One Man's Exodus
DECTER, MOSHE
One Man's Exodus Shcharansky: Hero of Our Time By Martin Gilbert Viking. 467 pp. $19.95. Reviewed by Moshe Decter Contributor, "Foreign Affairs," New York "Times," "Midstream" "Jews! Never...
...The Bolshevik Revolution was an unmitigated disaster for the Jewish people, most immediately for the Jews of Russia, because it put a virtual end to what had for centuries been the matrix of Jewish civilization...
...That cry out of the depths was uttered by Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, one of the most profound and original philosophers of Judaism, a mystical existentialist and pietist who flourished in the Ukraine in the late 18 th and early 19th centuries...
...Because of his English fluency, his quick intelligence, his wit and charm, he became the spokesman for the Jewish emigration movement and for the "refuseniks...
...Besides pursuing his own emigration, he dealt with the Western press, interpreted for physicist Andrei Sakharov, and initiated countless appeals, letters and protests...
...Skeptical, yes...
...By repressing Shcharansky, the regime sought to intimidate and demoralize the Jewish emigration movement, and to destroy its links with the human rights movement...
...The Soviet Literary Encyclopedia of 1930 added: "Hebrew literature is all under the sign of Zionism,the Jewish fascism...
...As he was spirited away from the court, Sakharov, standing with Anatoly's mother at the door, said, "What is happening now is pure sadism," and to the KGB and the police: "You're not people, you're fascists...
...That is the story of countless individuals throughout the USSR who rediscovered their Jewish identity...
...There is no assessment of the historical and spiritual significance of the new Zionist movement in Russia...
...The system was designed for psychological torture—slowly to make one weary, slowly to make one lose hope in emigration...
...That is the story of Ana-toly Shcharansky...
...His idealistic father had joined the Communist Party out of faith in its promise...
...Never despair...
...Following the adoption in 1975 of the Helsinki Accords, with their human rights provisions, he also became a founder of the Helsinki Watch group in Moscow...
...Shcharansky described the plight of the refusenik graphically: "You were gradually made to believe that you were persona non grata—no job, no apartment, no education for your children, no work papers, no record of schooling...
...But the book enjoys the virtue of its defect...
...That original characterization provides the key to the meaning of Jewish survival...
...But with the accent always on faith...
...Even Hebrew and Zionism led a precarious secret life...
...Now his career began...
...What gives the work lasting value is the extensive extracts it presents of the basic documents—Shcharansky's pretrial interrogation, the transcript of the trial and, above all, his letters from prison and forced labor camp...
...This he fortified with a deepening faith—reading the Psalms, singing Hebrew songs loud and clear—and with his knowledge "from the pages of our Jewish history, above all from the story of Judah Maccubee: The fact that there is a history of resistance always helps...
...There it is in a nutshell: Jewish national identity is the enemy of the State...
...There was the safety valve of escape from oppression—mass emigration to the West...
...For the letters alone, this book is worth cherishing...
...The repression visited upon the Zionist and human rights activists was that of a cruel, cynical tyranny...
...All the resources of a superpower," he declared after his liberation, "cannot isolate a man who hears the voice of freedom, a voice I heard from the very chamber of my soul.' Shcharansky survived intact for several reasons, chief among them being his own inner strength...
...By April 1973, Shcharansky applied for an exit visa himself...
...Nor is there any discussion of Shcharansky's own philosophical view of the relationship between his struggle for Jewish emigration and for human rights in general, and that of other religious and national groups in the USSR...
...Interrogated 300 times over a period of 16 months in isolation, he stood up to the unrelieved pressure with honesty, humor and resolve, betraying neither his friends nor his ideals...
...Yiddish was spoken by hundreds of thousands—grandparents and assimilated grandchildren found each other...
...Just consider: Despite the pogroms and the pauperization inflicted by vicious Tsarist anti-Semitism, Jewish life throbbed with creative vitality and (a miracle...
...Whatever the effect of his imprisonment, it failed utterly to undermine his spirit...
...And, not insignificantly, there was the saving grace of free contact not only with kith and kin across the seas, but between communities and families within Russia...
...But Shcharansky did not lose hope...
...A separate little volume of those letters should be published...
...Except he was not simply another Zionist, not simply another Jew who rediscovered Judaism in conditions of duress...
...The numerus clausus notwithstanding, in 1911 Jews comprised 9.2 per cent of the students in Russian universities...
...Anatoly, a whiz at math, physics and chess, enrolled in the Moscow Physical-Technical Institute...
...If this sounds high-flown and fanciful, it is nonetheless integral to understanding the indomitable struggle waged by Shcharansky, who emerged from a kind of hell into freedom—a whole man...
...In 1967, with the great victory of the Six Day War, it burst into flame again...
...A spark flickered...
...Not the only one, not the first one, yet singular for his admirable human qualities and for the chutzpah and brilliance with which he conducted his struggle...
...It might equally have been written—in fact, its spirit suffuses all his letters—from Soviet prison and labor camp by Natan Sharon, known to the world until his recent liberation and ascent to Jerusalem as Anatoly Shcharansky...
...His mother, Ida Milgrom, in her 70s, never ceased to press the authorities, to write her son, to visit him in prison and labor camp, to bring whatever news she had to the attention of journalists and other Westerners in Moscow...
...Shcharansky himself testifies that he was kept alive by sustained, informed and voluble protest—that silence and oblivion, not the KGB, are the oppressor's most dreadful servants...
...You ceased to exist, were swallowed into the air...
...A fabled grandfather and uncle had been Zionists in Odessa, the heartland of Russian Zionism and Jewish culture before the Revolution...
...He emerged as one of the most heroic and ingratiating personalities of the Jewish movement in Russia in the past decade...
...Shcharansky was arrested in March 1977, shortly after his marriage to a young woman who had just received an exit visa for Israel...
...Martin Gilbert's method in his book is not that of a historian or political analyst . His method is to let the people involved and the documents speak for themselves...
...But the flame was not extinguished...
...They have witnessed and remembered the rise and fall of empires, and their own grandeur and misery...
...actually experienced atremendous renascence...
...Then in 1948, only 30 years after the Bolshevik Revolution, came the re-creation of the State of Israel...
...This prevents him from offering the overarching analysis Shcha-ransky's saga demands...
...Traditional religion and learning thrived...
...His entire experience, moreover, is emblematic of the Zionist movement in Russia in our time, a movement that could not be predicted and that remains a wonder...
...Yet strangely the Jews are not a sad or mournful people...
...They are among the most affecting and powerful in the literature of prison—an extraordinary meditation on the complex sources of faith, love and intelligence that help preserve sanity and banish fear in the face of a vast system that aims to break the human spirit...
...The Jews have always lived at the edge of the abyss...
...All this was methodically, ruthlessly destroyed by the Bolsheviks...
...The spark took on a bright glow...
...He was released last February, just as Mrs...
...In July 1978, he was sentenced to 13 years' deprivation of freedom—three in prison and 10 in a strict-regime labor camp...
...He was accused of espionage, treason and anti-Soviet propaganda...
...And his wife, Avital, stormed the chancelleries of the Western world on his behalf...
...He was a natural leader, and therefore dangerous to the lawless and arbitrary regime...
...The Bible describes the ancient Hebrews as stiff-necked, obdurate...
...In addition, there was an unprecedented opening-up of opportunity for higher secular education...
...there was not a major leader whom she did not engage in her campaign for his freedom as she traveled everywhere tirelessly...
...Compare that with the 1958 figure of 4 per cent, less than 1.4 per cent in 1976 and under 0.9 per cent in 1978, the last year statistical data about Jews in higher education were published...
...Lenin defined the target in 1913: "Jewish national culture—the slogan of the rabbis and the bourgeois, the slogan of our enemies...
...He was born in 1948 and reared in an affectionate family devoted to education...
...Many religious Jews persisted...
...Soon after graduating in 1972, he gravitated to a circle of Jewish scientists in the forefront of the emigration movement whose requests to leave for Israel had repeatedly been refused...
...He has already demonstrated that he does not intend to quit the battle for Jewish and human rights, to forget those he has left behind...
...Sakha-rov was permitted to travel to the West for medical treatment, as a cosmetic concession on the eve of the Reagan-Gorbachev summit...
...They returned to Jewish roots, religion, Hebrew, Zionism, the quest for emigration to Israel...
...His tale begins typically enough...
...Two remarkable women in his life made an enormous contribution...
...Shcharansky's spirit and personality emerge vividly, fiercely, mainly because Gilbert lets his friends and comrades speak...
...With a millennial history drenched in blood and tears, why should Jews not despair...
...Ironical, certainly...
...Because, Nachman and Natan teach, miracles—hard facts that remain mysterious and incredible—are always possible...
...and obdurate persistence...
...The two great secular political movements, the Bund and Zionism, captured the imagination of Russian Jewry...
...A rich literature unfolded in Yiddish and Hebrew (and in Russian, too), as modern Jewish cultural and educational and communal institutions of all sorts proliferated...
...He impressed everyone—family, friends, comrades, Western journalists, visitors from abroad, with his courage, optimism, and selflessness...
...Indeed, the rebirth in the Soviet Union of latter-day Jewish national/religious feeling and identification and pride is a paradigm of Jewish history: the rise of the phoenix out of the ashes of repression and evisceration...
Vol. 69 • April 1986 • No. 7
