Making Connections Level 1 Teacher's Manual: Skills and Strategies for Academic Reading

In the south, the Japanese, who had no love for Russians and abhorred Bolsheviks, advanced on Aleksandrovsk, with the intention of taking the entire island. Solomon organized his men, the original two hundred political prisoners and the many criminals who had joined them, into a small army. (Where had the son of a small-town Russian Jewish teacher learned the skills of weapons and war? The chronicles are silent on that.) But, though disciplined and dedicated, Solomons force knew itself to be outnumbered and outgunned by the Japanese, whose rapid advance into the north it could not hope to stop. Solomon decided to move his men to the mainland and link up with Bolshevik partisans operating there under the command of a man named Nicholas Triapitsin. By now, however, the ice had thawed, and there were no boats large enough to take all his men across the Tatar Strait, some fifteen miles at the narrowest point. He crossed to the mainland with three other men in a small boat and found the captain of a large boat, who refused to help ...»