Latvians and Jews between Germany and Russia / Frank Gordon ; Stockholm : Memento, 1990; 66, [2] lpp. ; 22 x 14 cm.
Deals with Latvian-Jewish relations before, during, and after the Second World War. Criticizes the stereotypes identifying all Jews as communists and all Latvians as fascists. Explains the deterioration of relations between Latvians and Jews in the interwar period by their conflicting sympathies in the First World War. However, argues that before the Soviet takeover in 1940 these relations were cordial, and that only the Soviet and the subsequent German occupations caused an acute confrontation between Jews and Latvians.
Frank (Efrayim) Gordon was born in Riga on September 1, 1928. He studied at the French lycee. On June 28, 1941, he and his parents fled to Russia, returning to Riga on April 3, 1945. From 1945 to 1957 he worked at the Latvian Telegraph Agency (a division of TASS), and from 1957 to 1971 at the evening paper Rigas Balss as a translator and columnist in the international affairs section. He studied journalism by correspondence at the Moscow Lomonossov State University, graduating in 1959. His thesis was "Latvian satirical journals of the time of the 1905 revolution." In 1972 Gordon managed, with great difficulty, to get permission to emigrate to Israel. From 1973 to 1984 he worked at the Tel Aviv newspaper Nosha Strana, and since 1985 he has been on the editorial staff of the Tel Aviv German-language daily Israel Nachrichten.In 1974 the New York Latvian publisher Gramatu Draugs published Gordon's book Flexibility and The Fate of Non-Russians in Muscovy Today, under the pseudonym Alberts Sabris. Gordon has translated A. Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago into Latvian. His novel Twilight in the Microdistrict was serialized in the Latvian newspaper Laiks. He has published numerous articles in the Latvian exile press, and has lectured extensively in North America and Australia.