Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back: A Memoir of the Gulag

by Julius Margolin, Stefani Hoffman (Translator), Timothy Snyder (Foreword by), Katherine R. Jolluck (Introduction)

Overview

Under the Soviet regime, millions of zeks (prisoners) were incarcerated in the forced labor camps, the Gulag. There many died of starvation, disease, and exhaustion, and some were killed by criminals and camp guards. In 1939, as the Nazis and Soviets invaded Poland, many Polish citizens found themselves swept up by the Soviet occupation and sent into the Gulag. One such victim was Julius Margolin, a Pinsk-born Jewish philosopher and writer living in Palestine who was in Poland on family matters. Margolin's Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back offers a powerful, first-person account of one of the most shocking chapters of the violent twentieth century. Opening with the outbreak of World War II in Poland, Margolin relates its devastating impact on the Jews and his arrest and imprisonment in the Gulag system. During his incarceration from 1940 to 1945, he nearly died from starvation and overwork but was able to return to Western Europe and rejoin his family in Palestine. With a philosopher's astute analysis of man and society, as well as with humor, his memoir of flight, entrapment, and survival details the choices and dilemmas faced by an individual under extreme duress. Margolin's moving account illuminates universal issues of human rights under a totalitarian regime and ultimately the triumph of human dignity and decency. This translation by Stefani Hoffman is the first English-language edition of this classic work, originally written in Russian in 1947 and published in an abridged French version in 1949. Circulated in a Russian samizdat version in the USSR, it exerted considerable influence on the formation of the genre of Gulag memoirs and was eagerly read by Soviet dissidents. Timothy Snyder's foreword and Katherine Jolluck's introduction contextualize the creation of this remarkable account of a Jewish world ravaged in the Stalinist empire--and the life of the man who was determined to reveal the horrors of the gulag camps and the plight of the zeks to the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780197502167
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	08/26/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	640
Sales rank:	843,430
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Julius Margolin (1900-1971) was trapped in Poland by the successive Nazi and Soviet invasions in 1939 and was arrested by the Soviets in June 1940 for refusing to accept Soviet citizenship. From 1940 to 1945 he served time in the Soviet Gulag. Upon his return to the West, he wrote his memoirs, Journey to the Land of the Zek, and a description of his return via Europe, The Road to the West. Stefani Hoffman is the former director of the Mayrock Center for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Research at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has translated numerous works, including Fear No Evil by Natan Sharansky. Timothy Snyder is Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University. His award-winning works include The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999; Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin; and Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. Katherine R. Jolluck is Senior Lecturer in History at Stanford University. She is the author of Exile and Identity: Polish Women in the Soviet Union During World War II and the co-author of Gulag Voices: Oral Histories of Soviet Incarceration and Exile.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Glossary Foreword by Timothy Snyder Introduction by Katherine R. Jolluck Prologue Chapter 1 September 1939 Chapter 2 Encircled Chapter 3 The Story of a Disillusionment Chapter 4 Pinsk Intermezzo Chapter 5 Elijah the Prophet Chapter 6 The Pinsk Prison Chapter 7 The Wandering Coffin Chapter 8 BBK [Baltic-White Sea Canal] Chapter 9 "Square Forty-Eight" Chapter 10 Rabguzhsila [Man/horsepower] Chapter 11 Conversations Chapter 12 Karelin's Brigade Chapter 13 Dehumanization Chapter 14 Wood Felling Chapter 15 The Medical Sector Chapter 16 My Enemy Labanov Chapter 17 Gardenberg's Brigade Chapter 18 Evening in the Barrack Chapter 19 People at Square 48 Chapter 20 Spring 1941 Chapter 21 Etap Chapter 22 Amnesty Chapter 23 "You Must Work" Chapter 24 Ivan Aleksandrovich Kuznetsov Chapter 25 A Letter to Ehrenburg Chapter 26 KVCh [Cultural-Educational Sector] Chapter 27 Isaac the Fifth Chapter 28 Camp Neurosis Chapter 29 In the Bathhouse Chapter 30 In the Office Chapter 30a Three Chapter 31 Maksik Chapter 32 The Doctrine of Hate Chapter 33 An Invalid's Lot Chapter 34 The Brigade Leader of Chronic Invalids Chapter 35 The Road to the North Chapter 36 Kotlas Chapter 37 Block Nine Chapter 38 Block Five Chapter 39 Release Chapter 40 Conclusion The Road to the West Chapter 1 Slavgorod Chapter 2 The Freedom Train Chapter 3 Non Omnis Moriar Chapter 4 The End of Maria Chapter 5 September 1946 Chapter 6 Heliopolis

Editorial Reviews

"Margolin's memoir presents a heart-wrenching account of hunger and cold, alongside numerous reflections on the Soviet camp system....What makes...[it] so compelling is its ground-breaking immediacy and urgency. This is direct report from Soviet camps, unencumbered by postwar interpretations and taboos....While it is too late to alter the fate of Margolin's fellow prisoners, this English edition of his memoir may play an important role in preserving the memory of millions of people of various nationalities and religions who perished in the Gulag." — Lidia Zessin-Jurek, East European Jewish Affairs

"This is a superbly edited academic edition whose excellence is praised in the foreword by the celebrated historian Tim Snyder. Journey to the Land of the Zeks with all its horrifying details, philosophical insights, and superb literary style, will finally receive the honor and attention that it deserves." — Mikhal Dekel, Haaretz

"But now we have the first English translation of the book, and in our current political climate it behooves people on both sides of the political aisle to read it." — Franklin Freeman, America Magazine, The Jesuit Review

"An incisive, harrowing, and absorbing eyewitness account of the Gulag....Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back acknowledges the scale of the catastrophe, but the volume focuses on its impact on humanity." — Harry C. Merritt, Arts Fuse

"Beautifully written, incredibly detailed and moving - an important historical document." — Kirkus, Starred Review

"More than just a Gulag memoir, this book includes an excellent and unusual portrait of Poland in 1939, encompassing an account of the occupation and Sovietization of its eastern territories after the Red Army's invasion in September. Margolin observes the impact of major political changes on different people and social classes; he has a strong sense of history, and his language has a literary flavor. This book is important for anyone interested in Soviet history, but also for anyone interested in a full account of the Jewish experience of the war. While the story of the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe is well known, the fate of Jews in Soviet-occupied Europe is still obscure. This is a story that will seem fresh and unusual to many." — Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag: A History

"Julius (Yuli) Margolin — clairvoyant Jewish writer and passionate political polemicist — fought to open the eyes of the world to Stalin's crimes and, specifically, to the Soviet system of slave convict labor. The long-awaited English-language publication of Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back is a game changer in both Soviet studies and Jewish studies." — Maxim D. Shrayer, editor of Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature and author of A Russian Immigrant

"This is a powerful, fine-grained account of war, occupation and the Gulag from an extraordinarily gifted writer. Margolin vividly details the Eastern European world of Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Belarussians and others living in fear under the German and Soviet occupation of their countries. His searing description of Gulag servitude is a ghastly refresher on mass dehumanization and how it robbed the prisoners of their identity, family, memories, health, and sanity." — Deborah Kaple, Princeton University

"It's hard to believe that this publication marks the first appearance of this remarkable story in English. Back in 1949, this thoughtful, detailed compelling memoir was the first of what ended up being many diaries of reluctant travelers sent to this awful Kafkaesque world of the Soviet Gulag. The author thus became the first of many witnesses who exposed the natural consequences of the Marx-Lenin-Trotsky-Stalin ideology of imposing forced equality on the masses...this book can serve as a fresh and welcome reminder of a long-forgotten warning to beware the tyranny of even lovely-sounding ideas." — Natan Sharansky

"Ably translated by Stefani Hoffman, the new volume includes helpful introductions by Timothy Snyder and Katherine R. Jollock that describe the work's publication history, provide necessary background information, and underscore what is most significant in the book." —Mosaic Magazine

"This is a book that demands to be read." —Times Literary Supplement®

From the Publisher

★ 2020-07-23
The first English translation of the author’s gulag memoir, composed in Russian in 1947 and first published in France in 1949.

Published long before Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago (1973), Margolin’s fierce exposé was largely ignored after the war. In this new version—featuring maps and glossary, a foreword by Timothy Snyder, and a helpfully contextual introduction by Katherine R. Jolluck, translator Hoffman does a brilliant job rendering Margolin’s sardonic flourishes in his presentation of the senseless cruelty of the Soviet gulag system. Born in Pinsk in 1900, then in Russia’s tumultuous Pale of Settlement, Margolin—a Jew who was trying to return to Palestine, where his family had moved by the time of the invasion of Poland in 1939—was ultimately caught up in the terrible nationalistic dilemma of accepting a Soviet passport or returning to Nazi-occupied Poland. Ironically, those who did return perished in the concentration camps. Margolin was arrested and endured five years in the Soviet prison system. He was taken by “coffin” train to the far northwest, on the northern tip of Lake Onega, where Stalin had established a camp to provide the labor to construct the Baltic–White Sea Canal. With the Nazi invasion, the inmates were moved by foot, walking 12 hours per day to the Kargopol camp, 300 miles east. Via the meticulous day-to-day chronicling of the horrendous conditions and labor, spiritless terrain, meager rations, foul conditions, and sadistic behavior by the hardened, predatory criminals with whom he traveled and worked, Margolin sketches the thoroughly dehumanizing system of Sovietization. “I was never enchanted by the Soviet regime,” he writes, “and I never doubted that its theory was unsustainable and its practice full of cruel human fraud.” Attempting to reveal the truth about the camps, Margolin was met by “a stone wall of indifference and treachery.” The final section, “Road to the West,” delineates his arduous, miraculous return to freedom.

Beautifully written, incredibly detailed and moving—an important historical document.

Kirkus Reviews