84 pages • 2 hours read
Leon LeysonThe Boy On The Wooden Box
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | YA | Published in 2013A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Epilogue-Afterword
Epilogue Summary
After settling in America, Leon decides not to discuss his Holocaust experiences. It is a part of his life that he wishes to leave behind, and his listeners would not understand. Nevertheless, the memories remain with him. Leon and his parents live first with Leon’s Aunt Shaina (“Jenny”), then with his Uncle Morris. They enroll in English classes. Moshe takes a job as a janitor at an elementary school, while Leon works at a factory that manufactures shopping carts. After some time, Leon gets a job as a machinist at an automotive factory and attends classes at a trade school.
Leon is drafted into the army for the Korean War and goes to Monterey, California for basic training. There, he makes friends from all over the country. He serves with a unit of army engineers in Okinawa, Japan, for 16 months. When his tour of duty is over, Leon returns to Los Angeles and continues his education under the GI Bill of Rights at California State University. He earns a bachelor’s degree, a teaching credential, and eventually a master’s degree in education from Pepperdine University. He then embarks upon a career as a high school teacher in 1959. For 39 years, Leon teaches at Huntington Park High School. It is there that he meets Lis, a fellow teacher. The two marry in 1965 and have a daughter and a son. Leon shares his Holocaust experiences with his children gradually as they mature.
David and Pesza, living in Israel, also marry and raise children. Moshe becomes a machinist in a factory, a job in which he is able to use his old skills. After he dies, Chanah is stricken with grief but is comforted by her grandchildren. She dies five years later.
After the war, Oskar Schindler tries several unsuccessful business ventures and must subsist on donations from Jewish organizations. Many Germans regard him as a traitor. He keeps in touch with the Schindlerjuden (“Schindler Jews”) through the years and dies in humble circumstances in 1974. By his own request, he is buried in Jerusalem.
Leon also keeps in touch with other members of “Schindler’s list” over the years, but it is not until the release of Thomas Keneally’s book, Schindler’s Ark (renamed in the United States as Schindler’s List), along with Steven Spielberg’s subsequent film, that Leon feels compelled to speak about his experiences. A reporter named Dennis McLellan interviews Leon, and the article runs on the front page of a local edition of the Los Angeles Times to great acclaim. Leyson accepts invitations to share his story, usually without notes or preparation, at many venues across the U.S. and Canada. In 2011, he receives an honorary doctorate from Chapman University and tells his story in a documentary for Los Angeles television.
Leon learns more about Schindler over the years, including the bribery and shady deals that he performed to save Jewish lives. While other German businessmen worked only for their own self-interest, Schindler took risks to save his Jewish employees. Leon concludes that Schindler embodies heroism, which he defines as doing “the best of things in the worst of times” (205). Throughout the rest of his life, Leon misses his brother Tsalig and is haunted by his memory, but he takes great solace in the love of his wife and their children and grandchildren.
Afterword Summary
In the Afterword, Leyson’s wife, Elisabeth (“Lis”), his daughter Stacy, and his son Daniel remember his life. Stacy and Daniel’s remarks are taken from the eulogies that they delivered at Leyson’s memorial service.
Lis explains that Leon died on January 12, 2013, after living with T-cell lymphoma for three years. Although Leon had finished the manuscript of his book and had entrusted it to an agent, he did not live to learn the details of its publication. Leon’s motivation in telling his story was to honor the memory of his family and other victims of the Holocaust.
Stacy says that her father’s key characteristic was his generosity, and she asserts that his Holocaust experiences did not define who he was. Daniel remembers his father’s wisdom, his talent for languages, and the pleasurable times that the family shared together.
Epilogue-Afterword Analysis
The Boy on the Wooden Box embraces a complex time scheme. It is bookended by a prologue and an epilogue to address events that take place after the main events of the narrative. In these sections, Leyson makes use of a retrospective approach, reflecting upon events in a way that is seasoned by the knowledge of what happened later. The timeline of the book starts in 1965, jumps back to the 1930s and Leon’s childhood, and then follows a linear path through World War II and its aftermath, extending the narrative to 2013, the year of the book’s publication.
The Epilogue recounts Leon’s life in America after the war. Leyson draws a sharp contrast between his old life in Europe and his new life in America. In the previous chapter, Leyson contrasted the humane treatment at the American-led refugee camp with the brutal conditions at the Nazi labor camps. In the army, although the drill sergeant yelled at him and his army buddies as they performed their menial duties, Leon realized that he “[wouldn’t] be shot for that” (190). In this way, Leyson expresses his gratitude to the United States, a country he “had […] come to love” (191).
At the same time, he was disturbed by racial segregation on buses in Atlanta, Georgia, which recalled the discrimination directed at Jews during the Holocaust. Thus, Leyson’s attitude toward his adopted land mixes criticism with a predominant tone of grateful appreciation.
Leyson also addresses Schindler’s precarious life after the war, in which his rescue of Jews during the Holocaust became the focal point of his life. He retained affection for his former employees, whom he called his “children,” thus demonstrating that he valued them as more than mere workers. Leyson describes Schindler’s tomb at a Catholic cemetery on Mt. Zion in Jerusalem, stating that Schindler is “the only member of the Nazi Party buried” in that location (196).
Leyson effectively brings his story up to the 21st century, thus connecting the events of World War II and the Holocaust with modern times, and he addresses the reception of the popular movie Schindler’s List. He tells of his many talks and television appearances and of his children and grandchildren. In the Afterword, the narrative voice switches from Leyson’s to those of his wife and children, thus marking Leyson’s death before the book’s publication. The Afterword therefore functions as a sort of eulogy, contemplating Leon’s death and widening the scope of the story to his personal and family life in his later years.
