Back From the Rivers of Babylon

As the Berlin Wall fell, unknown to those who chipped it away, its energy radiated eastward, cracking the Iron Curtain of the USSR. It was not instantaneous, but slowly disruptive in the lives of all those committed to Communism’s world view.
Such was the case of Yosephie Schroder, Moscow University’s youngest and rising history professor. Disillusioned with Communism’s failure and confused as to the answers to life’s purpose, he made Aliyah, emigration to Israel. Thousands of other Russian Jews emigrated to escape the poverty of their government’s disruption, but that was not Yosephie’s reason.
With that trauma, he had lost a major part of who he was and needed to replace it. He no longer had faith in Communism and its atheism. Were the records of the ancient Jewish sages distorted as well? Where better to investigate their claims as to life’s meaning than in Israel? Could it give him a cornerstone to rebuild who he was?

However, he would find life as an immigrant more challenging than Israel automatically being a land of “milk and honey.” Rather than gaining a university position, he was thankful for a menial job that paid his rent. Still, he was embarrassed by it, attracted to Sasha Robinowitz, the firm’s new environmental engineer from America.

Ward carries us along with Yosephie in his search for truth and its confrontation with what, to him, seemed a betrayal of his people by the girl he sought. Though obscure to both the church and synagogue, it was the Messianic Synagogue movement and its adherents who proudly proclaimed their Jewishness. Still, could a Jew become a Christian and remain a Jew?