I recommended “Coming Out of the Ice: An Unexpected Life” by Victor Herman (Blackstone Audiobooks, 800-729-2665, unabridged in 10 cassettes, purchase $69.95, rental $13.95) to a friend. It not only hooked her for life on spoken books, but it also became her standard for all others. “I want to listen to another book as important as that,” she repeatedly says.
My friend is an artist of Jewish-Russian ancestry who grew up hearing tragic stories of her family’s suffering under Stalin. She is a gifted potter (who listens while working), an owner of a rare-book store, and a lover of great literature. The heartening memoir of Herman, a young American who moved with his family in 1931 from Detroit to the Soviet Union, where his father set up an auto plant for the Ford Motor Co., had a haunting effect on her.
Herman, a teenager who adored his Jewish Russian-born father, at first thrived in the Soviet Union as an outstanding athlete. He became a celebrity and was called “the Lindbergh of Russia” after setting a world record for parachute jumps. When he refused to sign a document stating he was a native of the USSR in 1938, he was thrown into prison for 18 years, beginning a nightmare of starvation and torture.
Herman was one of the few prisoners who survived Stalin’s 30-year reign of terror that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people.
The rich, mellifluous voice of narrator Christopher Hurt personalizes Herman’s daily endurance in the prisons and camps where he ate rats to keep from starving and was never given a reason for his imprisonment. After he was released from prison, he was exiled to Siberia, where he married a beautiful Russian gymnast. They lived with their baby in a cave chopped out under the ice.
