Delin Colón

Rasputin and the Jews: a Reversal of History Delin Colón

This book is a well-documented account of Rasputin as a healer, equal rights activist and man of God, and why he was so vilified by the aristocracy that their vicious rumors became accepted as history. For nearly a century, Grigory Rasputin, spiritual advisor to Russia's last Tsar and Tsarina, has been unjustly maligned simply because history is written by the politically powerful and not by the common man. A wealth of evidence shows that Rasputin was discredited by a fanatically anti-Semitic Russian society, for advocating equal rights for the severely oppressed Jewish population, as well as for promoting peace in a pro-war era. Testimony by his friends and enemies, from all social strata, provides a picture of a spiritual man who hated bigotry, inequity and violence. The author is the great-great niece of Aron Simanovitch, Rasputin's Jewish secretary.
Rabbi Joshua Chasan says: "The historian John Lukas speaks of history as the remembered past.  Delin Colón characterizes her book Rasputin and the Jews as A Reversal of History.  What she attempts to do is correct the widely held view of Rasputin as an evil man who committed the worst debaucheries, substituting instead a view of Rasputin as a humanitarian, a courageous defender of Jews and other people vulnerable in pre-revolutionary Russia.  She identifies the sources of the negative views of Rasputin, making a good case for the need for us to see that there are a lot of ways of remembering the past.  At a time when George Orwell's prophesy of the world of 1984 rings very true, Ms. Colón does us all a great service in showing how false stories take on the face of truth and become our understanding of the history of a certain time and place.  Aside from being a good read and an important contribution to Russian and Jewish history, Rasputin and the Jews prompts the reader to delve into her or his own personal memories, to consider and reconsider how they were shaped, why, and even by whom?"