Russia Books

Every now and then you read a book that is exceptionally scholarly, thoroughly academic and more than a little pedantic, and you find yourself enthralled by the subject, invigorated by the presentation and uplifted by the uncommon knowledge you are gaining. Such is the experience of reading Andre Liebich's deeply researched and concisely narrated history of the Russian Social Democrats, FROM THE OTHER SHORE. You may come to the book with the usual assumption that the SDs, better known as the Mensheviks, were just another political party that lost to the Bolsheviks in the 1917 struggle for power in Russia, and you will leave with the suspicion that they constitute the more lasting legacy from that world upheaval and may once again have their say.

Liebich reveals just how principled they were. As Marxists, they did not side with the Whites against the Bolsheviks after the October coup d'etat, but rather offered a loyal opposition, intending by their commentary and criticism, often severe, to moderate Soviet policy and to keep it from devolving into absolute tyranny, which they feared would discredit the idea of a proletarian revolution altogether. They held fast to this "Martov Line," so called after their first leader, Yuly Martov, during the years of the Russian Civil War (1918-1921), when they served in the government with the Bolsheviks; and then again, after their expulsion, through the years of their first emigration in Berlin (1921-1933), when they established themselves as the so-called "Foreign Delegation" and published Sotsialisticheskii vestnik ("The Socialist Herald") with political commentary and news from SDs still functioning in the underground in the USSR; and then again, after the rise of Hitler, through the years of their second emigration in Paris (1933-1940), when they endured the physical extermination of their home base and the abuse of the Soviet press. And then finally, after the outbreak of war, in their third emigration in New York City (1940-1951), when they were obliged to sum up "the science of exile" and the "sociology of defeat," as one member (Pyotr Garvi) put it. They were a "foreign delegation" only in their dreams.

All the while, through these three emigrations, the Mensheviks remained aloof from other anti-Bolshevik parties, became "an emigration within the emigration" (Garvi again) and held to their socialist ideals, sometimes living together and finding each other work. They circulated the Vestnik and tried to find positive factors underlying negative developments in the Soviet Union. To this end they interpreted Stalin's policy decisions as the results of objective forces, reasoning in the abstract Marxist categories of class struggle and proletarian demands. Ultimately the arbitrary nature of Stalin's rule became impossible to ignore, and their arguments turned on the problem of democracy vs. totalitarianism. In 1944 they split into pro and con, and the Martov line died out. The majority came to realize that democracy was inseparable from a viable socialism and that the only mission left to the party was to uphold that ideal. Amazingly, the SDs adhered to a policy of accepting no new members abroad, insuring the eventual dying out of the "foreign delegation." They called this pure but suicidal policy "liquidationism."

Liebich details the many twists and turns in their thinking and in their fortunes. Like other Russian émigré groups, they endured many indignities in exile, yet unlike others enjoyed remarkable successes. They won respect in national and international socialist circles, exerted influence on Marxists worldwide and often appeared at forums as the legitimate voice of Russia. The information published in their journal was reliable and historically valuable, in contrast to the patently false reports and false statistics produced by the Bolsheviks. Their views were intellectually rigorous, unlike the Marxist-Leninist boilerplate produced by Stalinist robots. They were erudite, polyglot and cosmopolitan, unlike the captive minds of the Soviet state. And, as Jews, they were twice persecuted, yet unsentimental and stoic in the face of adversities.

Now that the Bolshevik state has failed and disdain for the loser of 1917 has lost its rationale, the Mensheviks emerge historically as the more reasonable, moderate and humane side of the socialist equation, intellectually and morally superior to their politically stronger counterparts. In America they laid the foundation for responsible anti-Communist criticism and the discipline of Sovietology, a foundation temporarily undermined by the buffoonery of Joseph McCarthy. Through their periodical The New Leader they influenced many American intellectuals and kept alive the theoretical premises of an economically just society.

Publishing with Harvard University Press, Liebich is obliged to maintain tight academic standards, yet excels in crunching great masses of complex material into exciting and graspable concepts. He turns many an apt phrase and touches titillatingly on private lives. Unfortunately, his punctuation and grammar exhibit a number of irritating features, yet I suspect that the abominable Chicago Manual of Style, designed to emasculate, depersonalize and deface the English language, is at fault, since many editors insist upon it. The author's only shortcoming is that he stopped too soon: it would have been good to have his account of the CIA funding of The New Leader and the problems it caused during the Cold War. Hopefully others will build on his work, which is heroic in scope and mighty in intellectual stamina.

This is a beautifully written, truly wonderful book. Ms. Pond took a train trip on the Trans-Siberian railroad, and wrote fascinating and erudite vignettes based loosely on each of her stops, from Moscow to the far East.

I've read widely about Communism. But I must say that, with the exception of Solzhenitsyn's works and Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station, I have never read any book that contributed as much to my understanding of this morally bankrupt, dying empire.

I have read numerous books on the Russian revolution. Of them all this is undoubtedly one of the best.

The Frommer books are all great ways to plan your trip with the kind of information that makes it work for your greatest enjoyment.

This volume is a compilation of papers that highlight the transformation of Western leftist parties from romantic revolutionaries to pragmatic realists. This meant that these parties shifted on the political spectrum from the left to the left-center.
The chapters are thorough, descriptive and insightful and even though the different authors offer different writing styles, some studies in this book are attractive and entertaining while other chapters are dull and boring.
Readers will particularly enjoy the story of leftist failure in the US, where post World War II prosperity hindered the evolution of the concept of society. This individualism was emulated in England under Conservative premier Margaret Thatcher in the 80s. Magi became famous for her statement: "There is no society, only individuals," in reference to her rightist party's stance against the social welfare state.
The rightist leadership of England extended for most of the 1980s and 90s until the Conservative Party's several mistakes, coupled with the leftist Labor Party's "reconsideration" of itself leading to its transformation into the New Labor, brought Labor to power. When in power, the leftist English party moved away from leftism and the welfare state toward what it depicted as a "Third Way" style of governorship, which included more liberal economic policies.
But such a shift was not easy in France, where despite the Socialist Party's implementation of rightist economic policies starting the mid 1980s, the socialists could not express out loud their adoption of more center-leftist policies for the fear that their strong communist allies might abandon them.
Meanwhile, in Germany the social democrats endorsed "Third Way" policies and came to power.
In Poland, the disbanded Communist Party transformed itself into a Social Democratic Party and won over the Solidarity Movement, known for its freedom fighting under the communists before 1989. The reason for this leftist victory, the book argues, was the virtual inexistence of the middle-class which traditionally supports rightist parties and their market economy theses.
In Russia, the underdeveloped political culture has been unable to sustain majoritarian politics. Therefore, social democracy failed facing a dominant popular political culture based on a clientele network and favoritism penetrating the state bureaucracy.
The volume ends with a concise conclusion by the book's editor Erwin Hargrove. The book is both entertaining and enlightening for all those interested in political studies and political philosophy.

ALEXANDER PUMPIANSKI, Editor in Chief, THE NEW TIMES, MOSCOW: Literature is always humanitarianism, brotherhood, an all-human odyssey, a reincarnation in other people's lives. In this case the author tries to reconstruct what a private life could have been, had it taken a slightly different course. The instructive device of split personality is, in fact, used to present a united personality, torn in two by the century of the greates schism; they are put into extremely different social positions, and pushed through numerous battles and dramas, apart or together. The Russian American is an idealist, dreamer, fighter - an eternally restless heart.

YEVGENIA NIKOLAEVNA MAYOROVA, Herzen Pedagogical Institute, ST. PETERSBURG

Your book makes one think of a huge documentary photograph taken with a long exposure for many years, almost two human lifetimes. It is not a family chronicle or a history of a single part of a family's life; it is simply a story, a story that appears through two human souls, a story that is reflected in letters, where letters are mixed with tears, words with pain, facts with tragedy, where people are not considered as representatives of two different political systems, where the search for similarities is more important than the search for differences, because the main characters of this story are brothers.

SVETLANA ROZOVSKY, Professor of Russian Studies, University of Hartford:

Thank you very much for the wonderful book. I enjoyed it a lot! The genre of the book is perfect and very up-to-date. Every line sounds so realistic to me. It is impossible to express myself and all my feelings the book aroused in me. I would be very happy to invite you to speak to my Russian Studies class.......

BRIAN JOHNSON, Asst. Prof. Doctoral Candidate Russian Studies, Boston College:

I finally had a chance to read your manuscript The Genes of Gregoria. This is not meant to flatter you, but the work is brilliant. It covers so much ground, yet it claims it's humanity and stimulates the intellect at the same time. When I picked it up I figured that I would read two letters and finish the book over the next couple of days, however, I was hooked after the first twenty pages. The book would be of immense value as a teaching aid in a variety of uses on the college level.

As of 2007, two editions of this book have been published (11,000 copies in all). Copies of the original book "Zloczyn" [Genocide]--in Ukrainian--have been distributed free of charge throughout Ukraine. This English translation publication will be distributed free of charge to the United Nations in New York and to all of the Ukrainian embassies throughout the democratic world.

In the Foreword written by journalist Bohdan Rudnytski, he quotes from eminent human rights defender Levko Lukianenko, who is the Head of the Association of Researchers on the Holodomors in Ukraine and was awarded an honorary Doctor of Law Degree: "Historical accountability between Ukraine and Russia should commence from the seventeenth century. Indeed, the art of politics is based not on satisfying emotions of revenge, which are focused on the past, but rather on creating a positive basis and conditions for the future development of the [Ukrainian] nation."

Australian activist Peter Kardash is the compiler and publisher of "Genocide in Ukraine." His words are as follows: "Through this book the tragic history of Ukraine down the centuries is speaking to you. The truth about the horrific legacy of violence, terror, denationalization, Russification, deportations, and the three Holodomors is finally beginning to emerge. This book describes the terrible wars, cruel occupations, and the destruction of the political, intellectual, and spiritual leadership of the Ukrainian nation. The entire world watched as Nazi war criminals were tried in Nuremberg. It is my firm belief that Ukraine has suffered more than any other nation in the world."

Further, the section entitled Nuremberg-2 states, in part: "...the All-Ukrainian Society of Political Prisoners and Repressed Persons, the Association of Researchers of the Holodomors in Ukraine, and the Memorial Society, together with twenty-three political parties and organizations, founded the Ukrainian National Committee at the Writers' Building [in Kyiv] on 21 March 1996, whose goal is to organize an international court to try the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) for totalitarian crimes (Nuremberg-2).

...While our committee, Nuremberg-2 in the Verkhovna Rada, enlisted sixty-eight deputies to the informal group tasked with preparing for an international court and initiated energetic activity in all directions, no assistance has been forthcoming from the pro-communist leadership in the Verkhovna Rada...On 6 November 1997 the Lithuanian parliament passed a resolution on mass repressions, genocide and other crimes against humanity and war crimes perpetrated during the period of occupation. The parliaments of the Czech Republic and Poland passed similar documents.

On 29 November 1997, on the initiative of Lithuanian organizations consisting of people who resisted the occupation and of victims of communism, an organizational committee was formed to prepare an international public tribunal to assess the crimes of communism.... In July 1998 discussions that began more than fifty years ago culminated in a resolution passed in Rome by world states to create the International Criminal Court to prosecute crimes and against humanity and their perpetrators, no matter who committed these crimes or where...

The Lithuanian organizing committee sent an invitation to Ukraine, to the Society of Political Prisoners and Repressed Persons as the organization most directly interested in the work of the international court"....Although, the Association of the Holodomors in Ukraine was informed very late about the preparations for the Vilnius court, at which time a group of ten patriotic scholars from Kyiv was formed to prepare the Ukrainian side for the trial, they prepared appropriate materials on the basis of which Levko Lukianenko drew up a twenty-two page bill of indictment. Levko Lukianenko presented the bill of indictment in the name of Ukraine.

There is very much of Ukraine's history recounted in the voluminous "Genocide in Ukraine." Some of the numerous articles deal with topics such as: The Destruction of the Sich; Ivan Mazepa; The Kruty and Bazar Tragedies; The Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church; How Bolsheviks Imprisoned Priests; How the Communists Turned Churches into Prisons; The Union for the Liberation of Ukraine (SVU); The Persecution of the Kobzars; The Deportation of the Ukrainian Intelligentsia; The Thorny Road of the Ukrainian Language; Purged Ukrainian Intellectuals; Profiles of Four Ukrainian Freedom Fighters: Petliura, Konovalets, Bandera and Shukhevych; In Auschwitz; Nil Khasevych, Hero of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army; The Murder of the Composer Volodymyr Ivasiuk; Operation Wisla; Jaworzno (Concentration Camp); Crime: Ukrainian Catholicism's Way of the Cross; Patriach Volodymyr of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Kyiv and All Ukraine-Rus; Kolyma Soviet concentration camp; and, Nuremberg-2.

The table of contents lists 140 entries in this extremely well documented, over-sized book with large type, numerous black and white archival photos, copies of documents and newspaper articles, eyewitness accounts, and lists broken down by region, raion, city, and village.

Although Amazon shows that this book is unavailable, keep checking other sources--Yevshan has it in stock. This is a must-read book that should be part of history curriculums and should appear on library shelves worldwide!--Mandrivnyk, Arlington Heights, IL

The Atlantic February, 1991

We think of them as relatively new situations: Russia shaken from autocratic isolation by new forms of communications; the spread of concern for human rights and constitutional rule from West to East; America's efforts to maintain good relations with autocratic rulers while helping democratic protesters. Yet these are precisely the issues that defined the career of the first American Russia expert, George Kennan, a century ago. M ore than any other single American, this first cousin twice removed of our own era's George F. Kennan "discovered" and described Russia for America during the more than half a century between the American and Russian civil wars.

Kennan was a child of the new communications revolution, first visiting Siberia as part of an ill-fated telegraphic expedition, then making Russia the subject of one of the great lecturing careers of the late nineteenth century and one of the great journalistic careers of the early twentieth. Having discovered Siberia as an adventuresome frontiersman trying to forge a European-American cable connection the long way, across the Bering Strait, Kennan returned to expose the czarist prisons of Siberia and to become perhaps the leading champion in the Western world of democratic revolutionary resistance to the czarist authorities. As such, he struggled against a well-established official American policy of friendship for that particular autocracy. He mobilized American popular opinion in behalf of Russia's suppressed political opposition, and eventually helped change U.S. government policy as well.

IT IS A GREAT strength of this extensively researched new biography by Frederick Travis that we discover how little Kennan really studied Russia, how many mistakes (including deliberate ones) he introduced into his journalism, and yet how little challenged his authority remained within the United States. This was an age when America was absorbed in its own interests and inclined to read foreign countries, if at all, in terms of its own institutions and aspirations. Until the early twentieth century the study of Russia was almost totally absent from universities, and serious literature on Russia almost totally absent from libraries. Dilettantism could triumph if accompanied by the kind of arrogant tenacity and rhetorical panache that Kennan possessed. He presented a picture of Russia that was more a projection of characteristic American hopes, fears, and fantasies in an era of exuberant self-confidence than the product of had-earned knowledge.

His authority was, however, based on firsthand observations, though they were largely focused on the exotic. Kennan first arrived in Russia in 1865, and only after spending two winters in hitherto largely unknown parts of Siberia (later described in his first major book, Tent Life in Siberia) did Kennan visit Moscow and St. Petersburg. On his second trip he passed rapidly through Petersburg in order to reach the Caucasus, describing himself as "a vagabond ... who travels without any definite utilitarian aim ... the vagabond is never a spcialist ... he is ready to become all things with all men and to make himself equally at home in all places." His early travels in Russia were thus a kind of romantic Wanderjahre for a young midwestern Calvinist who was losing both his boyhood religious faith and his adolescent enthusiasm for scientific and technical expeditions. But he developed what grew into a lifelong fascination with the Russian people. There was, initially, no political or social content to his interest, although he generally shared the vague Russophilia in some circles that followed Russian support for the Union in the Civil War and the sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867. Throughout the 1870s and early 1880s Kennan defended Russian policy even when it proved expansionist, first in the Balkans and then in Central Asia, and he also tried to propagate the glories of Russian literature.

His ten-month-long trip to Siberia in 1885 and 1886 turned him from a defender of official Russia into a self-appointed spokesman for the political exiles and prisoners that he discovered there. Romantic infatuation was part of it all, as Kennan himself acknowledged: "With many of them I simply fall dead in love as if I were a girl of eighteen." But he was also moved by the moral purity of the exiles--their continued intellectual earnestness under difficult conditions and their combination of inner dignity and outward affection for this mysterious visitor from distant America. Kennan was particularly impressed by Catherine Breshkovsky, the populist "little grandmother of the Russian Revolution." She bade him farewell in the small Transbaikal village to which she was confined by saying, "We may die in exile, and our grand children may die in exile, but something will come of it at last." One of the Russians explained that until they had met Kennan, "we had been talking either to acknowledged friends or to prejudiced enemies, but never to an impartial observer, who would take on himself to bring the case before the tribunal of universal conscience." Kennan devoted much of the next twenty years to pressing their cause, mainly from the lecture platform.

He lectured before about a million people in the course of the 1890s, inspiring in one of them a "curious craving to see this gaunt land of Siberia and let my own eyes gaze on the starved wretches sent to a living death." Victorians loved to feel both superior to and shocked by distant outrages like those Kennan recounted. A taunt thrown at Victorian liberals--they "cross equinoxial lines in search of objects of charity"--brings to mind the "radical chic" of more recent times: North Americans incensed by events in Southeast Asia, South America, or South Africa.

Travis astutely observes that Kennan "saw in the political exiles the same heroic spirit that had attracted him to Caucasian mountaineers, wandering Koriaks in northeastern Siberia, and reforming drunkards on New York's Water Street." It was something like the spirit that another great journalist, John Reed, later sought first in the Wobblies, then in Mexican revolutionaries, and finally in the Bolsheviks about whom he fantasized so appealingly in Ten Days That Shook the World.

BUT KENNAN'S infatuation with Russia was informed by a sterner moral purpose, which Travis describes as a sense that Kennan was always on the side of civilization against barbarism. His long campaign in behalf of political prisoners was expanded to include persecuted minorities in the Russian empire--particularly the Jews--and the Japanese, who warred with the Russians in 1904-1905. He helped in a fascinating, little-known campaign to educate and politically mobilize Russian prisoners of war in Japan. And he attached great hopes to the Russian Revolution of 1905 and even greater to the democratic revolution of February, 1917.

Kennan was a perceptive analyst of the practical need for democratic and constitutional reform. He was particularly distressed by the czarist repression of student activity after the upheavals of 1905. "A university is a barometer which shows the state of the public mind," Kennan quoted a Russian surgeon as saying. "A wise man does not break the instrument, but learns from it what the weather is likely to be." He accused the czars of breaking the barometers rather than read them. He saw that all russian involvement in modern wars concluded with a period of reform or revolution--in effect, "a recompense for their sacrifices and losses."

All the more bitter, then, was the Bolshevik betrayal of a revolution that Kennan had encouraged in its democratic phase. Unlike John Reed, Kennan vehemently rejected the October Revolution, both because of the Bolsheviks' renunciation of the Allied cause in the war and because the Soviet government lacked the "knowledge, experience, or education to deal successfully with the tremendous problems that have come up for solutions since the overthrow of the Tsar." Kennan criticized Woodrow Wilson for being much too timid in intervening against Bolshevik power, and persisted longer than most Americans in the belief that the Siberians would hold out against the Bolsheviks, because they were a "bolder and more independent people than the Muzhiks of European Russia." Travis tends to be rather condemnatory both of Kennan's extreme opposition to the Bolshevik takeover and of his insistence on the moral obligation to defend the provisional government. Kennan's last epitaph on the Bolshevik Revolution was written in a small-town newspaper, the Medina Tribune, in July of 1923:

The Russian leopard has not changed its spots... The new Bolshevik constitution ... leaves all power just where it has been for the last five years--in the hands of a small group of self-appointed bureaucrats which the people can neither remove nor control.

He died not long after Lenin did, having just finished an article on Japanese education--finding more hope for the future in Japan than in Russia.

ONE IS RELIEVED that Travis's biography does not include the kind of psychological probing or moralistic preaching that has too often been directed at Victorian figures, though his tendency to make this account an exhaustive inventory of Kennan's acquaintances and views results in a certain blandness. Kennan's larger-than-life and even heroic qualities--his physical endurance on Siberian trips and on lecture tours, the majesty of his moralism--never quite come across. But Travis perceptively identifies Kennan's flaws. There was more than a little blindness in the man. He was sympathetic chiefly to political prisoners, who represented a minute fraction of those in Russia's vast penal and exile system. As far as we know, he never visited any prison outside Russia for comparative purposes. He confused political exiles in East Siberia with administrative exiles in West Siberia, and at times he misled his audiences in other ways to dramatize his cause. Kennan never probed deeply into the views of Russians working within the system, whom he could have helped and learned from. Nikolai Yadrintsev, for instance, one of the most interesting and sophisticated publicists in behalf of a semi-independent Siberia, urged a different, more open style of development there. Kennan met him early but seems never to have talked seriously with him or with a number of others who saw then--as many do today--that Siberia itself might ultimately become an example of the kind of liberal democratic development that its prisoners advocated.

The fact remains, however, that Kennan created American public interest in the internal conditions of a remote country, and the story of how he did so supplies an impressive first chapter for a history, yet to be written, on the effects of American journalism on foreign policy. Kennan catalyzed a range of things that eventually helped to change policy: the first English-language opposition journal, Free Russia; the Society of American Friends of Russian Freedom (involving such luminaries as Julia Ward Howe and Mark Twain); and a public campaign against a Senate-approved treaty that would have exposed Jewish emigres to America to possible arrest if they re-entered Russia. State Department officials in the late nineteenth century were as annoyed by Kennan's attempts to affect intergovernmental relations as their successors were many years later by the outcries over immigration and human rights which led to the Jackson-Vanik amendment of 1974. It is easy to forget now, in the wake of the victory of the human-rights agenda in Eastern Europe, how doggedly most of the American foreign-policy establishment resisted the intrusion of such concerns into its realpolitik agenda of security, political, and economic questions. It was Western Europeans, rather than Americans, who took the lead in assuring that human rights were included in "basket three," which became part of the international obligations of all signatories of the Helsinki Final Act. Leaders in the newly emerging democracies of Eastern Europe today express more admiration for moralistic journalists than for realistic diplomats. They are likely, too, to feel greater sympathy for Kennan's buccaneering spirit and his fierce denunciation of autocracy and Bolshevism than for the more cautious and moderate positions taken both by his opponents then and by his biographer now.

This is a collection of hundreds of rare photgraphs of German fighters in Russia during World War II all with very interesting captions. The reader gets the impression that he walks among the great aces with triple digit scores of victories and in the primitive airfields set in the Russian steppe. The youthfull faces of countless German pilots with the Knight's Cross around their neck fill this book, as well photos of the famous Bf-109s and Fw-190s, some of them showing the interesting artwork on their rudders depicting very impressive victory scores. The book is highly recommended to anyone interested in the Luftwaffe aces!! One wonders how the Red Air Force survived after the merciless slaughter it suffered at the hands of those terrific aces.

Review by Ingeborg W. Smith, Western Springs, Illinois

I have a whole bookcase full of cookbooks, some of them in German, but no cookbook quite like this one. It is not just a compendium of recipes, but it is historical, emphasizing the food traditions of the Germans who were invited to Russia by Catherine the Great. Many of these people re-emigrated from Russia to the Great Plains of the New World but kept their old folkways.

Some people use cookbooks as bedtime reading and this one lends itself to this use, perhaps because it has fewer recipes than the standard book of this kind, and contains more background information. It is probably one of very few such volumes that contains a bibliography. There are also a glossary and a list of "Sources and Resources."

"German Food & Folkways" is the result of four years of research and data-gathering and one year of writing by Rose Marie H. Gueldner, an educator, historian, writer and businesswoman, and a descendant of Germans from Russia. It is not your standard cookbook, but a history of the Germans from Russia, where they came from, how they got to Russia, and how the German food traditions were changed by conditions in Russia, especially the climate and the short growing season, which produced an emphasis on root vegetables and cabbage.

We learn that Frederick II was instrumental in adding the potato to the German diet during the food shortages in the 1700's, that peanut butter was introduced as a health food at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition, plus a host of other interesting facts.

As a descendant of both North and South Germans, I expected to find a few more familiar dishes. My mother made her egg noodles from scratch and I was familiar with brains, heart and tongue, all found in this book, but strudel as a main dish stuffed with cabbage and cooked on top of meat and potatoes did not remind me of Apfelstrudel I grew up with. Happily, desserts, bread and Kuchen will each be the subject of other books by Ms. Gueldner.

The beginning of each chapter repeats the cover design, a collection of items used in the kitchen, a butter churn, a pail, a meat grinder, rolling pin, foaming beer stein, eggs, beets, etc. Drawings of individual foods grace various pages. Several maps are included. There is even a chapter on mealtime prayers. Ms. Gueldner promotes good organic ingredients and healthful eating.

Each chapter starts with a general discussion and then proceeds to the recipes, which may include further discussion. Ms. Gueldner's recipe for Farmyard Roast Goose reminded me of the Christmas goose I roasted four years ago. This goose, the smallest one I could order at my local market, weighed 10 pounds, and cost $40.00, and served three, with no leftovers at all. Geese had more meat on them when I was young. Ms. Gueldner's recipe uses an 8 to 12 lb. goose and expects it to produce 4 to 18 servings. She suggests serving this fowl with potato dumplings, applesauce or red cabbage, for which no recipes are forthcoming.

The section on beverages includes a page on water and the former necessary chore of hauling it to the fields as well as pumping it for the house. In Jimmy Carter's memoir of his boyhood, "An Hour Before Daylight", he comments that the easiest way to bring water to the fields was in the form of watermelon. That's the spirit, Jimmy!

I enjoyed reading this book and got a few tips on how to improve my own cooking. I also learned a little German dialect--that anyone would call a potato (Kartoffel) Grumbeere or Grumbara, some sort of berry is certainly new to me.

While I find that the quotation on the back cover attributed to Brother Placid Gross, OSB, Folklorist: "This book is the crowning achievement of all cookbooks", to be an exaggeration, I believe that more to the point is Dr. Timothy F. Kloberdanz's conclusion: "Although there are German-Russian cookbooks currently on the market, this one is quite unusual because of the way it interweaves background history, ethnic heritage, and so many mouth-watering Old Country recipes." I concur.