Read Books Online and Download eBooks, EPub, PDF, Mobi, Kindle, Text Full Free.
Journey Into The Land Of The Zeks And Back
Download Journey Into The Land Of The Zeks And Back full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online Journey Into The Land Of The Zeks And Back ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!
Book Synopsis Journey Into the Land of the Zeks and Back by : Julius Margolin
Download or read book Journey Into the Land of the Zeks and Back written by Julius Margolin and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-10 with total page 649 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Journey to the Land of the Zek and Back is a vivid, first-person account of life in the Soviet Gulag, a work that has never appeared in full before in English. It was one of the earliest published accounts of the Soviet camp system when it was published in France in 1949 and became an established classic in the Russian-speaking world, influencing the formation of the genre of Gulag memoirs"--
Book Synopsis A Terrible Country by : Keith Gessen
Download or read book A Terrible Country written by Keith Gessen and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-07-10 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Editors' Choice Named a Best Book of 2018 by Bookforum, Nylon, Esquire, and Vulture "This artful and autumnal novel, published in high summer, is a gift to those who wish to receive it." —Dwight Garner, The New York Times "Hilarious, heartbreaking . . . A Terrible Country may be one of the best books you'll read this year." —Ann Levin, Associated Press "The funniest work of fiction I've read this year." —Christian Lorentzen, Vulture.com A literary triumph about Russia, family, love, and loyalty—from a founding editor of n+1 and author of Raising Raffi When Andrei Kaplan’s older brother Dima insists that Andrei return to Moscow to care for their ailing grandmother, Andrei must take stock of his life in New York. His girlfriend has stopped returning his text messages. His dissertation adviser is dubious about his job prospects. It’s the summer of 2008, and his bank account is running dangerously low. Perhaps a few months in Moscow are just what he needs. So Andrei sublets his room in Brooklyn, packs up his hockey stuff, and moves into the apartment that Stalin himself had given his grandmother, a woman who has outlived her husband and most of her friends. She survived the dark days of communism and witnessed Russia’s violent capitalist transformation, during which she lost her beloved dacha. She welcomes Andrei into her home, even if she can’t always remember who he is. Andrei learns to navigate Putin’s Moscow, still the city of his birth, but with more expensive coffee. He looks after his elderly—but surprisingly sharp!—grandmother, finds a place to play hockey, a café to send emails, and eventually some friends, including a beautiful young activist named Yulia. Over the course of the year, his grandmother’s health declines and his feelings of dislocation from both Russia and America deepen. Andrei knows he must reckon with his future and make choices that will determine his life and fate. When he becomes entangled with a group of leftists, Andrei’s politics and his allegiances are tested, and he is forced to come to terms with the Russian society he was born into and the American one he has enjoyed since he was a kid. A wise, sensitive novel about Russia, exile, family, love, history and fate, A Terrible County asks what you owe the place you were born, and what it owes you. Writing with grace and humor, Keith Gessen gives us a brilliant and mature novel that is sure to mark him as one of the most talented novelists of his generation.
Book Synopsis Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back by : Julius Margolin
Download or read book Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back written by Julius Margolin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-26 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Book Synopsis The Foundations of Ostpolitik by : Julia von Dannenberg
Download or read book The Foundations of Ostpolitik written by Julia von Dannenberg and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2008-01-10 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An analysis of the processes by which the West German government negotiated the Moscow Treaty with the Soviet Union in 1970 - the foundation of West German Ostpolitik.
Book Synopsis Survival on the Margins by : Eliyana R. Adler
Download or read book Survival on the Margins written by Eliyana R. Adler and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The forgotten story of 200,000 Polish Jews who escaped the Holocaust as refugees stranded in remote corners of the USSR. Between 1940 and 1946, about 200,000 Jewish refugees from Poland lived and toiled in the harsh Soviet interior. They endured hard labor, bitter cold, and extreme deprivation. But out of reach of the Nazis, they escaped the fate of millions of their coreligionists in the Holocaust. Survival on the Margins is the first comprehensive account in English of their experiences. The refugees fled Poland after the German invasion in 1939 and settled in the Soviet territories newly annexed under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Facing hardship, and trusting little in Stalin, most spurned the offer of Soviet citizenship and were deported to labor camps in unoccupied areas of the east. They were on their own, in a forbidding wilderness thousands of miles from home. But they inadvertently escaped Hitler’s 1941 advance into the Soviet Union. While war raged and Europe’s Jews faced genocide, the refugees were permitted to leave their settlements after the Soviet government agreed to an amnesty. Most spent the remainder of the war coping with hunger and disease in Soviet Central Asia. When they were finally allowed to return to Poland in 1946, they encountered the devastation of the Holocaust, and many stopped talking about their own ordeals, their stories eventually subsumed within the central Holocaust narrative. Drawing on untapped memoirs and testimonies of the survivors, Eliyana Adler rescues these important stories of determination and suffering on behalf of new generations.
Book Synopsis Camels in the Sky by : V. Muzafer Ahamed
Download or read book Camels in the Sky written by V. Muzafer Ahamed and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-11 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Journeying from the green, rain-soaked Kerala into the amphitheatre of the Sun, our traveller-journalist finds that there is no better metaphor than the desert to instil the lessons of life and death, love and hatred, thirst and water. From a single shower of rain which brings the gaaf tree back to life after a decade to the ever-shifting dunes of gold and thousand-year-old sand palaces, the mysterious poetry of the desert is everywhere on display, if one but has the eye and heart to see it. As the deserts of Nafud, Dahna, and Rub’ al Khali in Arabia both embrace and trap the travellers, the outpouring of the landscape’s longing for rivers recalls a past filled with water. This narrative describes the history, prehistory, archaeology, legends, folklore, and travails of the émigré Asian work force that tames the harsh desert as never before.
Book Synopsis Kolyma Diaries by : Jacek Hugo-Bader
Download or read book Kolyma Diaries written by Jacek Hugo-Bader and published by Portobello Books. This book was released on 2014-04-03 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the award-winning White Fever, Kolyma Diaries is an excursion into one of the world's last remaining badlands, a place full of Gulag ghosts and living wrecks. All along the 2000 kilometres of the Kolyma highway, Bader is plied with vodka. He hears mesmerizing, sometimes devastating, tales of the journeys that brought his 'fellow travellers', the people who give him lifts, to this benighted land. This is a book about the descendants of prisoners eking out a living, of conmen and veterans and scrap iron dealers, of corrupt politicians and organised crime. Stories are told of sons given away, husbands who reappear after three decades, scholars who now survive by foraging for mushrooms and berries, sculptors who hoard the heads lopped off statues of Lenin, miners who dig up mass graves while looking for gold, and all the addicts, convicts, fallen heroes and even sportsmen who run away from their troubles and end up in the most remote region in Russia
Book Synopsis One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by : Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Download or read book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2014-07-29 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the centenary of the Russian Revolution, a new edition of the Russian Nobel Prize-winning author's most accessible novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is an undisputed classic of contemporary literature. First published (in censored form) in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, it is the story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov as he struggles to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. On every page of this graphic depiction of Ivan Denisovich's struggles, the pain of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's own decade-long experience in the gulag is apparent—which makes its ultimate tribute to one man's will to triumph over relentless dehumanization all the more moving. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced-work camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is one of the most extraordinary literary works to have emerged from the Soviet Union. The first of Solzhenitsyn's novels to be published, it forced both the Soviet Union and the West to confront the Soviet's human rights record, and the novel was specifically mentioned in the presentation speech when Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. Above all, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich establishes Solzhenitsyn's stature as "a literary genius whose talent matches that of Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy" (Harrison Salisbury, The New York Times). This unexpurgated, widely acclaimed translation by H. T. Willetts is the only translation authorized by Solzhenitsyn himself.
Book Synopsis Is That a Fish in Your Ear? by : David Bellos
Download or read book Is That a Fish in Your Ear? written by David Bellos and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2011-10-11 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book for 2011 One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year People speak different languages, and always have. The Ancient Greeks took no notice of anything unless it was said in Greek; the Romans made everyone speak Latin; and in India, people learned their neighbors' languages—as did many ordinary Europeans in times past (Christopher Columbus knew Italian, Portuguese, and Castilian Spanish as well as the classical languages). But today, we all use translation to cope with the diversity of languages. Without translation there would be no world news, not much of a reading list in any subject at college, no repair manuals for cars or planes; we wouldn't even be able to put together flat-pack furniture. Is That a Fish in Your Ear? ranges across the whole of human experience, from foreign films to philosophy, to show why translation is at the heart of what we do and who we are. Among many other things, David Bellos asks: What's the difference between translating unprepared natural speech and translating Madame Bovary? How do you translate a joke? What's the difference between a native tongue and a learned one? Can you translate between any pair of languages, or only between some? What really goes on when world leaders speak at the UN? Can machines ever replace human translators, and if not, why? But the biggest question Bellos asks is this: How do we ever really know that we've understood what anybody else says—in our own language or in another? Surprising, witty, and written with great joie de vivre, this book is all about how we comprehend other people and shows us how, ultimately, translation is another name for the human condition.
Book Synopsis The Book Smugglers by : David E. Fishman
Download or read book The Book Smugglers written by David E. Fishman and published by University Press of New England. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Book Smugglers is the nearly unbelievable story of ghetto residents who rescued thousands of rare books and manuscripts-first from the Nazis and then from the Soviets-by hiding them on their bodies, burying them in bunkers, and smuggling them across borders. It is a tale of heroism and resistance, of friendship and romance, and of unwavering devotion-including the readiness to risk one's life-to literature and art. And it is entirely true. Based on Jewish, German, and Soviet documents, including diaries, letters, memoirs, and the author's interviews with several of the story's participants, The Book Smugglers chronicles the daring activities of a group of poets turned partisans and scholars turned smugglers in Vilna, "The Jerusalem of Lithuania." The rescuers were pitted against Johannes Pohl, a Nazi "expert" on the Jews, who had been dispatched to Vilna by the Nazi looting agency, Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, to organize the seizure of the city's great collections of Jewish books. Pohl and his Einsatzstab staff planned to ship the most valuable materials to Germany and incinerate the rest. The Germans used forty ghetto inmates as slave-laborers to sort, select, pack, and transport the materials, either to Germany or to nearby paper mills. This group, nicknamed "the Paper Brigade," and informally led by poet Shmerke Kaczerginski, a garrulous, street-smart adventurer and master of deception, smuggled thousands of books and manuscripts past German guards. If caught, the men would have faced death by firing squad at Ponar, the mass-murder site outside of Vilna. To store the rescued manuscripts, poet Abraham Sutzkever helped build an underground book-bunker sixty feet beneath the Vilna ghetto. Kaczerginski smuggled weapons as well, using the group's worksite, the former building of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, to purchase arms for the ghetto's secret partisan organization. All the while, both men wrote poetry that was recited and sung by the fast-dwindling population of ghetto inhabitants. With the Soviet "liberation" of Vilna (now known as Vilnius), the Paper Brigade thought themselves and their precious cultural treasures saved-only to learn that their new masters were no more welcoming toward Jewish culture than the old, and the books must now be smuggled out of the USSR. Thoroughly researched by the foremost scholar of the Vilna Ghetto-a writer of exceptional daring, style, and reach-The Book Smugglers is an epic story of human heroism, a little-known tale from the blackest days of the war.
Book Synopsis What They Didn't Burn by : Mel Laytner
Download or read book What They Didn't Burn written by Mel Laytner and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-09-20 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if you uncovered a Nazi paper trail that revealed your father to be a man very different from the quiet, introspective dad you knew . . . or thought you knew? Growing up, author Mel Laytner saw his father as a quintessential Type B: passive and conventional. As he uncovered documents the Nazis didn’t burn, however, another man emerged—a black market ringleader and wily camp survivor who made his own luck. The tattered papers also shed light on painful secrets his father took to his grave. Melding the intimacy of personal memoir with the rigors of investigative journalism, What They Didn’t Burn is a heartwarming, inspiring story of resilience and redemption. A story of how desperate survivors turned hopeful refugees rebuilt their shattered lives in America, all the while struggling with the lingering trauma that has impacted their children to this day.
Book Synopsis Young Heroes of the Soviet Union by : Alex Halberstadt
Download or read book Young Heroes of the Soviet Union written by Alex Halberstadt and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can trauma be inherited? In this luminous memoir of identity, exile, ancestry, and reckoning, an American writer returns to Russia to face a family history that still haunts him. It is this question that sets Alex Halberstadt off on a quest to name and acknowledge a legacy of family trauma, and to end a cycle of estrangement that had endured for nearly a century. His search takes him across the troubled, enigmatic land of his birth. In Ukraine he tracks down his paternal grandfather--most likely the last living bodyguard of Joseph Stalin--to reckon with the ways in which decades of Soviet totalitarianism shaped and fractured three generations of his family. He returns to Lithuania, his Jewish mother's home, to revisit the legacy of the Holocaust and the pernicious anti-Semitism that remains largely unaccounted for, learning that the boundary between history and biography is often fragile and indistinct. And he visits his birthplace, Moscow, where his glamorous grandmother designed homespun couture for Soviet ministers' wives, his mother dosed dissidents at a psychiatric hospital, and his father made a living by selling black-market jazz and rock records. Finally, Halberstadt explores his own story: that of a fatherless immigrant who arrived in America, to a housing project in Queens, New York, as a ten-year-old boy struggling with identity, feelings of rootlessness, and a yearning for home. He comes to learn that he was merely the latest in a lineage of sons who grew up alone, separated from their fathers by the tides of politics and history. As Halberstadt revisits the sites of his family's formative traumas, he uncovers a multigenerational transmission of fear, suspicion, melancholy, and rage. And he comes to realize something more: Nations, like people, possess formative traumas that penetrate into the most private recesses of their citizens' lives.
Book Synopsis A Little Corner of Freedom by : Douglas R. Weiner
Download or read book A Little Corner of Freedom written by Douglas R. Weiner and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1999-02-26 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While researching Russia's historical efforts to protect nature, Douglas Weiner unearthed unexpected findings: a trail of documents that raised fundamental questions about the Soviet political system. These surprising documents attested to the unlikely survival of a critical-minded, scientist-led movement through the Stalin years and beyond. It appeared that, within scientific societies, alternative visions of land use, resrouce exploitation, habitat protection, and development were sustained and even publicly advocated. In sharp contrast to known Soviet practices, these scientific societies prided themselves on their traditions of free elections, foreign contacts, and a pre-revolutionary heritage. Weiner portrays nature protection activists not as do-or-die resisters to the system, nor as inoffensive do-gooders. Rather, they took advantage of an unpoliced realm of speech and activity and of the patronage by middle-level Soviet officials to struggle for a softer path to development. In the process, they defended independent social and professional identities in the face of a system that sought to impose official models of behavior, ethics, and identity for all. Written in a lively style, this absorbing story tells for the first time how organized participation in nature protection provided an arena for affirming and perpetuating self-generated social identities in the USSR and preserving a counterculture whose legacy survives today.
Download or read book The Skripal Files written by Mark Urban and published by Macmillan Publishers Aus.. This book was released on 2018-10-04 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 4th March 2018, Salisbury, England. Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were enjoying a rare and peaceful Sunday spent together, completely unaware they had been poisoned with the deadly nerve agent Novichok. Hours later both were found slumped on a park bench close to death. Following their attempted murders on British soil, Russia was publically accused by the West of carrying out the attack, marking a new low for international relations between the two since the end of the Cold War. The Skripal Files is the definitive account of how Skripal's story fits into the wider context of the new spy war between Russia and the West. The Skripal Files explores the time Skripal spent as a spy in the Russian Military Intelligence, how he was turned to work as an agent by MI6, his imprisonment in Russia and his eventual release as part of a spy-swap that would bring him to Salisbury, where on that fateful day he and his daughter found themselves fighting for their lives.
Book Synopsis “Truth Behind Bars” by : Paul Kellogg
Download or read book “Truth Behind Bars” written by Paul Kellogg and published by Athabasca University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-05 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just north of the Arctic Circle is the settlement of Vorkuta, a notorious camp in the Gulag internment system that witnessed three pivotal moments in Russian history. In the 1930s, a desperate hunger strike by socialist prisoners, victims of Joseph Stalin’s repressive regime, resulted in mass executions. In 1953, a strike by forced labourers sounded the death knell for the Stalinist forced labour system. And finally, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a series of strikes by new, independent miners’ unions were central to overturning the Stalinist system. Paul Kellogg uses the story of Vorkuta as a frame with which to re-assess the Russian Revolution. In particular, he turns to the contributions of Iulii Martov, a contemporary of Lenin, and his analysis of the central role played in the revolution by a temporary class of peasants-in-uniform. Kellogg explores the persistence and creativity of workers’ resistance in even the darkest hours of authoritarian repression and offers new perspectives on the failure of democratic governance after the Russian Revolution.
Book Synopsis Survivors Club by : Michael Bornstein
Download or read book Survivors Club written by Michael Bornstein and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Byr). This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The incredible true story of Michael Bornstein--who at age 4 was one of the youngest children to be liberated from Auschwitz--and of his family"--
Download or read book The Infection written by Craig DiLouie and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A mysterious virus suddenly strikes down millions. In one American city, a small group struggles to survive. Together, they fight their way to a massive refugee camp where thousands have made a stand. There, what's left of the government will ask them to accept a mission that will determine the survival of them all - a dangerous journey back onto the open road and into the very heart of Infection
