How many of you remember ordering books from the Scholastic Book Club? I loved those thin catalogs of newsprint paper passed out every so often during the academic year. My parents didn’t have a lot of money for extras, but frequently I could find affordable items in the Scholastic catalog and would be allowed to order one precious book.
In the 7th grade I purchased The Endless Steppe by Esther Hautzig. Published in 1968, the book is an account of Esther’s formative years spent in a Communist Party labor camp in Siberia, to which her family was sent in early 1941. Esther was about 10 years old at the time of their forced relocation. Her account of the next five years of her life, arguably five of the most important years of a child’s life, was riveting to me for I was much the same age.
It must be noted that Esther and her family were Jews who lived in Poland. Although their relocation by the Russian communists actually saved them from the Holocaust, the labor camp experience took a terrible toll on their family. They did not return to their hometown of Vilna, which was eventually overrun by the Nazis, until after World War II ended.
The violent uprooting from all that Esther had known as the beloved child of a prosperous family, the terrible living conditions and grinding poverty endured in Siberia, the loyalty to family and faith, all of that touched and moved me. I admired her courage and initiative in the face of it. I read her book so many times during my adolescent years that the binding eventually fell apart. The lessons learned have stayed with me.
But let me relate to you what was, for me, the most stirring moment of Esther’s book: an account of young Esther walking home from (if I recall correctly) her job, and finding herself in a terrible Siberian blizzard. Likely you already know that the weather in that part of Russia can be harsh and dangerous. There is a reason why it is still an infamous location for their labor camps.
This storm that Esther found herself in was bad. She did not have the choice to remain at her place of employment to wait out the blinding blizzard; she had to walk home. And the storm nearly took her. Not only was she walking against gale force winds and snow, she lost her way and could not find their house. Darkness was falling and she was very late. As she battled the elements and wondered where she was, the wind brought a sound she feared she’d never hear again: her mother’s voice. To her utter amazement, she heard her mother calling over and over again through the wind and the storm, “Sh’ma, Israel! Sh’ma, Israel! Sh’ma, Israel!”
As Esther put it, her mother, with the ferocity and instinct of a mother bear, had turned herself into a human homing device, searching for her daughter with the great prayer of Israel: “Sh’ma, Israel!” In English: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one!”
I’m crying as I type this, for those words are the precious call of God on the hearts of His own.
We live today in turbulent, intolerant, frequently downright nasty times. We may not have to walk through blinding weather, but we certainly are living through stormy circumstances that threaten to defeat us. But know this: God is still the Lord. He still calls through the storms of this earthly life to each of us, a divine homing device guiding His children to Himself.
Sh’ma, Israel!