A Boy Is Not A Ghost by Edeet Ravel

In this sequel to A Boy Is Not A Bird, the saga of Natt Silver continues. Natt and his mother have been deported from their home in Zastavna to Siberia. 

It is the summer of 1941 and twelve-year-old Natt and his mother have been on a train for six weeks and two days. They finally arrived in Novosibirsk, Siberia, a city of four hundred thousand people where they are given soft bread, a steam bath, and their clothes are disinfected. Natt along with the other deportees is taken to a school with a fenced in schoolyard. On his fourth day in the schoolyard, Natt meets a boy and a girl who live in Novosibirsk, near the fence. The girl is Olga who who has been studying ballet and her brother Peter who wants to be a chemist. Olga tells Natt that her mother is a translation for the government. Natt and Olga form a connection over their mutual love of ballet and Beethoven and at Natt's request, she gives him her address..

Later that night, Natt helps a young mother named Felicia escape into the village with her baby. She has a distant cousin who has offered to help her, giving her a chance for her baby to survive. In exchange for this, Natt comes into possession of emerald earrings. Their group now consists of Natt and his mother, Elias and Cecilia and little Shainie and Irena, the young school teacher who joined the deportees in the hope of finding her mother.'

After a few days in Novosibirsk, their group along with most of the other deportees are shipped on three enormous barges north on the Ob River. A week into their trip, they detour to Tomsk and then continue up the Ob where every day a small group of "settlers" are let off. Natt and his mother are taken off the barge at Porotnikov where they are told at the Community House that they've been exiled for twenty years. There they manage to find lodging in a third of the kitchen of a house owned by a couple and their six or seven children.

Natt's Mama and Irena are forced to dig out tree stumps for eleven hours a day. Natt finds himself constantly hungry. But things get even worse when his mother is tricked into stealing a few potatoes and is arrested. His mother is taken to the jail in Bakchar.

Irena manages to get a clerk job in Bakchar and she and Natt quickly pack to hitch a ride with a farmer. Irena had promised Natt's mother she would look after him. They are able to rent a whole room to themselves that has a stove, a bed, cot, table and two stools in Bakchar.

The next day Natt meets a girl while on a walk at the beach. She speaks Romanian and offers him some soft cheese. He learns her name is Gabriella and she is only three months away from being twelve. Irena returns that night with a bag full of food. She tells Natt that she attended his mother's trial and that she's been sentenced to a year in jail in Tomsk.

But barely three weeks into his stay in Bakchar, Natt is faced with more changes. He learns that Irena who is Polish, is now free to go wherever she wants, and she plans to move to Moscow in the hopes of eventually reuniting with her parents. Natt is faced with the difficult decision of whether he should leave with Irena and be thousands of  kilometers from his mother or stay and be on his own in a city where he knows no one. The choice he ultimately makes nearly costs him his life but in the end, the prediction of the fortune teller comes to pass.

Discussion

As Ravel has previously indicated, the events in her first novel, A Boy Is Not A Bird, and in this sequel, A Boy Is Not A Ghost  are based on the real life experiences of her fifth-grade teacher, Nahum Halpern. Although some of the characters in these novels are fictional, Nahum really did experience many of the events Ravel describes in her books. Some of the real life events include Natt's travel on the barge up the Ob River, his winter in Porotnikova, living with the Mindrus, the sleigh ride and his serious illness that forced him into hospital. Also real are the people who helped Natt survive his ordeal in Siberia, including Yuri, Sima Israelovna, and the two NKVD officers. 

In A Boy Is Not A Ghost, Natt becomes so traumatized by the repeated hardships and sense of loss that the only way he could survive was, as he put it, to become a ghost. Becoming invisible, suppressing his feelings and withdrawing into himself are the only way he is able to cope with what he is experiencing. After surviving a brutal train ride into the heart of Siberia and experiencing every deprivation, Natt is unprepared to cope with the arrest of his mother. When his mother is jailed and he and Irena move to Bakchar to be near her, Natt states, "I stare at the passing trees in a daze. I'm starting to feel like a ghostly spirit, drifting from place to place. Every day I'm becoming more invisible and less solid. Solid kids have homes. Imaginary kids have imaginary homes." 

Just as things settle, Natt learns he will be losing Irena. As she struggles to find someone to take Natt in, he begins to feel numb. It isn't until he recovers from his illness at the Mindru's after being given the "water cure" for his fever that Natt begins to feel again. He notes that "It seems the water cure has woken up my emotions. I begin to cry and I don't even try to stop." He is comforted by Gabi who tells him they love him and that he has friends who love him.

Although Natt is cared for by the Mindrus and loses the feeling that he is a ghost,  when he receives a letter from his mother written in code, telling him that she and Natt's father are planning their escape from Siberia, he believes he must return to being a ghost again. "I also have to practice not calling attention to myself, so that when I do slip away, no one will notice, like Felicia when she stepped into the dark. I have to practice being a ghost again."

Being a ghost though is conflicting for Natt. After attending Mr. Goldman's clandestine Hanukkah party, Natt remembers past celebrations but this has mixed blessings. "I decide that remembering is both the best thing and the worst thing, but that you have to remember. If you don't remember, you really are a ghost."

When Natt obtains his travel pass to Tomsk he believes he must be like a warplane that flies very low to avoid being detected by radar. "That's what I have to do. Fly low. I need to be very boring, very small, nearly invisible." After Natt and his mother finally arrive in Moscow, he begins to feel that he has become a nobody, a ghost. He is humiliated and ashamed of how he and his mother look. "All this time, trying to be invisible, trying to be a nobody -- I suddenly feel as if I really have turned into a nobody...What if I'm not just a nobody, but a disgusting, stinky nobody."

Ultimately it is Olga and Peter and their father Edward who welcome them into their home, and who begin Natt on the path towards reclaiming his identity. Olga tells him she loves him because he's interesting and kind and not bitter about all the hardships he's endured. To Natt's surprise, he discovers he is not a ghost after all.

It's difficult to comprehend the hardships people in Eastern Europe endured under both Nazi and Soviet occupation, especially under Stalin. A Boy Is Not A Ghost succeeds in portraying to readers these unimaginable hardships in a way that is realistic but also with a touch of humour for so serious a topic. It's important that experiences like those of Nahum Halpern not be forgotten because they help us understand how important it is to preserve the freedoms we often take for granted in Canada.

Ravel has included a map showing the locale of the story, an Author's Note and a detailed Historical Background that touches on Russia during the rule of the Czars, World War II, Stalin and the post war period. Another excellent novel by Canadian author Edeet Ravel.

Book Details:

A Boy Is Not A Ghost by Edeet Ravel
Toronto: Groundwood Books, House of Anansi Press   2021
239 pp.