-each undertaking a long and perilous journey shaped by concealment, displacement, and moral choice.
The novel unfolds through interwoven narratives that follow the father's wandering survival, the sons' passage through borders and exile, and the endurance of the children who rebuild lives in foreign lands. Though physically separated, the family remains connected through dreams, premonitions, and an inherited discipline of attention-representing the persistence of guidance, faith, and moral orientation beyond physical presence. These moments are not rendered as miracles, but as the internalization of belief and training under extreme pressure.
Rather than focusing on spectacle or atrocity, Scenes of the Father examines survival as a practice: the ethics of silence, restraint, and correct movement when certainty collapses. Orthodox Jewish ritual and prayer function as structural tools for coherence rather than symbolic ornamentation. As the narrative progresses beyond wartime urgency into postwar endurance, the novel explores how vigilance gives way to stewardship, and how legacy is transmitted not as trauma, but as method.
Ultimately, Scenes of the Father is a meditation on faith under erasure, fatherhood beyond presence, and the long work of living after catastrophe-arguing that endurance is not marked by triumph, but by the quiet continuity of chosen life.
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