Within the whirlwind /

In the second volume of her memoirs, Ginzburg takes up the story inside the physical horror--Stalin's Kolyma, the Elgen Camp--that the earlier book's account of emotional ruin introduced. (A faithful Communist arrested in 1937 for ""non-denunciation"" of a colleague, Ginzburg was first interred in Yaroslav prison, then moved to Siberia and ultimately to Kolyma.) Kolyma was like nothing else, of course: at 49° below zero Celsius, the prisoners would moan with despair--50° below being the point at which outdoor labor was suspended for the day. She recalls working in the chicken house (at least, gratefully, an indoor job), where all the cocks had ""pallid combs."" She notes the chilling reflex that comes with escaping any killing labor: good luck encouraged hope, ""And where there is hope there is fear."" Ginzburg's ""house of cards"" was built on that fear, because hope became her daily horde. Working as a ""nurse"" in the terminal ""ward"" of the camp, she met a German doctor, a zek like herself, Anton Walter--and the succeeding romance is almost fantastically noble, Eloise and Abelard. Released in 1947, Ginzburg lived outside the Taskan camp until Dr. Walter could be let out too; meanwhile, her second son (the first had died of starvation in Leningrad during the war), Vasya--the novelist Vasily Askyanov--was permitted to join her, from Moscow, in Magadan where she'd obtained a job as a pianist in a kindergarten. From that same kindergarten, Ginzburg was able to adopt Tonya, a young child, orphan of zeks. With Stalin's death, the nightmare finally seems to end. The spacious, patient, Russian-novel scope of Ginzburg's memoir adds up, here, as a series of breaks that broke her way instead of breaking her. In its greatheartedness and fidelity, it somewhat resembles Nadezhda Mandelstam's Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned, but Ginzburg tests the cracks within horror more than its wall-ishness. For the latter, we already have Varlan Shalamov's great Kolyma Tales. What we find here, under the pain and terror, is the stirring of new life. A book, mirabile dictu, of optimism. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.