Book review | The daughter’s harmless question made the father look into the background of his family: the grandfathers were revealed to be tyrants, spies and liars

Nonfiction book

Axa Fahler: Liar, spy, revolutionary. On the trail of my family’s secrets. Athena. 440 pp.

In the thousands families create chronicles and little booklets about the family’s own twists and turns in life. Usually, the initiative is taken by the older generation: if you young people someday, maybe, these things would also interest you… There are collections of stories, in-depth genealogies, you name it.

from Helsinki by Axa Fahler (b. 1973) his teenage daughter asked him four years ago: “What do you know about Nonno’s father?”

Nonno was the father of the daughter, whose father the question was about. From the background she needed for her daughter’s high school essay, the topic swelled into Axa Fahler’s extensive work – as a result, the family’s secrets are told, and it progresses in a relaxed manner. Liar, spy, revolutionary -work.

It’s not about the work of a professional researcher, “but a family story based on real events, a narrative based on one’s own interpretations”, states Fahler. But yes, in his inventive thirst for information, he can stand the comparison.

Main characters are a very secretive “badass dad”, Leo Fahler (1923–1971), and his father Jussi Fahler ( 1896–1956). There is a lot of surprisingly hot information about their life cycle.

Leo Fahler in particular was suppressed in the family, a forbidden topic of conversation. For reasons that will partly be revealed as you read.

Other people in the book have adventures in the fields, from the family and from outside. The description of the people is toned down.

Jussi Fahler was born as a child of poor people in Kankaanpää, Satakunta. His father was a vicious, violent family tyrant, and Jussi left the world early.

From the sources that have been spared, authentic scenes are drawn, how a boy with a desire to study develops into a sawmill worker, a popular labor speaker, who ends up a red prisoner in 1918. He was an SDP member of parliament in the late 1920s.

At the beginning of the civil war, Fahler was captured, apparently innocent, and the road eventually led to the Dragsvik death camp. There are convincing indications of how the guy who dominates the supliik can manage for almost two years in extreme conditions.

Not necessarily standing on the shoulders of others, but firmly securing one’s own interests. Emergency finds a way.

Jussi’s prison letters create a rich image. They are the literary pinnacle of his mini-biography.

“When I was imprisoned, I was a young child full of divine enthusiasm,” he summed up his time in prison. “Few people can imagine my moods from the early days of being a prisoner. I was like a chained bird. Many times I cried and cursed.”

Later life brought success, if setbacks, and in Fahler’s social thinking, fantasy seems to have taken over the field of time. He was also tormented by prison camp nightmares, and booze made him violent. Axa Fahler draws the image of her bohemian great-grandfather very well.

How about Leo Fahler, who gave the initial impetus to the book, family taboo?

He grew up on Torkkelinmäki in Helsinki with his father Jussi and his overprotective mother Thyra-with his mother, and attended the Kallio co-educational school. Snobby friends, the “Core Group” seeking street credibility became important. The war took a toll on them, the dead came too, but Leo Fahler survived with minimal wounds.

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The most hidden content of life was work in the red Valpo.

The book describes Leo’s 1930s in a flexible way, while after the war there is a hum of silence and questions. The student of political science didn’t exactly fill out his study book, but he passed anyway and even passed the student union elections – the only one from the Academic Socialist Society.

The most hidden content of life was work in the red Valpo. Leo Fahler worked for one and a half years as a detective of the department and even as deputy head of the military office.

There was a shortage of qualified clerks, so a smart young leftist with good language skills was fine. There were more student officials, such as those who later worked at Skp Erkki Kivimäki and Timo Koste.

Fahler’s job was to try to get back to Finland the wartime intelligence materials, the archives smuggled to Sweden in the Stella Polaris operation, along with their holders. He must have faded some of the catch. Apart from Valpo, the client could also have been the supervisory commission, the men of the hotel Torni.

Report on activities In Sweden, like all of Valpo’s time, it remains in the books as a company. It’s understandable, there simply aren’t any source materials, or at least they can’t be found. There are many places that can be filled with imagination. In any case, there are exciting glimpses of the young man’s activities in the book.

Although Leo Fahler officially left Valpo in the fall of 1946, some degree of freelance relationship with the agency (or with the Russians) apparently remained. He left the far-left soon, lived talentedly on the money of female friends and liked to socialize in restaurants.

The reasons why he became Leo Fahler persona non grata in their family, do not remain unclear. Casting oneself as a communist and vigilante was enough, and an additional merit was the general attitude of avoiding work. “An opportunist dressed in a funny Seuramie’s cloak,” sums up the grandson.

Jussi and Leo Fahler was united by a strong obsession with exaggeration, even lying: “One good story is a hundred times better than a thousand wooden facts.” The same mythomania applies to the author’s own father, whose stories are also presented.

Liar, spy, revolutionary is a unique, honest, poignant if sad story. There are many connections to political and social history.

Axa Fahler writes in an engaging style – where did she learn from? At least her daughter got the information she wanted.