Fifteen-year-old Violet Carlisle has a secret she can’t tell anyone but the trees: she thinks her mother is responsible for her father’s death. Violet’s Dad taught her that keeping your emotions—and secrets—in only makes you stronger. But when a redwood tree in her backyard becomes an unexpected confidante, she begins losing the battle to keep everything hidden.

“There is no doubt about the quality of this research, which the author has carried out with devotion, enthusiasm, and—interestingly enough—creativity. Draskoczy’s book is one of the few monographs devoted to the analysis of creativity within the camp. It shows how insightful, inspirational, surprising, and productive research on the Gulag from within, using the documents written or created by prisoners during the time they spent there, can be.” — Andrea Gullotta, University of Glasgow, Modern Language Review, Volume 110, Part 4, October 2015

“Julie Draskoczy’s Belomor: Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag is a well-conceived and thoroughly researched study of unknown, yet truly important, aspects of the Belomor camp, a key site of Stalin’s Gulag. This study stands out through its careful archival research into fascinating prisoner writings produced in the camps—autobiographies as well as literary attempts submitted to the camp newspaper Perekovka. The body of unpublished prisoner writings that Draskoczy has studied in Moscow archives are ‘live’ accounts of camp life, yet, as Draskoczy carefully shows, they are highly mediated representations of the writers and their camp experiences, complex texts that can share narrative strategies with both futurist and socialist realist art. Given the many different literary and cultural layers that make up these writings, it takes a discerning and knowledgeable reader to do justice to the complexity of the material. Draskoczy rose to this challenge, and has produced a judicious, insightful, and readable study.” — Cristina Vatulescu, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, New York University

“Julie Draskoczy’s new study. . . is the first to systematically examine a trove of Belomor prisoner narratives held in Russian state archives. By examining such narratives in conversation with better-known art produced by prisoners and nonprisoners, she explores the subjectivities of those who took part in this monumental, and deadly, construction project. As she discovers, there was remarkable diversity in how prisoners responded to camp officials’ frequent encouragement to participate in literary endeavors. The result, Draskoczy argues, is that prisoner narratives can be used to gain a better understanding of the relationship between creativity and criminality in the gulag, as well as the creative and destructive potentials of Stalinism.” — Alan Barenberg, Texas Tech University, Slavic Review, vol. 74, no. 4 (Winter 2015)

I was the editorial assistant on a multi-volume encyclopedia on the history of Jews in Eastern Europe, published by the YIVO Institute and Yale University Press.