COMING OUT OF THE ICE: An Unexpected Life

by Victor Herman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 24, 1978

Victor Herman was 16, the scrappy son of a Detroit auto worker and Sodalist organizer, when he followed his father's lead and signed up to work at the new Ford Gorky plant in 1931. A few hours' exposure to the mindless brutality of the New Russia, and his mother was begging to go home, his father was intoning ""No matter, no matter."" They never would; and Victor himself did not return until 1976, the sole survivor--as he tells it--of those who stayed beyond their three-year contract. Then, Victor was a star athlete and a hero, ""the Lindbergh of Russia""; Stonewall Street, Detroit, could wait. Was it because his flying and parachuting records were not really Russian, and he refused to change nationality, that this apolitical barnstormer became a political prisoner? He doesn't say: in 1938, his was just another unexplained arrest, another interrogation under torture, another sentencing without trial. Mostly, this is the story of how competitiveness kept him alive. In Cell 39, a bathroom-size space where 16 men sat propped-up ""like dolls,"" he vowed to sit better than anyone else; thrown in with criminals, ""wolfbloods,"" he stood his ground ""and looked around for more""; set the impossible task, one Siberian winter, of filling a 60ton railway car with logs before he could sleep or eat, he devised a way to make it at least look full; and when a year in solitary left him too weak to work, and thus ineligible for food, he trapped rats--which other zeks said they would rather die than eat. But he would have followed his father still. . . Later, released and joyfully married, he is ""exonerated of all charges"" in the post-Stalin thaw; and begins to dream of returning to America. A wild-shot letter to a cousin--""Dave Herman, Esq;, Attorney at Law, New Orleans, Louisiana""-carries him, eight frustrating years later, over the threshold of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and on to Detroit. He's too game, too much the sportsman, to expect cheers or tears: his father had a dream, his only dream was to be Iris father's son--impervious to outrage.

Pub Date: Jan. 24, 1978

ISBN: 1433297752

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1978

Categories: NONFICTION