There is a lot of good history in this study of a family of Russian Jews and their lives from pre-revolution to the 1980s but it's hard to plough through at times.Still, the father's story.. leaving anti-Semitic Tsarist Russia for America, becoming politicized there, leading an army against the Whites and Japanese, rising to top ranking Bolshevik, going to China to help kick off the revolution there, shit it's a really huge fascinating story.The other main focus is the different guises that anti-semitism has taken in Russia and the USSR and the dissident movement of the 60s and 70s. Was really interesting thinking snout how people organised and did things to protest and resist even when they were scared to talk to anyone they didn't know. For a random op-shop find I guess I learned a lot.
Another brilliant work by Chaim. I would almost hesitate to call it a story as it has elements of legendary strength, unfathomable stamina, intense and enduring focus twined within the history of this family. We have no real parallel experience to understand an interminable, labyrinthine bureaucracy fraught with seemingly random actions of a central government dedicated to the keeping of it's dissidents within a secret country, intent on protecting itself, not only from without, but, also within.This work read like a novel, almost too strange to believe.
What do You think about The Gates Of November (1997)?
A tedious season they awaitWho hears November at the gate- Alexander PushkinIntroduction: History brought together on the same soil two vigorous peoples, Russians and Jews, whose bitter destiny it was to be ruinously at each other's throats.Prologue: On a Thursday evening in the first week of January 1985, Adena and I landed in a snowstorm at Sheremetevo Airport in Moscow.Opening: Shortly after the turn of the century, a thirteen year old boy in a small town in White Russia fled from the impoverished home of his mother, his father having died five years earlier.1* The Gates of November3* Moominvalley in November
—Bettie☯
