A Russian-language publishing house operating here issued a long two-volume book about the Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn which depicts him as being of Jewish origin and a person of doubtful sexual morals.
The book, “Vokrug Solzhenitsyna” (“About Solzhenitsyn”), is written and published by A. Flegon, head of the Flegon Press. Although ostensibly catering to anti-Soviet Russians in the West, the lurid attack on Solzhenitsyn, with its blend of pornography and anti-Jewish smears, resembles some of the latest officially inspired popular writing in the Soviet Union.
Long before Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974, the Soviet authorities had sought to discredit him by anti-Jewish smears even though he has no Jewish ancestry. Flegon seeks to perpetuate this charge by suggesting that the author of “The Gulag Archipelago” is a baptized Jew and anti-Jewish as well.
Several illustrations in Flegon’s book caricature Solzhenitsyn as a stereotype East European Jew. His name is also frequently distorted as “Solzhenitsker” in order to “Judaise” him..
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
