A New, Non-Fiction Work Traces A Soldier's Ancestral StepsFrom Poland To Vietnam. By Kent Anderson Rumors and Stones: A Journey, by Wayne Karlin (Curbstone Press). Hardcover, $19.95. WAYNE KARLIN HAS been known primarily for his fictional works resulting from his experience as a soldier in the Vietnam War. With his latest book, Rumors and Stones: A Journey, the author presents a new approach. This disturbing effort is a non-fiction account of the author's coming to grips with Vietnam through his writing and an eventual journey to Kolno, Poland, the town from which his Jewish mother emigrated prior to the annihilation of the Jewish community there in World War II. The inhumane savagery Karlin witnessed in Vietnam, coupled with his knowledge of My Lai and other atrocities, propelled him back in time to a reconsideration of the Holocaust and his own combat role in America's most troubling war. Parts of Rumors and Stones have appeared previously in various publications. This makes for a patchwork quality with occasional repetition, but the book is still a worthwhile reading endeavor. Even though it is, ostensibly, a piece of non-fiction, Karlin imagines and re-creates the circumstances of his relatives' past and their friends and teachers who were persecuted in Kolno. These non-contiguous chapters roughly cover the years from World War I to the period leading up to his grandmother's and mother's flight to America at the onset of World War II. The author also provides eyewitness accounts of the Kolno massacre. In July of 1941, Nazi soldiers who had recently invaded the area, along with many culpable Polish townspeople, horridly slaughtered the remaining 2,000 Jews of the village. This was a month or so after Nazi Germany had invaded the Soviet Union and captured that part of eastern Poland which had been under Soviet control. (The book incorrectly states this crucial turn in the war as July 22, 1941, rather than June 22, 1941.) The author's speculative forays into his ancestral past are the least successful parts of Rumors and Stones. To shield him, his mother told Karlin little of his family's past or deliberately misinformed him. Hence the "rumors" of the title; that children's game whereby a sentence is whispered around in a circle and always ends up changed. Karlin relates the oppressive anti-Semitism his forebears endured in a vague, almost elliptical style with dips into the stream of consciousness. These chapters of half-remembered family tales, pogroms and the golem legend have a strange, dream-like quality; or more accurately, a nightmarish bent. Additionally, the reader may stumble into a morass of genealogical confusion as if trying to read Faulkner at his most complex without the necessary family tree chart my old literature professor always required. Rumors and Stones is most successful in the personal accounts of the author about his own life, particularly how Vietnam affected him and his seemingly sudden decision, in the summer of 1993, to visit Poland, his personal locus of ancestral terror and death. Hence the "stones" of the title; the traditional Jewish marking of graves as a "hard" testament of remembrance. Stones become important symbols for Karlin at key points throughout the book. He took away pieces of brick from Kolno's abandoned synagogue. He took stones from the embedded road of the death camp Treblinka, built by slave labor, and related: ...I saw Hebrew letters engraved/on a number of broken stones/mixed in with the others:/gravestones uprooted from somewhere/and used to pave the road:/this was the place/where the cemeteries and their gravestones/and the stones left by the dead/on gravestones had gone;/this was the place of stones. Wayne Karlin is part of a writers group of Vietnam veterans who arranged to meet a similar group of writer-veterans from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Through this interaction and facing of old foes, his sense of guilt from his time in Southeast Asia begins to gnaw at him. He wonders if the Vietnamese peasants regard him in the same way as his Jewish forebears in Poland viewed the Nazis. Ultimately, Karlin must go to the location of his origin and torment: Kolno. The narrative of his journey, with side trips to Warsaw, Lomza, Treblinka, and the Smithsonian's Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., are the most compelling parts of his journey. The quest grips author and reader alike with feelings of fear, anger, guilt and resignation. The most riveting and horrific account rendered is from one of the author's stories about Vietnam: the killing of a family of rats. The imagery will sear itself into the reader's brain. Here Karlin has found a stunning analogy for not only My Lai, but for his own feelings about the Holocaust and all atrocities perpetrated in war, from Kolno to Cambodia to Bosnia. When "others" are viewed as less than human, the actions taken are inevitably subhuman.

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