A Year in Reading: Sonia Jaffe Robbins

I never would have believed it’s possible to have too many books. But a loud noise awakened me one night as a shelf of books crashed to the floor, and I knew it was time to stop collecting and start culling.

That bookcase holds works on European and world history. I emptied the shelves into categories: the bigger piles were about Russia and the Russian Revolution, the Holocaust, German history and WWII, the Middle Ages, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and ideas. There are the books I’ve read, the books I’ve wanted to read, and the books whose titles intrigued.

I started reading about Russian Revolution after seeing the movie . My parents and grandparents were all sympathetic to the Communist left, one of my grandfathers even a member of the Party, but I knew nothing about the revolution. At 20 I read ’s ; I still have that ancient Doubleday Anchor paperback, and keeping it. After seeing I embarked on a reading binge, starting with’s (which the movie was based on), followed’s and ’s , which was the movie tie-in paperback. Next were by (toss), by (keep), and ’s (I have two copies of this title—one missing a chapter and repeating another, and the replacement copy with an entirely different misprint of missing and repeated chapters). Then there is’s and , along with his novels , , and (which is every bit as good if not better than the much more well-known by ). Serge was the son of Russian revolutionaries in exile in Belgium when the revolution happened; he returned to Russia after an abortive anarchist revolution in Spain in 1914, joined the Bolsheviks, but was critical of Stalin’s power consolidation, and ended up in the early gulag. I’m keeping all of his books.