Column: Author of 'How My Grandfather Stole a Shoe' Writes for the Record

Russian American journalist and author Julie Masis says that when she set out to write her new book, How My Grandfather Stole a Shoe and Survived the Holocaust in Ukraine, she wasn’t planning to write about the Holocaust.

“The first stories were not really even about the Holocaust,” she said of her collection of short stories about her grandfather’s life. “It was just an attempt to record oral history, to record the memories of an old man and put them on paper.”

Masis, in fact, first self-published a version of How My Grandfather Stole a Shoe about a decade ago, so that she could give it to her grandfather, Shlomo Masis, on his 100th birthday.

At the time she started the book, her grandfather was in his 90s, and Masis feared his own account of the war, the Holocaust and his siblings would be forgotten. Living to 102 years old, Shlomo Masis had survived a time when thousands of Moldovan Jews were shipped to the Obodovka ghetto in an area of Ukraine that was then under Romanian occupation.

Julie Masis, at a book reading event in Brookline recently. Photo by Adam Smith

I should stop here and say I first met Julie Masis before she had even set out to write the book. I had worked with the St. Petersburg native while I was editing a newspaper in Waltham called India New England around 2007. Masis, then a staff reporter, seemed to be able to find stories others would pass by without a thought. Once, for example, she went out to cover a seemingly sleep-inducing medical doctor gathering. She returned with a humorous and somewhat jaw-dropping report of how the event — the Indian Medical Association gala at which many people of Hindu faith were present — was inadvertently catered with a menu of beef dishes.

As I caught up with her to talk about the book, and her Russian-language Boston newspaper she founded, she revealed herself as the same curious reporter I had remembered. Masis' reporter instincts are also evident in her book, such as when she tries to track down the German soldier who saved Julie's grandmother by helping her escape the ghetto, in advance of a Nazi "clean-up" operation.

After her stint at India New England, Masis eventually found her way to Cambodia, where she had lived in the 2010s, taking on various jobs including reporting gigs, teaching English to Buddhist monks and leading tours to the Khmer Rouge tribunal. After she had moved back into small-town snowy Massachusetts with her parents, as she tells it, she started on her book as a way to deal with her nocturnal sleep schedule. She would stay up until 4 a.m., to the annoyance of her father. Her dad, she said, thought he could remedy what he viewed as her sleep problem by turning off the home Wi-Fi by 11 p.m. But his heavy-handed trick didn’t work.

“I didn't have anything to do,” she said of late nights. “So, I just started writing down the stories that (my father) told at dinner time. My father is really good at retelling things, and his stories are funny, and then they're sad and they're true.”

Her dad would retell her grandfather's stories as well as his own, she said, adding that during these family conversations, she discovered stories she didn’t previously know, such as that her grandfather had three siblings who were killed during the Holocaust. She eventually put these stories and new ones into her book, which was published by Academic Studies Press with art by Felix Lembersky.

Masis said her family's history with the Holocaust has deeply affected her. Since her childhood — she’s not sure if it was while in Russia or after moving to the U.S. — she’s had a reoccurring nightmare: “I'm living at the time of the Holocaust, and I'm trying to run away. I'm trying to warn everybody, and nobody believes me.”

And today, the fear, she said, of a return to a Nazi-like force is greater than ever.

“When I heard the story about the five-year-old child arrested by ICE, I immediately thought about the Diary of Anne Frank,” she said, referring to the arrest of Liam Conejo Ramos in January by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.

“I just feel like, if you start putting five-year-old innocent children into jail … it reminds me of what the Nazis did, because they were separating men and women. They were taking kids away from families. … The Holocaust started gradually. The first German concentration camps didn't have gas chambers in them. They were just incarcerating people without giving them a chance to prove their innocence in court, putting them into jail indefinitely. And that's what we're doing now.”

The now-iconic photo of little Liam, with his blue bunny-eared hat, says Masis, also speaks to the power of the press. If it were not for that photo, she believes, his story might have never been told.

Masis is herself a member of the press, even if not always the traditional one. She’s written for a number of publications including the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor and the Times of Israel. But she also has uncovered many untold and fascinating stories at the paper she founded and runs, the Russian Boston Gazette, a free Russian-language weekly.

For, example, in that newspaper she told the story of an elderly homeless woman who has been a fixture in the Coolidge Corner area of Brookline — and the effort by a Muslim, Jew and Christian — to get her help. She also investigated the story of a celebrated New Hampshire man whom Masis revealed had actually fought for the Germans during WWII.

As for Masis’ next project, she’s got several book drafts waiting to be published.

“I might do another book, too, about my grandfather from my mom's side. I would call it, 'How my grandfather fell from an airplane.' It's a true story, and he survived the siege of Leningrad, in which a million people starved to death, including my great grandfather.”