Word: yakov
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...State Department last week released the captured Nazi archives that gave those long-hidden details of the death of Yakov Dzhugashvili, Stalin's only child by his first marriage. As a 33-year-old artillery lieutenant, Yakov was taken prisoner near Smolensk in World War II's early days. Stalin was so enraged that he had Yakov's Jewish wife thrown into prison on suspicion that she had somehow weakened his will to fight. Svetlana Alliluyeva, the daughter of Stalin's second marriage, remembers that her brother Vasily (who died in a drunken auto accident...
...herself after a trivial quarrel with Stalin. Her mother's relatives and intimates were victims of her father's paranoid suspicions, and "the life of almost everyone was cut short in some tragic fashion" -prison, firing squad, madness. When the Germans captured Svetlana's half brother Yakov during the war, Stalin refused to exchange him for a Nazi general and Yakov was executed. Svetla na's brother Vasily, an air force lieutenant general at 24, became an alcoholic and an embezzler and' died a ruin. In telling all this, she shows a natural eloquence only...
...reviewer wishes Malamud had written. The book is judged in terms of what it is not, and therefore is found to have "missed." There is nothing more contemporary than Malamud's theme; that of identity. Within the "innocent-guilty" framework is embedded the hard, solid nut of Yakov's stubbornness: I am what I know is true. Malamud speaks for contemporary Americans as well as for one Russian Jew. Man's inner quantum soul is reflected here...
Surrounded by Russia. He aims to pose the universal question of innocent man put to nothing by guilty authority. His hero is a Jew whose complaint against Gentiles is not that they are not Jews but that they are not Christians. He is called Yakov Bok (a name that suggests scapegoat), a Russian who is a stranger to Russia, who makes himself a stranger to his own Jewish tradition, and who is finally a stranger to everyone but the reader...
...history and men betray him. His cart breaks down, so he rides bareback to his fate. He cannot leave himself behind; the horse "looks like an old Jew," and as he canters, ambles, trots and staggers across the black plain, Yakov can only be seen as a Jewish Quixote. It could also be said of his dream of "good fortune and a comfortable house," in the conditions of the Ukraine of that day, that nothing could be more hopelessly quixotic. He trades his Rosinante for a ferry ride and enters the holy city of Kiev. As a final renunciation...