‘The Accidental Anarchist’ is the true story of Jacob Marateck, an Orthodox Jew who was sentenced to death three times in the early 1900s in Russia — and lived to tell about it. He also happens to have been the author’s grandfather. The book is based on the diaries that Marateck began keeping in 1905. That was when he decided to overthrow the Czar. The story is told in Marateck’s voice, and is characterized by his remarkable humor and irony that contrasted with the circumstances and were key to his survival. It includes a rare, soldier’s-eye view of a little-known war that changed the geopolitical status of several nations. At 25, Jacob Marateck was a Jewish officer in the notoriously anti-Semitic Russian army during the Russo-Japanese War. After avoiding a firing squad for a third time, he escaped from a Siberian forced labor camp with Warsaw’s colorful “King of Thieves.” This is the remarkable, true story of an ordinary man made extraordinary by participating in the history-making events of the 1900s in Russia and Poland.