Triumph of faith

Mendelevich’s saga is a classic of Soviet prison camp literature.

By RALPH AMELAN
Triumph of faith (photo credit: MENDELEVICH)
Triumph of faith
(photo credit: MENDELEVICH)
“I felt the embracing presence of the One who transcends time and space, and thus was out of reach of this monstrous system, and my sense of being part of that omnipresent Oneness is what saved me.”
When Riga-born Yosef Mendelevich was sentenced to 12 years imprisonment for his part in the 1970 aborted attempt to hijack an airliner in order to escape to Israel, he lived in Soviet prisons and labor camps for over a decade. But his inner world, dominated by his fierce discovery and tenacious practice of Judaism, was matched by his surroundings, “crosshatched by tensions and passions, boiling with intensity.” He chronicles both with a novelist’s sensitivity.
On one level, Mendelevich, now a rabbi and educator, presents his story as a remarkable triumph of faith. Indeed it was. But he also reveals a self-critical awareness, and is a keen observer throughout of the currents that both united and divided his fellow prisoners.
He notes the “dark impulse” that almost always ruined previous good relations between himself and his cellmates, and describes with frankness the daily moral dilemmas, which racked his existence. When was it better to defy the authorities and when to lie low? When to make common cause with other prison groups and when to fight only for his fellow Jewish prisoners? How to choose sides when friends fall out? Mendelevich combined an unquenchable thirst for Jewish learning with broad sympathies.
He got on well with most of the staunch Ukrainian and Baltic nationalists whom he met, and forged links with unobservant Jewish prisoners: he reserves his scorn for the Communist “true believers” and, of course, his jailers. And, throughout, there is frustration and sorrow at his inability to help his family: he was never to see his father in freedom.
This account was published in Hebrew and Russian 25 years ago, and its appearance in English is long overdue. Benjamin Balint’s translation reads as fluently as one could wish, and helps to establish Unbroken Spirit as a classic of Soviet prison camp literature. It also helps remind us of the bravery and resilience of a generation that succeeded in confounding a powerful empire.
“We hadn’t imagined the strength of your willpower and determination,” confessed the colonel who was the KGB’s head of Jewish affairs, as Mendelevich was ushered out of the Soviet Union. But the author had imagined his strength, and acted accordingly. “I was rather like sand,” he muses, “which even when stepped on soon resumes its former shape.”