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
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1957-1958
• Where—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Barnard, M.B.A., Yale
University
• Awards—see below
• Currently—N/A
Bryna Kranzler is a graduate of Barnard College where she studied playwriting, and received the Helen Price Memorial Prize for Dramatic Composition. Her first play was a finalist for the Eugene O'Neill Memorial Theater Competition, and was scheduled for production twice: the first time, the theater owner died, and the season was shut down; the second time, the director committed suicide.
For the benefit of the arts community, she got out of playwriting and earned an MBA from Yale University to make up for her misspent youth. She spent 15 years in marketing for health-care, high tech and consumer products companies before returning to writing.
Her first book, The Accidental Anarchist, is the winner of multiple awards, including the 2012 Sharp Writ Book Award for General Non-Fiction, the 2012 Readers Favorite Award for Historical/Cultural Non-Fiction, the 2012 International Book Award, and National Indie Excellence Award for a Historical Biography, and the 2011 “USA Best Books” Award for a Historical Biography.
Born in Los Angeles, Kranzler is the daughter of Shimon Wincelberg, the first Orthodox writer in Hollywood. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Marateck is an extraordinary character facing certain death many times with consistent humor and steadfast faith in God. The reader certainly does not need to be an Orthodox Jew to appreciate the intense commitment Marateck has to his faith and his religious duty. His notes reveal a breathtaking ability to absorb the absurd that life dishes out to a lowly Jew in the Czar’s anti-Semitic army with aplomb and grace.
New York Journal of Books
“There was simply too much fun to be had.” Reality and three narrowly dodged death sentences kind of puts a damper on that illusion as 13-year old Jacob Marateck, citing “the ignorance of youth and a desire for grand adventure,” leaves his small Polish hometown to seek some rudderless escapades in the Warsaw of the absorbing and often black-humored true story The Accidental Anarchist. Indeed, the adventures in this novel are many, and unforeseen. Variety-spiced life mixed with historical events of the 1900s in Russia and Poland sees Marateck moving on from student to baker’s assistant, labor organizer to an officer in the Russian army during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 against the Japanese in China.
Seattle Post Intelligencer
Bryna Kranzler has masterfully pulled together the notes and journal entries of her forbearer, Yakov (Jacob) Marateck, and turned them into a warm, enchanting, readable Jewish saga, with all the richness of pre-Bolshevik color and Polish-ethnic splendor. To dive into “The Accidental Anarchist,” at 334 pages, is to lunge into a whole different world and time that draws one into the spirit of the times and the mind of Yakov. Yet, the reader, whether a Goy (Gentile) like myself, an adult or a teen, is not left behind by incomprehensible words and phrases.
Reader Views.com
I found myself so fascinated by The Accidental Anarchist that I thought about it at work, wondered what would happen during dinner, and picked it up each night before bed. Several nights I went to sleep much later than I had intended because I was simply unaware how much time was passing. One reason for this is that Kranzler does a remarkable job of turning a life into a narrative. The reader knows what drives Marateck and wants to know whether or not he achieves his goal.
Kate Brauning - Bookshelf.com
Discussion Questions
1. Why did Jacob Marateck began keeping a diary?
2. What role did friendship play in the book?
3. What role did women play in Marateck’s survival?
4. Would you have made the same moral choices that Marateck made (eg., helping his army friend get transferred to another regiment, rejecting Pyavka’s suggestion for what they needed to do to get home) under the same circumstances?
5. What were the most important survival skills that Jacob Marateck demonstrated?
6. Who was your favorite character, and why?
7. How do the political, social and economic circumstances that preceded the Russian Revolutions compare with those in recent history in other countries?
8. Does this book have the same relevance for non-Jews as well as Jews?
9. What messages did you take from this book, and are they still relevant today?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)
Bryna Kranzler has also provided additional information to enhance your understanding and discussion of The Accidental Anarchist.
Background
Jacob Marateck began keeping the diaries that were turned into The Accidental Anarchist in 1905, during the Russo-Japanese War. That was when he decided that he needed to overthrow the Czar. He filled about 282 pages with his impeccable Yiddish penmanship until he was distracted by the death sentences, sentence to and escape from Siberia, and the need to flee to the United States.
Once he arrived in the Polish mining town of Shenandoah, PA, to which two of his brothers had already emigrated, he began telling stories of his experiences as a Jewish soldier, and later officer, in the Russian army, as well as what it was like to live as a Jew in the Russian-occupied territories at a time when anti-Semitism was the official government policy.
But what distinguished his stories was not merely his eyewitness account of a period of time that we, in the United States, know very little about (despite the fact that it changed the balance of powers in the world); it was his unique take on the situation that he described with a rare sense of humor that was not irreverent or self-deprecating so much as it was ironic. His storytelling style makes it easy to read about what were intolerable circumstances
Historical Context
The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 was ostensibly fought over a warm-weather port in Manchuria, but in reality the reason for the war was quite different: Czar Nicholas II, the last of the Romanov Dynasty, had been hearing rumblings about revolution (not surprisingly because everyone in the Russian-occupied territories was starving).
Rather than addressing the problem directly, such as by giving some of the noblemen’s land back to the peasants (which the nobility opposed, of course), the Czar decided that having a “quick and easy” war would be the best way to distract the population, raise their patriotism, and put to reset all that ‘nonsense’ about revolution. So the Czar violated terms of an earlier treaty with Japan, which provoked the Japanese to attack Port Arthur. Russia used this attack as an excuse to declare war.
Despite the fact that Russia declared what became known as the Russo-Japanese War (February 8, 1904-September 5, 1905) the Russian Army was completely unprepared to fight, going to war with technology and strategies that had last been employed thirty years earlier, during the Russo-Turkish War. The Russians completely underestimated the Japanese, and their defeats began almost immediately.
But since the War was not being fought so much for a strategic as much as for a political purpose, the Czar would not allow the War to end and kept sending young men to their deaths. And in 1905, Jacob Marateck began documenting the many ways that the Czar had let down his own people.
The War changed the balance of power in the world as Russia fell off its perch as a superpower, while Japan emerged onto the world stage as the first Asian nation to defeat a European nation. It took the intervention of President Theodore Roosevelt to negotiate a truce between Russia and Japan to end the war, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize.