A rich trove of letters tells the moving story of two young physics students in Stalin’s Russia whose love was severely tested while separated by exile in Siberia.
In this first publication of “the largest cache of Gulag letters ever found,” Figes (History/Birkbeck College, Univ. of London; The Crimean War, 2011, etc.) has sifted through more than 1,500 missives to uncover a story of two people who found a way to endure over eight years of the harshest isolation and repression. After meeting at Moscow University in 1935, Lev and Svetlana, or Sveta as she is called in the letters, became kindred spirits over their shared passion for poetry and learning. With the invasion of Russia by the Nazis in 1941, Lev was mobilized to the front; he was soon captured and spent the war as a POW. However, because he spoke German, he was enlisted as a translator. With the liberation by the Americans, Lev was urged to take a job as a physicist in the United States, but he refused, returning to Moscow to find Sveta. Upon arrival, he was accused of spying for the Germans and was sentenced to 10 years in the Arctic Gulag. News of Lev’s whereabouts finally reached Sveta and her family, and in an extraordinary letter dated Jul. 12, 1946, Sveta wrote to Lev for the first time at the labor camp: “How many times have I wanted to nestle in your arms but could only turn to the empty wall in front of me? I felt I couldn’t breathe. Yet time would pass, and I would pull myself together. We will get through this, Lev.” They managed to express a cautiously optimistic tone through the grim, lonely stretch of Lev’s incarceration, and were even able to meet secretly a few times. Their devotion to each other allowed them each to survive. A heart-rending record of extraordinary human endurance.
Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9522-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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