The gates of November by Chaim Potok Page A

forests and steep mountain ranges, was rich in coal and iron deposits, and was originally barren of people. The region south of the fiftieth parallel belonged to Japan. The Russians populated their part of the island with convicts and exiles.
    There is a photograph, taken in 1915, of a Jewish woman thief being placed in irons on Sakhalin. Three guards and two leather-aproned smiths stand, all stiffly posing. The woman appears to be in her forties—hands shackled, features rigid, defiant. “Sonka of the Golden Hands” she was called. The building in the background is made of logs; one of the windows lies awkwardly off its frame. From the visible presence of the ground and the obvious absence of winter garb—no fur caps, no gloves, no coats—the photograph appears to have been taken in weather a good deal warmer than that which greeted Solomon Slepak when, early in 1919, he stepped onto the island where the anti-Bolshevik Kolchak regime intended him to spend the rest of his life at hard labor.
    The labor camp was in the town of Aleksandrovsk some thirty miles north of the fiftieth parallel. Camp and town seethed with Bolshevik activity. The political prisoners lived apart from the criminals, the thieves and murderers, an arrangement that made it easier for Gregory Zarkhin and Solomon Slepak to smuggle letters out to the Bolsheviks in Aleksandrovsk and Nikolayevsk, to continue to direct underground activities on the mainland from their cells on Sakhalin, and ultimately to stage their own revolution. They organized the Bolshevik prisoners, about two hundred men, into a tightly disciplined fighting unit, and in April 1919 they rose up against the guards and gained control of the labor camp and the town of Aleksandrovsk. Solomon and Zarkhin ordered the release of the criminals in the camp. The fact that they were criminals was not their fault, Solomon and Zarkhin declared at a meeting of the prisoners; the blame lay with the tsarist society that had forced them into an outlaw life by not providing them with a decent education and the economic means to fulfill their goals. They were not criminals in their hearts. They should help overthrow the regime that turned good men into criminals. Most of the criminals joined them.
    Gregory Zarkhin now decided to leave Sakhalin and return to the mainland; he vanishes from this narrative until his abrupt reappearance some years later. Solomon remained and was elected first chairman of the Soviet of People’s Commissars of Sakhalin. He was now the head Bolshevik on the Russian part of the island.
    In the south, the Japanese, who had no love for Russians and abhorred Bolsheviks, advanced on Aleksandrovsk, with the intention of taking the entire island.
    Solomon organized his men, the original two hundred political prisoners and the many criminals who had joined them, into a small army. (Where had the son of a small-town Russian Jewish teacher learned the skills of weapons and war? The chronicles are silent on that.) But, though disciplined and dedicated, Solomons force knew itself to be outnumbered and outgunned by the Japanese, whose rapid advance into the north it could not hope to stop. Solomon decided to move his men to the mainland and link up with Bolshevik partisans operating there under the command of a man named Nicholas Triapitsin. By now, however, the ice had thawed, and there were no boats large enough to take all his men across the Tatar Strait, some fifteen miles at the narrowest point.
    He crossed to the mainland with three other men in a small boat and found the captain of a large boat, who refused to help. Solomon put a gun to the captain’s head and commandeered both him and his boat. It took several back-and-forth crossings to bring all his men to the mainland. They managed somehow to avoid the patrolling Japanese warships. On the mainland they began to make their way to the partisan army led by Triapitsin. Solomon Slepaks army now numbered close to three thousand