cover image Red Tempest: The Life of a Surgeon in the Gulag

Red Tempest: The Life of a Surgeon in the Gulag

Isaac J. Vogelfanger. McGill-Queen's University Press, $29.95 (216pp) ISBN 978-0-7735-1404-1

During the seven years Vogelfanger was exiled in Soviet prison camps, he saved countless lives, endeared himself to Communist Party higher-ups and conquered many women, most of whom appear to have thrown themselves at him. The result: a study of life in the gulag that reads like a medical textbook crossed with a romance novel. One minute Vogelfanger is talking about duodenal ulcers and intravenous fluids; the next he's going to mush about a Russian beauty who ""looked like an illustration from a book of Russian fairytales"" and whose eyes met his ""in a mute encounter, a deja vu of bygone days that had never existed."" Between the surgery and the sex, Vogelfanger encounters a broad range of touching characters, and these are the reminiscences that make his story worth reading. There's the administrator who threatens him during their first meeting but becomes his primary defender after Vogelfanger saves the man's pregnant wife. There's the suicidal young man whose life Vogelfanger saves and who consequently becomes his dutiful and beloved assistant. And there are dozens of prisoners, packed off to the gulag for such ""crimes"" as noting that the German army had better food than the Russian army. A Polish Jew who signed up for the Red Army early in WWII, Vogelfanger never discovered why he was arrested. Now an emeritus professor of surgery at the University of Ottawa, he doesn't dwell on the negative, and while this optimism occasionally seems simplistic, it clearly helped save his life-and this story. (June)