The Samurai of Vishogrod

Book excerpt: During the early 1930s Jacob Marateck (1883-1950), a Polish-born immigrant to the United States, resumed the journal he had begun during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. At the time of his death he had filled a total of twenty-eight notebooks, none of which had he had the opportunity to revise and edit for publication in English. To the present-day reader, they will undoubtedly evoke ready echoes of the society and culture of what collectively has come to be known as the shtetl -- the lost world of East European Jewry. Finally, there is also the story of Jacob Marateck, now a soldier in the Czar's army, finds himself adrift on the blood-soaked battlefields of Manchuria, a participant in the Russo-Japanese War. His notebooks serve to remind us that for a people simply to have survived through nineteen centuries of unrelenting hostility, most of them have truly belonged to that biblical breed of "giants of the earth"--Compassionate yet full of brawling vitality, pious yet earthy, stubbornly determined to survive without forfeiting their humanity, and not all inclined "to let anyone spit into his kasha". To prepare this huge windfall of stories, fragments, and notes for publication called not only for translation and editing, but frequently also for connective passages of imaginative reconstruction. Involving the talents of writer, historian, and literary archaeologist -- his youngest daughter, Anita, and son-in-law, Shimon -- serve him well.