The Accidental Anarchist: From the Diaries of Jacob Marateck
Bryna Kranzler, 2010 *
Crosswalk Press
338 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780984556304
Summary
The Accidental Anarchist is the true story of Jacob Marateck, an Orthodox Jew who was sentenced to death three times in the early 1900s—in Russia—and lived to tell about it. He also happened to have been the author's grandfather.
The book is based on the diaries that Marateck began keeping in 1905, during the Russo-Japanese War. A Jew who was conscripted into the notoriously anti-Semitic Russian army, Marateck led soldiers during the war who wanted to kill him, simply for being a Jew, at least as much as the enemy did, simply for being in the way. Not content to merely survive, following the war Marateck joined the incompetent Polish revolutionary underground movement that sought to overthrow the Czar.
It was in that capacity that he was caught, arrested, and casually sentenced to death for the third time. His life was saved by the intervention of a young girl who picked up a note he dropped he dropped in the street, which resulted in the third death sentence being commuted to ten years of hard labor in Siberia, followed by permanent exile.
But Marateck escaped from Siberia with Warsaw's colorful "King of Thieves." Together, the unlikely pair traveled 3000 miles by to Warsaw, without food, money or legal papers, where Marateck decided to search for the young girl who had saved his life. Her name was Bryna, and she became the author's grandmother and namesake.
The Accidental Anarchist, told in Marateck's own voice, is filled with rare humor and optimism that made it possible for him to survive. (From the publisher.)
* Translators: Shimon Wincelberg and Anita Marateck Wincelberg