The Literary Legacy of Julius Margolin, Gulag Veteran &Public Intellectual

One of the earliest important contributions to the corpus of Gulag literature is "Journey into the Land of the Zeks," the memoir of Julius Margolin, a Russian/Polish/Israeli writer who had been imprisoned in Northern Soviet labor camps for five years and, upon release, managed to leave the USSR in 1946, as part of the repatriation of Polish citizens after World War II. Margolin’s book, long recognized for its literary merit as well as for its testimonial function, represents the Gulag through the eyes of a liberal Western intellectual. The book’s fate was thorny, possibly because of what some of the readers perceived as a clash between the author’s protest against labor camps and his concern with (among other issues) specifically Jewish fates. Journey was first published in shortened forms; in full it came out, in Russian, French, Hebrew, Polish, and English, only half a century after the author’s death in 1971. An astonished outsider in the camps, Margolin remained a partial outsider in Israel, a Russian intellectual, recognized and listened to by narrow circles of the audience, which, however, proved to be indomitably faithful. His works, literary, journalistic, and educational are accruing a new relevance and new readership these days.

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Host or Publisher Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies