Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have finally read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s remarkable two volume historical essay Two Hundred Years Together after buying the Russian, French, and German editions from amazon. What an adventure it has been. Research and writing the two volumes occupied the last decade of his life; the books were published in 2001 and 2003, but are still not available in English translation. They were apparently translated by Columbus Falco and appeared listed along with a color picture of the book by several booksellers, but suddenly disappeared without explanation. It is simply “no longer available.” A few chapters have been translated and now appear in various scholarly blogs on the Internet, and two foreign language translations are available from amazon. Also, on the Internet one can find two partial English translations which are helpful but not authoritative Amazon.com does list the Russian original so I bought this two volume set. While I had a part-time job translating Russian engineering papers for the U S Air Force as a graduate student in the late 1950s my Russian is now more than 50 years old and it was never quite up to Solzhenitsyn. Reading him was a struggle, but I soon discovered translations in French and German, which I read far better than Russian. I ordered the two volume French edition from Amazon.ca but only got volume one. The second volume is somehow no longer available either from amazon in Canada or France. I did find a used copy on Ebay from Italy and bought it. The German translation I found on amazon.com was a huge disappointment. It’s in one large volume but is not faithful to the genre of the original as is the French translation, Deux siècles ensemble. Solzhenitsyn wrote his historical essay structured like a conversation moving from one idea to the next by association, rather than by time, events, or even topic. The German edition, Zweihundert Jahre Zusammen fits the original 27 chapters into 15 chapters organized in strict topical Teutonic fashion. Without indulging in conspiracy theories I wanted to learn why the book is still not available in English and why volume two is so difficult to find in French. Volume one doesn’t contain anything more embarrassing to the Jews than already exists in The Jewish Encyclopedia, however it does present a case that many of the so called Tsarist pogroms against the Jews were not government sanctioned at all, but rather were Orthodox Jews attacking and killing Hassidic and secular Jews while the government officials often looked the other way, not wanting to get involved in a local religious dispute. Solzhenitsyn is famous for giving names, aliases, family histories, and numbers because the author knew and worked with some of these people when a communist or later as a fellow dissident in the Gulag. He does make the point that the others do not, that while the fraction of the Russian population that were Jews before the revolution was only 4%, the representation of Jews in the Bolshevik party before and after the revolution was 27%. The author also points out that most of these were assimilated Jews like Lev Bronstein, a.k.a. Leon Trotsky. In the final chapter on assimilation, as a solution to the Jewish Question which has haunted Europe for centuries, he finds himself caught in a dilemma: whether they should assimilate and become Christian Europeans, or stay faithful to a religious heritage that has maintained them as a people for millennia. He reluctantly concludes that they would ultimately best immigrate to Israel although he says he has never been sympathetic with Zionism. Of course, more than a million Russian Jews have done so and today Israel now has a Russian Question. While the well-educated Russian Jews have assimilated economically, they still speak Russian, they live together in Russian communities, and they generally look down on Israel’s Levantine culture as inferior to their own Eastern European culture. The patrons of theater, concerts, and art exhibits in Israel are mostly Russian Jews. While they have all come to the country under the aegis of the Law of Return, the males are not circumcised and what is worse, they insist on eating pork, the main food of Central and Eastern Europe. Talmudic Law says that the hooves of swine must never touch Ha Eretz, the Holy Land, and they don’t. Pigs are raised on remote farms in Israel on wooden platforms six inches above the ground. But the controversial issue with this book apparently lies in volume two. By my reading, the author just comes right out and says it, as he is so wont to do. The Greeks told Diogenes that if he ever actually found an honest man, he would not like him. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn seems to be that man; however, only half of his readers don’t like him. The passage, on page 101 of volume two (in Russian edition), reads as best as I can find it faithfully rendered into English: The question then emerges of when Communist authority spread from Russia, and came to engulf world Judaism. The stormy participation of Jews in the Communist revolution drew cautious statements of concerns about world Jewry that were quieted, their evidence concealed, by communist and Jews worldwide, who attempted to silence it by denouncing it as extreme anti-Semitism. After 70 or 80 years passed, and under the pressure of many facts and discoveries, the view of Jewish involvement in the revolutionary years opened slightly. Already many Jewish voices have discussed this publicly. For example, the poet Naum Korzhavin has noted that as long as it is taboo to speak of the participation of the Jews in Bolshevism, it will be impossible properly to discuss the revolutionary period. There are even times now when Jews are proud of their participation—when Jews have said that they did participate in the revolution, and in disproportionately large numbers. M. Argusky has noted that Jews involved in the revolution and the civil war was not limited to the revolutionary period but also continued in their considerable and widespread involvement in running the state apparatus. Israeli socialist S. Tsiryul’nikov has stated that from the beginning of the revolution Jews served as the basis of the new communist regime. But most Jewish authors today still deny the contribution of Jews to Bolshevism, sweeping the evidence aside with anger, or more frequently with reference to the pain such evidence causes them. But despite their pain there is no doubt that these Jewish otshchepentsy for several years after the revolution dominated Bolshevism, headed the belligerent Red Army (Trotsky), the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (Sverdlov), ran both capitals (Zinoviev), the Comintern (Zinoviev), the Profintern/Red Trade Union International (Dridzo-Lozovskiy) and the Komsomol (Oscar Ryvkin, and after him Lazarus Shatskin.) But, why would this passage cause people to shun this book? In the 30s and 40s liberal Jews were proud of their participation the Great Experiment, but after Russian Communism proved to be a complete economic and political, if not genocidal failure, they wanted to sweep it “unter den Teppich” as the German translation reads in this passage. Nobody wants to ever have been associated with a failed project. Even the most ardent Marxists assert that Karl himself said Communism could never be successfully implemented in an industrially backward nation (e.g., Russia) or a primitive agricultural economy (e.g., China). He predicted that England would be the first communist nation and the United States the second. How can you redistribute the wealth if there is no wealth to redistribute? Marxists had high hopes for Venezuela, the wealthiest nation in South America, but alas that grand experiment failed for some unknown reason (go figure!), so hopes are now turning to The Republic of South Africa, the wealthiest nation in Africa. I hate to be a stick in the mud, but after the newly elected Marxists have killed or driven off all the Boers (read farmers) in the RSA, they will surely starve along with the Venezuelans. Those farms already appropriated by indigenous Africans are failures. On a recent news feed a European journalist asked a native RSA woman where they would get their food after they had driven out the Boers; she said: “The same place we get it now, in the grocery store.” Chavez and Maduro soon discovered that loyal military officers cannot successfully run a nationalized oil industry, and the RSA Marxist government will soon learn that people who have never farmed cannot raise food, or at least not enough to support a modern urbanized society. But, perhaps they will stumble across Stalin’s classic solution to agricultural production, the collective farm. In the Ukraine, implementation of that solution may have resulted in the death of 35 million Kulaks (read farmers). What can we learn from Solzhenitsyn’s remarkable historical essay that may help guide society today? The Jews were rejected by Europe because they were different and they refused to assimilate. Napoleon offered them first class citizenship in his new Europe, but they still refused to assimilate. For this, Solzhenitsyn praises them from his own vantage point as a devout Russian Orthodox Christian nationalist, but he admits this was the Jewish Question. Only the Russians have a Holy Land like the Jews’ Ha Eretz. Is the next ethnic problem for the West the Muslim Question? Muslim immigrants and refugees have shown little progress toward assimilation and if anything, Shari’a Law is much more severe and separating than Orthodox Judaism, which after all, was born in 14th Century Poland, rather than the Middle East. What can we learn from history? Perhaps the British historian Trevor-Roper was correct when he observed that “The only thing we learn from history is that we don’t learn fromhistory.”