There are books; some average, some bad, many good books,
and then there are great books. From his
autobiographical narration to Jeffrey Beal of a great life, comes a great book, Echoes of My Footsteps, by Ivan Z.
Gabor. Gabor’s greatness lies not in
making a historical difference in the world like some Napoleonic figure, but in
his way of navigating the tidal forces of history and revealing his own story,
perhaps best defined as an ordinary man living in times of great changes. Ivan Gabor was only capable of doing such
once discovering the sanctuary of Miami Beach at a time of his life affording
him the ability and luxury to relax and reflect back.
Ivan Gabor is a prolific storyteller and has gained much
wisdom through living and witnessing atrocities throughout his youth. As a boy in Hungary in the 1930’s and 1940’s,
growing up in his middle class Jewish family, he saw the onslaught of the Nazi
regime and became the victim of their inhumanity. This part of the book is very disturbing and
difficult, as the story has been told by so many others in various ways. However Ivan Gabor is extremely sensitive to
his reader’s emotions and cradles them in a “protective bubble” of having his
blind faith pull the reader through without much emotional collateral
impact. By this I mean he tells of the
unspeakable not for the impact of the inhumanity, but uniquely in the spirit of
survival and the love of life – a very fine line of literary posturing. It is mostly due to this skill that these
sections of his book are plausible.
Then there are the many rewards for continuing the
read. The romancing of Rebequinta, a
Cuban immigrant beauty coincidentally appearing at a traffic light in Miami at
a time in Gabor’s life when such an encounter had a matrix of possibilities,
one being his wish for seduction coming true and most all other permutations of
failure of his desire. The “swordsmanship”
of this developing romance is by all means a beautifully epic love story,
written in a very gentlemanly and entertaining style.
It is very difficult, if not impossible, to put the essence
of a man’s life into a 330 page book, however over the hours of reading this I
found myself gravitating to the book to enjoy the conversational narrative of
hearing in my mind Ivan’s stories. His
book is embellished with multiple pages of family photographs, illustrating the
times and people and creating the “period piece” aspect to his work. As a person with ties to his heritage, it was
fascinating for me to learn about his ordeals, as many I have learned from
others had different consequences, and Ivan Gabor’s have a characteristically
“lucky” twist to them.
As Gabor became the owner of a haberdashery, his comical
observation in the beginning of his book about never getting used to the common
style of older people matching their white shoes with a white belt sums up his
lighter side of his philosophical humor. His book will forever resonate in my mind, and is recommended for those who
wish to learn more about living from a lover of life, a man of immense empathy
and wisdom, and a historian with knowledge gained by his firsthand
encounters. Ivan Z. Gabor has an attitude
and wisdom not only earned, but philanthropically shared by all that are a part
of the Echoes of My Footsteps.
I commend Mr. Ivan Z. Gabor for having the fortitude to tell
his story to the younger generation, we must never forget the Holocaust in the
hope that the lessons that can be learned, while painfully difficult to
comprehend, will serve to prevent such genocide from happening again. Echoes
of My Footsteps teach about history, empathy, and human strength that
we all have within ourselves.
Buy this book at Amazon.com
