Siberian Garrison

The left-wing writer Rodion Markovits belonged to the Hungarian-speaking Jewish community of Transylvania. He trained as a lawyer but devoted most of his career to journalism. While serving with a Hungarian army infantry unit in 1916, he was captured by the Russians and spent the next seven years of his life in Siberia and the Russian Far East, first in a prisoner-of-war camp and then with the Red Army. He described his experiences in Siberian Garrison, a hybrid of reportage, autobiography, and fiction, which became an international bestseller and was his one great book. While he regarded himself as ethnically Hungarian, he nonetheless maintained links with secular Jewish culture. The publication of his collection of rural Jewish tales in 1939 alienated the Hungarian-reading public in Romania.