Feature

War Stories

His first visit to Moscow, and the subsequent trip down the Danube, from Ismalia to Vienna, blew his mind. Reagan had recently been elected president on a fierce anti-Soviet platform, but the fashionable position in intellectual circles was still the notion of moral equivalency: If the USSR was a nasty imperialist power, so were we. But in Moscow, Furst saw the fear in people's eyes, and it was a revelation: "I went, Oh, no, wrong -- this is not like us at all."

Later, when he returned to the States, his friends were shocked to hear him talking like a converted Reaganite. "I did a 180-degree turnaround," he confesses. "There really was an evil empire. I felt that I had been conned."

He also discovered a personal connection to the victims of that empire, which surprised him. "I don't speak a word of Russian -- but at the National Hotel in Moscow, there's a woman behind the counter talking to a Romanian, and I knew everything that she was saying just from the body language, the way she used her hands, the intonation of her voice. It was just like all the Jews I had grown up with. It was very odd, the sense of recognition. I thought, I'm home."

It all came together as he stood on the deck of a passenger steamer on the Black Sea. There were Russian voices around him, and Turkish music coming over the radio. First the glimpse of real totalitarianism, then the sense of an entire part of Europe that had been cut off from the West since the war, finally that private link -- it all conspired to change his life. "I looked at a map," he says, "and I thought, It's a novel. I'd never written a historical novel before, but right away electric sparks were coming out of my head!"

When he came home, he started writing Night Soldiers, a panoramic novel that starts in Bulgaria in 1934 and ends on the West Side of Manhattan eleven years later. "Why was I able to write this? I don't know." He shrugs. "But it flowed easily, like I already knew it." Furst and his wife relocated from Seattle to Paris to get closer to the world he was trying to re-create. (They moved to the East End of Long Island seven years ago.) The hero of Night Soldiers is a Bulgarian recruited to work for the Soviet Secret Police. His adventures take him to Moscow, to learn the spy trade; to Spain, where he fights for the Loyalists; to Paris, after he breaks with the Russians and goes underground; and back to Eastern Europe to fight the Germans. The book is tremendously entertaining and beautifully imagined.

Night Soldiers was published in 1988. It was a stunning midlife correction, and a miraculous literary rebirth. "I was a pretty good writer before," he says, "but I didn't really have anything to write about. Boy, I did now."

Since Night Soldiers, each subsequent novel has featured a hero from a different country. The sixth in the series, Kingdom of Shadows, revolves around a wealthy Hungarian, Nicholas Morath, a former officer in the Austro-Hungarian Cavalry. We meet him on a gray, rainy morning in Paris, in March 1938, in bed with a young South American heiress. (Reading a new Furst novel always makes me feel a bit like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day -- with each one he starts by winding the clock back to 1938 or '39, and right on cue, the lights begin going out all over Europe again.) Morath owns a lucrative share of a successful advertising agency, which allows him to commute between Paris and Budapest, but his uncle draws him into clandestine work on behalf of anti-Fascists in Hungary, and soon enough he finds himself shivering in a pile of straw in a cold jail cell in Romania, being interrogated by the Secret Police. It's the perfect nightmare for a pampered, comfortable era like ours. And the contemporary significance of such sudden turnabouts is always present in Furst's mind.

"The only thing I can say is that when European Fascism came back in Yugoslavia, I think people again began to realize that this wasn't just a German thing," he says. "It's ongoing, and it'll be back again. I don't know where it'll be next time. Latvia? Pick a place. But it'll be back again, like an infection."

Writers usually keep a few telling little talismans over their desks, and Furst is no exception. There are several framed photographs and drawings. One is an ordinary street scene, but it's Kiev in 1938. Next to it is a moody, evocative Brassai photo from the thirties: Two Parisian demimondaines stare insolently at the camera. And then there is a pen-and-ink portrait of someone I don't recognize. Furst smiles and identifies it as Joseph Roth, the Austrian Jew who wrote one of Furst's favorite novels, The Radetzky March, an elegantly moving portrait of a Europe destroyed by world war. "I grew up feeling that Europe is what made culture -- films, art, novels." Furst says, "And Jews were a crucial part of that. Then Hitler killed it."

Just before he drank himself to death in Paris in 1939, a bitter Joseph Roth wrote, "We all overestimated the world." Furst put Roth's funeral in Kingdom of Shadows. "I think the only thing I ever really wrote about is the death of Europe," Furst says. "That's all that ever interested me, and that's probably all that ever will interest me."