En las kátorgas del zar

On his seventieth birthday, H. Leyvik, perhaps the most celebrated Yiddish poet, decided to look back and recount his experiences as a victim of repression after participating in the 1905 Russian Revolution, brutally crushed by imperial troops, from whose embers, twelve years later, the October Revolution would emerge. First in the Tsar's katorgas—a prison system that foreshadowed the gulag—between 1906 and 1912, when the writer was barely eighteen, and during his subsequent deportation to Siberia, Leyvik rescues his fellow prisoners from oblivion—whether revolutionaries or common criminals, Jews or Gentiles—and evokes his childhood, the traditional education he received, and the awakening of his political commitment, as well as the long journey on foot to Siberia. A testimony as harrowing as it is vital, and a profound reflection on life and freedom.