Affirmation and Pain in the USSR

...The young woman volunteers to parachute into her village to help fight the invaders, but is turned down because she is Jewish and, she is told, might be betrayed by her own neighbors...

...But who allowed them to snipe at Lenin...

...Yet as Saul Bellow noted in his New Yorker "Reflections" on Israel this past summer, in a parenthetical reference to the conditions suffered by Soviet religious and political prisoners, "we are informed about everything...

...Visiting home after the German retreat, Pauline learns her parents and younger brother were betrayed by a former schoolmate and friend of hers...

...On another level it is a powerful affirmation: " even if I always remain a man of Russian culture, with all the symptoms of homesickness known to civilization, I shall say—no, not say, but shout aloud—if I still have any human dignity left, 'I am a Jew.'" Svirsky is himself aware that the book has its shortcomings...

...All that is required of us is to put on a pretense of being as innocent as new-born babes and of firmly believing that our rulers are clothed in shining raiment...

...In World War II the family is not so fortunate...

...I was having to prove again and again that even though I was a Jew' I was no worse than anyone else...

...The manuscript of a novel by Svirsky already approved and paid for by the publication, is returned...

...In a Foreword he writes: "I would like to appear to my readers as wiser, more clear-sighted, as having a much greater degree of inner freedom than I did when I was writing it...

...They might kill her, as her parents had been killed...

...On one level, it poignantly tells an old story of unrequited love: "I have not stopped loving the earth for which I have given my blood, nor have I stopped loving my friends, or the Russian language which has been my life and my fate...

...As a result, Svirsky is summoned to the Moscow Party Committee and at the insistence of a member of the Writers' Union Party Committee he is allowed to document the charges against Smirnov: a long list of indiscretions and the vilest slanders, corroborated by several writers and editors in supporting statements...

...Get rid of the smell of Jews," is Smir-nov's first order on taking over...

...Inevitably, the case against Smirnov becomes the case against Svirsky...

...He served 25 years in the Russian Army...

...the military publishing organization stops the presses on a collection of short stories to excise four pages that were written by Svirsky...

...By the time Pauline and Svirsky meet, after the end of the War, she has been accepted for graduate study...

...And the translator might have cleared up some opaque sentences...

...Every publishing outfit, magazine and film studio turns away his work...

...When Svirsky's letters of protest to the Party Central Committee, Politburo member Mikhail Suslov, and Premier Nikita Khrushchev himself go unanswered, he airs his grievance before a meeting of the Writers' Union...

...Ironically, it is an East German student, a former Hitler youth, who draws Pauline's attention to the similarity between Point 5 and paragraphs in the Hitler-jugend constitution...

...The most interesting and detailed section in Hostages concerns the author's vain attempt to reverse the appointment of Vasily Smirnov, "the most rabid and malicious chauvinist and anti-Semite," as editor-in-chief of the magazine Friendship of the Peoples...

...Of course, one need merely read the newspapers to be reminded how quickly paradise turns to hell for those who attempt the forbidden—a prominent recent example being the dissident writer Andrei Amalrik's expulsion from the Soviet Union after having been exiled to Siberia twice and imprisoned twice...

...Broken in spirit, lacking any means of support and near starvation, the young girl makes her way back to Moscow to finish her undergraduate degree in chemistry...

...What had they done to Lenin...

...These are minor flaws, however, when viewed against the major contribution Hostages makes to our understanding of the plight of dissidents and Jews in the Soviet Union...

...Along with similarly fingered Jews, they were taken to a nearby quarry and shot, not by Germans, but by their own people, members of the Free Ukraine militia...

...But anti-Semites were not easily convinced, Svirsky tells us, and continued insinuating that Jews were shirking...

...I did not immediately understand," he says, "that in the chances I was taking, in the pleasure I derived from the fight, there was something deeply humiliating...

...Ironically, Pravda revealed that Jews, who made up only 2 per cent of the population and stood about eleventh in the order of all nationalities, ranked fifth in producing Heroes of the Soviet Union...

...Not because the City Committee Party had protected a pogromist (that came as no real surprise), but because of the casual way in which the head of the City Committee's Cultural Department had defied Lenin himself...

...Since many names are mentioned in the book, an index would have been helpful...

...He is working on a thesis in Russian literature, and has encountered no less anti-Semitism than his future wife...

...I am a Russian, or so I had thought for many years...

...Reviewed by Robert S. Rosen Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Baruch College, City University of New York Nadezhda Mandelstam, widow of one of Stalin's early victims, the brilliant poet Osip Mandelstam, writes in the second volume of her memoirs, Hope Abandoned (1974): "At the moment not much is demanded of us: we are left alone as long as we keep quiet about the crimes of the past and present...

...Pauline, a faithful Komsomol member, refuses to consider that her rejection might be related to Point 5, the pernicious regulation that requires every citizen to state his nationality on the mandatory Soviet Internal Passport and exposes Jews to the most humiliating discrimination...

...The secretary of the Moscow Party, in a Freudian slip, refers to Svirsky as Sinyavsky...

...We know nothing...

...Nevertheless, it was not until 1949 that Pauline and Grigory were able "to see what was going on—the guns had begun to aim at us...

...the Soviet Writers' Publishing House breaks up the type for a novel of his about to be printed...

...Svirsky first recounts experiences of his wife, Pauline, a Moscow University student at the time the Germans were overrunning her native Ukraine...

...She finds that hard to believe, recalling stories about how her extremely poor parents had been saved by neighbors —before and after the Revolution —when Ukrainian nationalist gangs (Whites, Greens and Blues) attacked their village and killed every Jew in sight...

...The author, a novelist and short-story writer, emigrated there with his wife in 1971...

...My great-grandfather had been a soldier under Nicholas I, and was wounded nearly 130 years ago in the first defense of Sebastopol...

...The only things forbidden are to act, speak—or worst of all—to write...

...For the next six years not a word of his is accepted in the USSR...

...The naivete of some lines is almost moving: "Nazis of all kinds might take aim at her, Pauline...

...Or, one should now add, Hostages, an account of the persecution of two very gifted people struggling against Soviet anti-Semitism begun in the USSR and completed in Israel...

...Despite excellent marks and recommendations, she is at first not permitted to pursue a higher degree...

...Yet of the 20 students applying with her to the science faculty, only the four who are Jews are turned down, including the single Stalin scholar of the class...

...By comparison with the past, we are living in a kind of paradise...

...And later: "I walked out of the room quite shattered...

...I would like to have sounded less cliche-ridden, less prone to journalese...

...This touches a matter troubling me for some time: our resistance to absorbing the knowledge that comes to us not simply in the daily press but in books such as Nadezhda Man-delstam's or Andrei Sinyavsky's A Voice from the Chorus (which prompted Bellow's remarks...

...Born in 1921, Svirsky was involved in World War II from the outset, flying dangerous missions over the Barents Sea, taking part in the defense of Moscow and in the liberation of Leningrad, earning nine decorations for bravery...

...But a mere summary cannot adequately convey the impact of Hostages...