'By Their Wit, Craft and Art'

...Tsaytl remains in rural Ukraine...

...Indians in Africa...

...That minority may not have fulfilled Tevye's dream of becoming a rich man, as have some oligarchs among Russia's Jews today...

...Her children achieve prominence in the arts and sciences, politics and finance, medicine and law, and the media ("Mercury's original job was that of messenger...

...They are joined in time by many of Hodl's descendants, who finally realize they must emigrate from a false paradise...

...These groups were the "descendants" of Hermes/Mercury, the god of commerce and patron of go-betweens "who lived by their wit, craft and art...

...Before 1917, Jews were largely segregated by the tsars in the Pale of Settlement, where they performed the traditional Mercurian service tasks while coexisting on hostile terms with their Apollonian Christian neighbors...

...The Jewish Centwy's panorama of the intellectual landscape in post-Stalin Russia is also filled with many other courageous Russian Jews whom Slezkine praises for their important contributions to Soviet society and to the struggle for human rights...

...Beilke goes to America, which "represented Mercurianism in power, nomadism without strangeness, full freedom of wealth and learning...

...Education was the other principal means of advancement...

...He describes the various services rendered, inter alia, by Jews and Gypsies in Europe...

...Among other Mercurians in the Russian Empire, the most prominent were the Germans...

...Formerly, Apollonians and Mercurians had lived in separate worlds, feeling both need and contempt for each other...

...Kopelev took part in the ruthless confiscation of peasant property in Ukraine, witnessed the famine that followed, and justified it as a "historical necessity," since Soviet power was "the best and most just power on earth...

...Slezkine begins by rather ponderously tracing the role of the Jews and other "ethnic strangers" during medieval and early modern times...

...On the other hand, Zionist leaders like Chaim Weizmann and Vladimir Jabotinsky deplored the overrepresentation of Jews among Russian Socialists...

...His conclusion, however, may be too pessimistic...

...For many Jewish Socialists, being an internationalist meant not being Jewish at all," the authortells us...

...The author's extensive academic expertise on Russia and Russian Jewry is amplified by his own family background...

...Chinese in Southeast Asia...

...Yet Tevye would derive great joy from seeing the remarkable resurgence of Jewish identity in a more tolerant, though far from fully democratic, post-Soviet era...

...A revolution in someone else's nation, they argued, was not worth the spilling of Jewish blood...

...Although Slezkine briefly tells us of Kopelev's eventual change of heart in the post-Stalin years, he omits significant details that might have been provided at the least in his voluminous notes: Kopelev served in the Great Patriotic War as a major in intelligence and was arrested for protesting the atrocities perpetrated by Soviet soldiers against the German population as they advanced to Berlin...

...The Rothschilds, "the world's bankers," it may be recalled, became the wealthiest family of the 19th century...

...During the purges of the late 1930s he was arrested, tortured and released after 18 months...

...In the early 19th century, for example, 30 of the 55 private banks in Berlin were owned by Jewish families...

...But he also points out that most of the remaining 4 million migrants moved from rural areas to small towns and then to big cities...

...It is true that most of those who remain are assimilated, but a vibrant minority has rediscovered its long suppressed traditions, actively helped and inspired by the participation of Beilke's American and Chava's Israeli progeny...

...The Jewish response was emigration...

...Once Jews emerged from legal, ritual and social seclusion, they moved to large cities and were especially successful in the general pursuit of wealth and learning...

...When Slezkine focuses on the transformation of Jewish life in pre-revolutionary Russia and the Soviet Union, where most of Europe's Jews lived, his book gains in interest and momentum...

...Chava goes to Palestine, where her children build the Zionist state...

...He deals in depth with the triumph and tragedy of scores of Russian Jewish intellectuals who embraced the Bolshevik Revolution with idealistic enthusiasm, but later became disillusioned...

...After 2,000 years of living as Mercurians among Apollonians, Jews in the land of Israel turned into "the only civilized Apollonians in a world of Mercurians and barbarians...

...When the Nazi Army invades, she perishes along with nameless thousands in every walk of life, who are revered in a heartbreaking excerpt quoted from one of Vassily Grossman's accounts of the Holocaust on Soviet territory...

...Hodl follows her revolutionary husband into Siberian exile...

...Her "children and grandchildren" become fully secular and thoroughly Russified members of the Soviet cultural and scientific elite, as well as the Communist Party hierarchy, including the secret police...

...One of the people he cites is Lev Kopelev, a renowned dissident in the literary world of post-Stalin Moscow...

...He chooses several of Tevye's daughters to represent the choices made by Jews of the shtetls in the Pale...

...He was a "convinced internationalist, a Soviet patriot, and a representative of the newly formed multinational Soviet people," as well as a lover of Russian history and "the Russian word...

...In fin de siècle Vienna, 40 per cent of the directors of public banks were Jews or of Jewish descent, and all banks except one were administered by Jews...

...In contrast to the spread of Jewish influence elsewhere in the world, he says, "the Jewish part of Russian history is over...

...Although the subject is familiar, he gives it a fresh perspective...

...The two men became friends, and in his magisterial novel Solzhenitsyn presents a faithful portrait of Kopelev as Lev Rubin, a linguist who is assigned to help design electronic scramblers so that enemies of the state could not bug official communications...

...The author metaphorically labels them "Mercurians," in contrast to the "Apollonians," the food-producing majorities...

...Elsewhere in Europe the percentage of Jewish university students, lawyers, doctors, teachers, journalists, and publishers was greater than their percentage of the total population...

...Nevertheless, shortly before his death in 1943, he wrote to his young daughter, the author's mother: "On the 25th anniversary of the glorious Red Army, in whose ranks I now serve, my wish is that you do well in school, as the great Party of LeninStalin demands...

...Slezkine sees her ultimately settling in Moscow...

...The author informs us that between 1870 and 1910 about 40 per cent of all gymnasium graduates in central Vienna were Jewish...

...Parsis in India...

...The Social Democratic movement attracted many Jews with its message of world revolution and brotherhood...

...The author's maternal grandfather was Jewish—Moisei Goldstein, a writer in Moscow...

...Armenians in the Middle East...

...Their Mercurian skills, he adds, combined with their ability to debate fine points of theory and adapt everyday behavior to doctrinal concepts, helped propel Jewish revolutionaries to top positions...

...Slezkine considers the "post-exilic" Jews of Europe "quintessential, extraordinarily accomplished Mercurians," who for a long time, over a large territory, filled service occupations ranging from peddling and smithing to medicine and finance...

...Kopelev is described as having been impressed by Stalin as a young man in the 1930s...

...With the rise of nation-states and capitalism, Apollonians increasingly took up such Mercurian vocations as entrepreneurship, medicine, law, journalism, and science...

...Yuri Slezkine, a professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, declares in his Introduction that the "Modern Age is the Jewish Age," and modernization "is about everyone becoming Jewish...

...Reviewed by Gene Sosin Author, "Sparks of Liberty: An Insider's Memoir of Radio Liberty" If Osama bin Laden ever reads this book, he will be spinning in his cave...

...After the Jews started identifying themselves as members of nation-states controlled by the majority, the Apollonians' resentment was heightened by the Jewish monopoly of jobs they now wanted for themselves...

...As members of a social and anthropological category of minorities known as "service nomads," they provided goods and services to the surrounding agricultural or pastoral populations...

...This meant, of course, rejecting their parents' world and becoming members of the Russian intelligentsia...

...They were not as severely restricted as the Russian Jews, who were barred from government employment, limited by quotas in their access to education and vulnerable to pogroms...

...Convicted of "bourgeois humanism," he was sent to a special prison camp housed in a former church on the outskirts of Moscow, where gifted Soviet citizens could conduct useful research for the regime...

...Abandoning Hebrew and Yiddish, they eagerly learned Russian, because "converting to the Pushkin faith" was their passport to success in various fields...

...The place was called a sharashka, a name that will sound familiar to readers of The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a fellow inmate...

...The author draws on Sholem Aleichem's Tevye the Dairyman for an imaginative metaphor to dramatize the different directions taken by the Russian Empire's Jewry...

...To support his provocative thesis he amasses impressive evidence (including 38 pages of notes), but curiously does not mention the challenging rise of Islamic fundamentalism...

...Slezkine repeats the well-known statistics about the 1.2 million Jews who left the empire between 1897 and 1915, and largely headed for the United States...

...In the early 1960s, Solzhenitsyn asked Kopelev for help in getting a novella published...

...Following Peter the Great's reforms, they had come to occupy central roles in the imperial bureaucracy, economic life and the professions...

...His father, ethnically Russian, had no problem graduating from Moscow State University in 1949, even though Stalin's anti-Semitic campaign was intensifying...

...It was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which caused a sensation when it appeared in Aleksandr Tvardovsky's liberal journal Novy Mir during the "thaw" period of Nikita S. Khrushchev's rule...

...Slezkine concentrates on "Hodl's choice" in the last half of the book...