The past hangs over the present in the Afterlife of Stars
Told through the eyes of children, The Afterlife of Stars is the story of a family fleeing the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.
This is a semi-autobiographical tale written by Canadian author Joe Kertes whose family was forced to flee Budapest when the Hungarian Revolution was put down by Soviet troops.
The central characters are two young brothers, one nine the other 13, who have to make sense of the invasion, their family’s flight from Hungary and the violence that they witness on the streets of Budapest as Soviet troops ruthlessly put down the uprising.
The brothers also have to understand past events that took place during the Second World War and the impact these events had on their parents. The two boys are confronted with an unwillingness, by their family, to talk about what happened to two cousins disappeared shortly after the end of the war. The refusal of their mother, father and grandmother to discuss what occurred spurs the brothers to uncover the mystery on their own.
The family’s flight from Hungary is harrowing. The family is uprooted and forced from their home when Russian soldiers show up at their door and tell them they have to immediately vacate their house, abandoning everything that they can’t carry on their backs. At one point during their flight from Hungary they are forced to cross a minefield on foot and Kertes’ description of this is both riveting and horrifying.
The family eventually makes its way to Paris en-route to Canada and it is here that the two brothers uncover what happened to their family in the final year of World War Two. The contents of a trunk in their great aunt’s Paris apartment allows them to piece together the horror of the holocaust and what befell their father’s cousins.
The trunk and what it contains enforces the central theme of The Afterlife of Stars. Past events can impact the lives of those living in the present and closure can be impossible to achieve even across generations. Some events and crimes should never be forgotten for fear that they will be repeated.
The Afterlife of Stars is a moving novel made even more so in that it is told from the perspective of children trying to make sense of a world that has been turned upside down and which proves capable of extreme violence both in the past and present. Innocence is hard to maintain when confronted with acts of great cruelty. The uncovering of the truth, and the loss of innocence this leads to, has a fateful impact on the brothers and results in tragedy for the family.
Kertes is an award-winning author who has previously published three novels in addition to two children’s books. His novel Winter Tulips won the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. His third novel Gratitude won both the Canadian Jewish Book Award and the U.S. Jewish National Book Award for Fiction.
