Propaganda and Nationalism in Wartime Russia By Shimon Redlich (Columbia University Press, 1982, $26.00) NINETEEN EIGHTY THREE marks the fortieth anniversary of the visit of Solomon Mikhoels and Itsik Fefer to this country. The publication of Shimon Redlich’s book on the saga of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) is thus timely and important. In 1943, … Read more
Testimony: The Memoirs of Shostakovitch ed. Solomon Volkov No Travel like Russian Travel: by Nora Beloff For decades, Dmitri Shostakovich was presented as the personification of all that was best in Soviet culture. On his death in 1975. the accolades from the high and mighty cattle cascading down in a torrent of grief. Behind the … Read more
NO JAIL FOR THOUGHT, by Lev Kopelev. 268 pages. (Seeker and Warburg) £6. Lev Kopelev is best known in the west not so much for his own writing but for his friendship in the camps with Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It was Kopelev on whom the great author based the character of the idealistic Jewish Communist Rubin … Read more
VORKUTA, by Edward Baca. 352 pages (Constable). 15.95. In 1945, Edward Buca was a 19-year-old member of the Polish Home Army. Poland at the end of the war was no place for an ardent nationalist. The victorious Red Army was in no mood to tolerate an independently-minded man and Buca soon found himself in a … Read more
THE MASARYKS: the making of Czechoslovakia, by Zbynek Zeman. 230 pages (Weidenfeld and Nicholson). £6.50. There has long been a feeling of mutual identification between the peoples of Czechoslovakia and Israel. Both achieved independence during the same period of history after countless centuries in the service of other nations. Since he Second World War, the … Read more
THE POWER, by Robert G. Raiser. 499 pages (Seeker and Warburg). £5.90. A CHRONICLE OF CURRENT EVENTS, Numbers 32 and 33. 192 pages (Amnesty International 11.95) Bullying harassment is the price a good journalist has to pay when he attempts to write about something that does not have official Soviet blessing. Soviet Jews learnt the … Read more
SHORT STORIES (W THE LONG DEATH, by Yechezkel Pulerevitch. 293 pp (published in Israel by former Prisoners of Zion from the USSR). AN AMERICAN IN THE GULAG, by Alexander Dolgun. 370 pages (Collins/Harvill) 370pp £4.50. Yechezkel Pulerevitch was a member of Betar, the youth group of Herut, when the Red Army invaded Lithuania in 1940. … Read more
When the Soviets finally allowed some Jewish emigration from the USSR, they also ensured the expulsion of some of their greatest literary talents, Jewish and non-Jewish. Although there is now a considerable wealth of contemporary Russian language writers in thewest, very little is heard of specifically Jewish writers from the USSR. David Markish’s book is … Read more
Kontinent 1: The Alternative Voice of Russia and Eastern Europe 180pp, published by Andre Deutsch 3.95 Since the Soviet authorities crush all forms of uncontrolled art and literature, it is not surprising to find that the best known of the country’s creative intelligentsia are emigrés. As the only creative literature is samizdat, it was only … Read more
LENIN IN ZURICH, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. (Bodley Head). £3.75. Sozhenitsyn’s latest book consists of chapters extracted from his panoramic history of the Russian Revolution. The first is the is the missing chapter 22 of August 1914. The rest comes from the still-to-be-published parts two and three, October 1916 and March 1917. ‘Lenin in Zurich” parallels … Read more