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.