“The Endless Steppe”的意思、由来-开放百科全书

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The Endless Steppe

释义

Summary
Memoir
References
Further reading

{{multiple issues|{{Refimprove|date=August 2008}}{{All plot|date=April 2011}}
}}{{Infobox book|
| name = The Endless Steppe
| author = Esther Hautzig
| cover_artist = Caroline Binch
| country = United States
| language = English
| publisher = Harper Collins
| release_date = 1968
| media_type = Print Hardcover, Hardback & Paperback
| genre = Autobiography
}}The Endless Steppe (1968) is a book by Esther Hautzig, describing her and her family's exile to Siberia during World War II.^[1]

Summary

Endless Steppe is about Esther Hautzig’s childhood. When she was 10 years old she was taken from her fancy big house in Poland by the Russians. She and her family were sent on a long train ride to Siberia. Esther and her family were forced to work in horrible conditions. After a while her family got a hut in the nearby town. Money is tight for a long time for Esther. After the war was done every one that was taken was free to go. So even though Esther liked her new life her and her family met up with her dad back in Poland who had left to fight in the war.

Memoir

In 1941, young Esther Rudomin (as she was then called) lives a charmed existence in the pretty town of Vilna (Wilno) in northeast Poland (now the capital of Lithuania). She is a somewhat spoiled only child living with her large extended family, and her parents are wealthy and well-respected members of the Jewish community, largely due to her father's skilled trade as an electrical engineer. Despite the Nazi invasion and the Soviet occupation of their region, to 10-year-old Esther, the war is something that ends at her garden gate. One June day, Soviet soldiers arrive at their house declaring the Rudomins to be "capitalists and enemies of the people." Their house and valuables are seized, and Esther, her parents, and her grandparents are packed into cattle cars and "relocated" to another part of the great and mighty Soviet Union, which turns out to be a forced labour camp in Siberia.

This first half of the book, Esther recalls the horrors of this world: the customary division of the healthy and weak, so that Esther, her parents, and her grandmother are separated from her grandfather; the nightmarish two month train journey with nothing more than watery soup to sustain them; the disorienting arrival in the camp; and the backbreaking work in a gypsum mine that they are forced to do. She also describes the unexpected mercies that exist alongside it: the local children who smuggle food to the slave labourers at considerable danger to themselves; the amnesty, requested by Britain, that allows the Poles to be released from the camp and to move to Rubtsovsk, a nearby village; and the kindness of the villagers, people with almost as little as the Rudomins, who enable them to survive their exile.

The Rudomins go from privileged complacency, in which they rely on servants to do everything for them, to a world where the growth of a potato plant can mean the difference between life and death. Esther is also forced to rely on making clothes for the few rich people of the village—the sort of people they had been in Poland—for the price of a bit of bread and milk. She almost absorbs the harsh Soviet message of their exile, feeling a perverse pride that "the little rich girl of Vilna survived poverty as well as anyone else."

Esther marvels at the irony of a "little capitalist" singing the Internationale, learning Russian, and eventually falling in love with the unique, unspoiled beauty of the steppe, so much so that when the war ends and the Rudomins are abruptly informed that they are to be returned to Poland, Esther doesn't want to leave. She thinks of herself as belonging there: she's a Sibiryak, a Siberian.

References

1. ^The Endless Steppe at WorldCat

Summary

Memoir

References

Further reading