Tale of a Soviet Prisoner

...But Vladimir Bukov-sky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Roy and Zhores Medvedev and others have already given us that...

...With her husband's health now reportedly deteriorating rapidly in prison, where he has over 10 years to go on his sentence, Avital Shcharansky continues to hope for an early release...

...She and her brother Michael, the children of dedicated Communists, found life at home oppressive and left in order to dream of and plan for a future in Israel...

...It belongs in the tradition of memoirs by the wives of Russian dissident poets murdered by Stalin, Peretz Markish and Osip Mandelstam...

...meeting with American Sovietologist Richard Pipes...

...and bringing a libel suit against an anti-Semitic Soviet television show, even though he was entitled to do so under Soviet law...

...Shcharansky's knowledge of Soviet law was made accessible not only to Jews but to members of other minorities, such as the Volga Germans, who needed his assistance in filing visa applications, writing protests and appeals...

...From a small apartment they furiously wrote press releases, prepared for her trips, contacted religious leaders...

...He served as informal representative to the Western media, calling impromptu press conferences when he learned of arrests and the harassment ot refuseniks...

...All communications and educational activities were to be carried out above ground, and protests were to be peaceful...

...Next Year in Jerusalem was published for the obvious purpose of provoking further interest in the author's relentless, exhausting campaign to secure her husband's release...

...Though often rendered redundant by the narrative, they reveal a warm, bright, witty, uncompromising young man who, however, would have preferred a normal life as husband, father, scientist, and Israeli...

...Nevertheless, when he first applied to emigrate to Israel in 1973, he was refused permission on the usual grounds of "access to classified material...

...He was perceived as too closely tied with the dissident movement...

...Shcharansky's account is the government of Israel, except for its expediting an occasional travel visa...

...In May 1976 he became a founding member of the Moscow Committee for the Implementation of the Helsinki Agreement (headed by Dr...

...Mrs...

...And I turn to you, the Court, who were required to confirm a pre-determined sentence: to you I have nothing to say...

...In this vein, she prints his ardent love letters from Moscow and later from prison...

...Congress to support the Jack-son-Vanik Amendment...

...Since that time...

...Now it is also widely identified as the inspired final words of Anatoly Shcharansky before being sentenced to 13 years of prison and a hard labor camp by a Soviet court in July 1978: "For more than 2,000 years the Jewish people, my people, have been dispersed...

...It was Shcharansky's excellent command of English that put him in the forefront of the movement...

...Like other leaders of both the Jewish and the democratic dissident movements, Shcharansky was guided in his actions by two principles—publicity and legality...

...For this activity he earned a reputation as a dissident, but he sat on the committee as a representative of Soviet Jews and sought simply to document violations of Soviet law, without the intent to change that law or Soviet society...

...His purported anti-Soviet activities consisted of appearing in a film shown on British television...

...nor, for that matter, does it take up the linkage of emigration and trade...

...Before his arrest in March 1977, Shcharansky, 31, had been one of the leading activists in the Jewish emigration movement, although he was less known in the West than some of his associates...

...Avital Shcharansky has logged many thousands of miles on her husband's behalf—to attend demonstrations, tribunals, press conferences, and meetings with Western officials, lawyers, scientists, and students...

...One of Shcharansky's Western lawyers discovered that Leonid Brezhnev had sent a similar telegram...

...After graduating with highest honors from a technological physics institute, he deliberately took a computer programming job at an open institution so as not to impede his emigration plans...

...But the author ably succeeds in her desire to portray, in addition to the Shcharansky case, Anato-ly's activities and concerns before he made headline news...

...The absence makes her book an intriguing critique of official Israeli policy on Soviet Jewry, which has influenced established Jewish organizations in the U.S., Canada and England...

...As translator for visiting Westerners, he met numerous American Congressmen, many of whom subsequently came to his aid, although these meetings were used against him in the accusation of treason ("bringing forces to bear on the U.S...

...Avital Shcharansky, nee Natalya Stieglitz, entered this story in the fall of 1973...

...But this book is different in at least one regard: It is a call to action, because her husband can still be saved...

...When she first met Anatoly he had just completed one of his numerous 15-day jail terms, and on their final parting only eight months later he had just returned from another brief incarceration...

...Shcharanskv also describes the spontaneous formation of an ad hoc support group among her friends (including co-author liana Ben-Josef, also from Moscow) in Jerusalem...

...Both before and after his trial, Israeli officials urged Western Jewish groups not to emphasize the Shcharansky case...

...Missing from Mrs...

...But wherever they are, wherever Jews are found, each year they have repeated, 'Next Year in Jerusalem.' Now, when 1 am further than ever from my people, from Avital, facing many arduous years of imprisonment, I say, turning to my people, my Avital, Next Year in Jerusalem...

...But as Shcharansky said in his own defense at his trial, "My open efforts to produce information of a nonsecrel character, available to all, were transformed into espionage...

...Later he was dismissed from this job and avoided prosecution for parasitism" only by private, unregistered tutoring in English, mathematics and physics...

...Next Year in Jerusalem describes their short, frenzied life together, moving from one Moscow apartment to another, spending nights in the police "detoxifier," evading KGB surveillance, yet still finding time to attend informal Hebrew lessons and public demonstrations...

...Her book catalogues this global reaction to Anatoly's plight, and credits it with saving him from the death penalty...

...Discovering that several civil bureaus had refused to register their marriage, Mrs...

...But he must have known, intuitively, that his wife had not given up her determined struggle for his freedom...

...and sending a telegram of congratulations on the American Bicentennial to President Gerald Ford...

...Mrs...

...Reviewed by Donna Arzt Director, Soviet Jewry Legal Advocacy Center The phrase "Next Year in Jerusalem" has long resounded from Passover seder tables, expressing the theme of Jewish redemption and exodus from slavery to freedom...

...In recent years it has become the adopted motto of Soviet Jews, who often transform it into the more sanguine "This Year in Jerusalem...

...Shcharansky arranged a religious ceremony, but was forced to emigrate the nest day She was assured her husband would join her in a few months, hut that was five and a half years ago...

...Nevertheless, except for an odd failure to fully caption and credit the valuable photographs, the book does not appear to have been hastily written...

...He was unaware of the massive, world-wide outcry at his arrest, or even of the crowds of Jewish, dissident and Western supporters who had congregated outside the Moscow courtroom...

...His goal for himself and for his fellow Jews was only emigration...

...Next Year in Jerusalem does not address the theoretical issue of linkage between emigration and internal reform of the USSR...

...Predictably, her book suffers from a lack of analytical insight into the nature of the system that has brought her so much personal grief...

...Shcharansky, too, comes across as unassuming and apolitical, an artist by profession who has had little chance to work quietly on a canvas...

...Shcharansky's acts of i reason ostensibly included assembling documentation on Soviet deprivation of human rights, on prisoners ol conscience, on the lack of Jewish culture, and on Soviet anti-Semitism...

...Yuri Orlov...

...organizing and sending collective letters supporting the Jackson-Vanik Amendment...

...The evidence presented in support of the charges of treason (one element of which is espionage) and ami-Soviet agitation reflects the regime's paranoid, inverted logic...

...compiling and disseminating the names and places of employment—already public knowledge—of Jews refused permission to emigrate...

...Next Year in Jerusalem is Avital Shcharansky's memoir of her own and her husband's joint struggle, and of the obstacles placed in the path of other Soviet Jewish "refuseniks" who have been denied repatriation in Israel...

...Western Soviet Jewry organizations invited her abroad, where she met with groups ranging from the French Communist Party to the Coalition for a Democratic Majority...

...It is infused with Zionist passion and a well-articulated sense of the Soviet threat to destroy her people's liberation movement...

...publicizing his trial along with those of "straight" re-fuseniks, it was felt, would serve to detract from the narrowly-circumscribed, unprovocative Jewish goal of emigration...

...Dismissing his KGB-appointed lawyer and defending himself after 16 months incommunicado, Shcharansky did not know that President Carter had twice proclaimed him innocent of espionage charges...