Coming Out of the Ice: An Unexpected Life
Herman, Victor
COMING OUT OF THE ICE: AN UNEXPECTED LIFE Victor Herman / Harcourt Brace Jovanovich / $12.95 Robin Little Victor Herman's book has all the makings of a popular novel: adventure, intrigue,...
...They killed it for him...
...We'll get used to it-it doesn' t matter-no harm done," Sam told his family...
...All that day after the fifty-third night I cried, but no tears came out.'' The reader cries for him...
...To quiet Svetlana's cries of hunger, Herman would tell her about America, but she could not understand America any more than we can understand a chop-out in Yeniseysk...
...I was an animal in a fever to stay alive...
...Cordially, The Moscow Military Tribunal The distant hope that had kept Herman alive-to return to America- now seemed a possibility...
...We looked and saw a man fingering my mother's things-and my father said 'No harm, no harm, no harm - Sam Herman's dream of a socialist paradise...
...He believed in everything," writes his son, which doubtless is why he was a socialist...
...His wife and daughter, Svetlana, followed him, and together they spent an entire year quite literally "in the ice...
...But then one should remember that he has spent most of his life in the Soviet Union, where his English fell deep into desuetude, as did everything else of importance save his indomitable spirit...
...In 1931, the Ford Motor Company sent 300 Michigan families to the Soviet Union to build a Model A plant in Gorky...
...Perhaps it was those ten years in the Lagers (the sub-camps presided over by the administrative camp, or Gulag) that affected Herman the most...
...Reduced to eating rats, Herman became more animal than human: Whence he survived...
...But on the international record voucher he wrote under citizenship: "U.S.A...
...He wrote to his cousin David, a lawyer in New Orleans, and negotiations for his repatriation began...
...He went on to win many awards for his flying, even setting a world's record with a 24,000-foot parachute jump, for which he was heralded around the world as "the Lindbergh of Russia...
...Initially, he was taken to Spets Korpus, a political prison...
...it only mattered where the marketplace was/') When Victor's father, Sam, a thrice-jailed socialist and blacklisted Ford employee, was asked to go, by Henry Ford himself, he eagerly accepted...
...Their first child was born just months before he was sent to Siberia again, this time near Yeniseysk...
...Though pressured, he would not change it...
...At one point, Comrade Belov (a real-life version of Koestier's Gletkin) tortured Herman for 55 straight nights...
...With the surreptitious help of a brave villager, Herman was shown how to make a "chop-out" in the ice...
...The first night [was] the hardest-and each one, each night thereafter, [was] your first...
...Would that it were not...
...They tried also to kill his son...
...Upon arriving, however, it did not take the Hermans long to realize that the Russia of their landfall was a very different place from the country of freedom and opportunity depicted at upstate Michigan socialist meetings...
...Does everyone have a whole potato...
...Papa, tell about food in America...
...Soon thereafter, he and his family hopefully sailed for the Soviet Union, aboard the portentously named Siberia...
...COMING OUT OF THE ICE: AN UNEXPECTED LIFE Victor Herman / Harcourt Brace Jovanovich / $12.95 Robin Little Victor Herman's book has all the makings of a popular novel: adventure, intrigue, romance, and, most of all, tragedy...
...Between Herman's release from the camps in 1948 and his exile to a Siberian forest in 1951, he met and married a gymnast named Galina...
...His ordeal of 40 years was finally over...
...Herman writes his woeful chronicle in an intimate, unusual style, which- colloquial and rambling-is at times distracted, at times distracting...
...It didn't matter what the politics were...
...It was never easy, I tell you, to be both...
...A year after arriving at Spets Korpus, Herman was sent to Siberia ("It was like traveling into your bones") where he remained for ten years in the labor camps...
...Eleven years later, Victor Herman was allowed to come home, followed after a time by his wife and daughters...
...The interrogators wanted Herman to admit to being a counterrevolutionary when his only crime was being an American in Stalinist Russia...
...In 1953, the year of Stalin's death, Herman and his family were returned from exile...
...But I was a man then, too...
...Yet the tale that Herman tells is true...
...Two years later he received a letter: Dear Citizen Herman: This Tribunal has reviewed your case, and finds that no case exists...
...Four years later, in 1938, when only 20 of the original 300 Ford-sponsored families remained in Russia, Victor Herman was arrested-without explanation...
...As of this date you are exonerated of all charges...
...Once in Russia, the young Herman -quite the athlete-came to the attention of a General Tukachevsky, who arranged for him to become a pilot...
...Instead, it was a place of crowded rooms, glaring soldiers, starving children-and the Gulag...
Vol. 12 • November 1979 • No. 11
