Zulejka otevírá oči – Jachina Guzel (2023)

The debut of a young Tatar writer is written in the style of classic Russian novels, which examine the fate of a person against the backdrop of significant historical events. The story takes place in the Soviet Union from 1930 to 1946 and begins in the winter of 1930 in a remote Tatar village, where thirty-year-old Tatar woman Zulejka lives an ordinary life, just as her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother did. Her world consists of her brutish husband and the care of the household; she knows no other life and thus considers it good, having gotten used to it. Therefore, when the kulaks are being liquidated and her husband Murtaza is shot during a scuffle with a Red commissioner, and she is sent to Siberia with other kulaks, she longs for her past hard but comprehensible life. ***** On a harrowing journey by train and riverboat to the Siberian taiga, Zulejka meets new people and a new world. In the newly built labor camp and under harsh conditions, she gives birth to a son, Jusuf, whose father is the slain Murtaza. Her son keeps her alive and helps her survive the harsh conditions of the gulag. The labor camp grows larger each year, and its inhabitants – farmers, kulaks, declassed intelligentsia, criminals, Muslims and Christians, Russians, Tatars, Germans, and Chuvash – must endure in the harsh Siberian nature every...