Coal and Ashes

Overview: Two young people, Mary and Martin, grow up in different parts of Lithuania and come separately to America in the early 20th century as part of one of the greatest waves of migration in world history. Twists and turns of fate bring them together to establish an American family and to experience Pennsylvania's "coal wars," two world-wars and the other horrific, world-scale events of the twentieth century. Friends of the couple and members of their respective families remain in Lithuania to experience a set of uniquely Lithuanian challenges and an even more-horrific twentieth century.*  

The story begins ten-thousand years ago with a fictional ancestor of both principal characters (making the point that we are all related). Tomitis, is a clan leader who escapes death while exploring a landscape opened up by the retreat of a massive glacier.  This opening chapter serves as a metaphor or allegory highlighting the themes of fate, chance, opportunity and wanderlust featured throughout the novel. 

Following Tomitis comes another fictional ancestor, "Tars," a deserter/forced-conscript from an invading Mongol army who makes his way across a landscape of people and places into Lithuania. Set toward the end of the Middle-Ages, some nine thousand years after Tomitis, the "Tale of Tars" is even more broadly illustrative of the impacts of fate and chance on the fortunes of people - and nations. Embedded in these seventeen chapters in which Tars eventually marries and establishes the lines of descent to both Mary and Martin, is an account of Lithuania's geopolitical history. The remainder of Coal and Ashes is a family saga loosely based on stories passed down by my grandmother (Mary) and on direct accounts by present-day family members living in Lithuania. This is a story about regular folks, all connected to the main characters, all of them playing the cards dealt to them in a turbulent world. 

Coal and Ashes is also a love story - a story about different kinds of love, falling in love, growing in love and familial love. It is about ancestors and the choices ancestors make, and how they influence who their descendants become - choices and chance sometimes tragically determining there will be no descendants. Coal and Ashes illuminates the ground-level effects of broad societal change and world-scale turmoil on the lives of common people caught up in the human drive for survival and the capricious effects of fate, chance and timing.