I want to welcome everyone back to the Piquaneda show. And yeah, this is the first episode of

something I'm really excited about. I'm here with Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson. How are you doing,

Dr. Johnson? I'm doing very well. We're finally settled in. We've got snow on the ground. It's like

15 degrees here in Pittsburgh. I'm happy.

Well, it's in the 40s here in the south, and that never makes anyone happy down here.

Yeah, they're panicking now.

Yeah, everybody's buying milk and eggs because they're making French toast.

All right. So we're going to embark on a journey here. And so I guess the best way to start is to ask you to talk a little bit about this book and what it is, who wrote it, what it's about. And before we start getting into the text, why you think it's important?

Well, you know, we couldn't have picked a better book.

It's become infamous in the West, mainstream in Russia now, 200 years together by Alexander

Solzhenitsyn, who everyone knows.

Although at the time he was alive and a Soviet, anti-Soviet dissident, he was unpopular in the West.

They liked, you know, liberal dissidents like, you know, Brojki and people like that.

But here you have a man who won the Nobel Prize for literature, as we all know,

for the Gulagapelago, and he has written 15 years ago now, something like that, 20 years, a book on Jews in Russian history.

And it caused a tremendous stir.

It took ages to have it translated.

I've been using this book for a long time. I've cited from it a thousand times.

I get so many ideas from it.

But since this point of view in the Jews is fairly mainstream in Russia, it's done very well. This was his, as far as I know, his very last book, it doesn't seem complete. But I could translate little bits of it. I'm not secure enough in my linguistic ability to do anything of any length.

But the American press certainly has almost denied that it exists.

And it's essentially the history of Russia from written you know, written history to the end of the Soviet era and the role of the Jews in all of this.

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