TITLE: Ditya Smerti ("Child of Death")
SUBTITLE: Nyevuidumaniy Roman ("A Novel that's not fiction")
LANGUAGE: Russian
AUTHOR: Aleksander Solomonovich Klein
PUBLISHER: Ministry of Culture of the Komi Republic
CITY OF PUBLICATION: Syktyvkar, Komi Republic, Russia
DATE OF PUBLICATION: 1993
ISBN 5-900280-31-4
SYNOPSIS: A Jew brought up in Kiev by his highly-educated uncle, Klein is just beginning an acting career in Leningrad when the Nazis invade the Soviet Union in June 1941. He volunteers to help defend the city, but is captured a few days later when his unit is encircled. Klein tells how he survived in the Nazi prison camps because of his fluency in German, how he repeatedly escaped certain death that would have followed his exposure as a Jew, and how he escaped to Soviet forces after two years, only to be sentenced to the firing squad as a traitor. He actually spent over a decade in Stalin's gulag, including years of hard labor in the arctic coal mines of the Komi Republic.
Aleksandr Solomonovich Klein, is an author, actor, director, and playwrite who lives in Syktyvkar, Komi Republic, Russia. That's the location of the Komi State Pedagogical Institute, the teachers' college with which my employer, the University of Maine at Farmington, conducts student and faculty exchanges. It is a city that has long-standing links with the town of Farmington including, among many other things, an annual exchange of high-school and junior-high-school students.