God Calls Me Miriam

The spiritual journey of a Jewish Christian…

The struggle with a crippling disease…

A life-changing bonding with gulag survivors in post-Soviet Russia…

“For twelve years I lived in northeastern Russia, in Magadan—a city that was once the administrative center for the Kolyma gulag system. My presence as a Jewish Christian was not a coincidence. God had brought me to this place from France, from Combermere, and from my American childhood.

“Part of the mandate for our Madonna House foundation in Magadan was to atone for the evil perpetrated in the camps. In 1998, when I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, I realized that I too had something to offer. An unbreakable link had been forged between the meaning of my life and the lives that were sacrificed for no apparent purpose at all.”