John B. Simon

A young Syrian boy growing up in Damascus finds himself and his family in the midst of a brutal war of repression waged by the Al-Assad government against its own people. As friends and relatives are imprisoned and murdered, Bashar becomes increasingly active in efforts to help his family stave off hunger and the cold of winter. At 14, his family, fearing for his life, sends him to Turkey to avoid conscription into the Syrian army and to find medical help for his ailing father. He is abused by employers in Turkey and tries to cross the Mediterranean to Greece. The first time, the smuggler’s rubber raft is returned to Turkey, the second time it sinks and the survivors are again returned to Turkey. The third time Bashar makes it to Greece and internment in the infamous Moria refugee camp. From Greece, he is chosen by the government of Finland to fill a quota of refugees to be transferred to that Nordic country. Although he is now safe, he suffers from trauma-induced psychological problems that are only cursorily addressed by the Finnish social welfare system. The author, himself an American immigrant to Finland, develops a close relationship with Bashar – now a young man – and tries to help him deal with the many problems he faces in his new life. Bashar’s story reveals both the resilience of teenage unaccompanied asylum seekers and the limits of a one-size-fits-all response by host countries to their assimilation.

A twelve-year-old boy named Peisach is snatched from his home in a shtetl near Vitebsk in 1842 and marched far away to be prepared for 25 years of service in the Russian Imperial Army. Six years later, he will be assigned to a garrison in Viipuri, a city in eastern Finland, where his children and grandchildren will be born. Upon his discharge, Peisach will survive by mending second-hand clothes and peddling them on the market square. His son, Mendel, a hat maker, will strive to avoid deportation and enter the middle class as Finland, a grand duchy of the Russia Empire, lurches towards independence while Russia tries to tighten the reins of control. Peisach’s grandson, Benjamin, ends up in the absurd situation of fighting alongside German troops on the Eastern Front in WWII as an openly Jewish soldier in the Finnish army. Like the other 266 Jewish soldiers in the Finnish army at the time, he is in a no-win situation. If the Soviets succeed in occupying Finland, he will be killed or sent to a gulag; if the Germans win, he will be sent to a death camp. He is hopelessly in love with Rachel, who is serving in the Women’s Auxiliary and in as much danger as he is. Through bravery, determination, strong leadership and luck, Finland avoids occupation in its three wars between 1939 and 1945, and its Jewish citizens survive unscathed except for the 23 who are felled in combat by enemy fire. The story of Finland’s Jews is unique, as is the story of their country’s survival on the razor’s edge between East and West. Whether read as a love story, a family chronicle, or the history of a little-known country and its tiny Jewish population, Strangers in a Stranger Land conveys the drama and complexity inherent in the dilemmas faced by this small country and its tiny Jewish minority as the Second World War approached and then engulfed them in bloody conflict the Finns tried hard to avoid.