Ivan Z. Gabor didn't have a fascinating life; he had many. Constantly changing names and circumstances, he lived through war, famine, persecution and bitter loneliness to taste artistic and romantic fulfillment even while dealing with the worst imaginable trauma. With help from writer Jeff Beal, his true story is never predictable and always fascinating...

 There are books; some average, some bad, many good books, and then there are great books. From his autobiographical narration to Jeffrey Beal of a great life, comes a great book, "Echoes of My Footsteps," by Ivan Z. Gabor. Gabor's greatness lies not in making a historical difference in the world like some Napoleonic figure, but in his way of navigating the tidal forces of history and revealing his own story, perhaps best defined as an ordinary man living in times of great changes. Ivan Gabor was only capable of doing such once discovering the sanctuary of Miami Beach at a time of his life affording him the ability and luxury to relax and reflect back. 

Ivan Gabor is a prolific storyteller and has gained much wisdom through living and witnessing atrocities throughout his youth. As a boy in Hungary in the 1930's and 1940's, growing up in his middle class Jewish family, he saw the onslaught of the Nazi regime and became the victim of their inhumanity. This part of the book is very disturbing and difficult, as the story has been told by so many others in various ways. However Ivan Gabor is extremely sensitive to his reader's emotions and cradles them in a "protective bubble" of having his blind faith pull the reader through without much emotional collateral impact. By this I mean he tells of the unspeakable not for the impact of the inhumanity, but uniquely in the spirit of survival and the love of life - a very fine line of literary posturing. It is mostly due to this skill that these sections of his book are plausible. 

Then there are the many rewards for continuing the read. The romancing of Rebequinta, a Cuban immigrant beauty coincidentally appearing at a traffic light in Miami at a time in Gabor's life when such an encounter had a matrix of possibilities, one being his wish for seduction coming true and most all other permutations of failure of his desire. The "swordsmanship" of this developing romance is by all means a beautifully epic love story, written in a very gentlemanly and entertaining style. 

It is very difficult, if not impossible, to put the essence of a man's life into a 330 page book, however over the hours of reading this I found myself gravitating to the book to enjoy the conversational narrative of hearing in my mind Ivan's stories. His book is embellished with multiple pages of family photographs, illustrating the times and people and creating the "period piece" aspect to his work. As a person with ties to his heritage, it was fascinating for me to learn about his ordeals, as many I have learned from others had different consequences, and Ivan Gabor's have a characteristically "lucky" twist to them. 

As Gabor became the owner of a haberdashery, his comical observation in the beginning of his book about never getting used to the common style of older people matching their white shoes with a white belt sums up his lighter side of his philosophical humor. His book will forever resonate in my mind, and is recommended for those who wish to learn more about living from a lover of life, a man of immense empathy and wisdom, and a historian with knowledge gained by his firsthand encounters. Ivan Z. Gabor has an attitude and wisdom not only earned, but philanthropically shared by all that are a part of the Echoes of My Footsteps. 

I commend Mr. Ivan Z. Gabor for having the fortitude to tell his story to the younger generation, we must never forget the Holocaust in the hope that the lessons that can be learned, while painfully difficult to comprehend, will serve to prevent such genocide from happening again. "Echoes of my footsteps" teach about history, empathy, and human strength that we all have within ourselves.