My fifth pick for the top works of the Soviet-Jewish decade is Operation Wedding, a documentary about an almost forgotten story of true heroism that helped thrust the Soviet-Jewry movement into the spotlight.
Soviet-Jewish Decade Top 10: Operation Wedding Continue Reading
My first selection for the top 10 Russian-Jewish works of the decade is journalist Gal Beckerman’s When They Come For Us, We’ll Be Gone. Published in 2010, the book was — and remains — the first and most comprehensive history of the Soviet-Jewry movement. It won the National Jewish Book Award and the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and was named a book of the year by the Washington Post.
Soviet-Jewish Decade Top 10: When They Come For Us We’ll Be Gone Continue Reading
A while ago I interviewed Anat Zalmanson-Kuznetsov for an article about her award-winning documentary, Operation Wedding, still one of just a tiny handful of docs on the Soviet-Jewish immigration. It’s the story of her parents’ attempt to escape the USSR in 1970, by hijacking an empty plane and flying it across the border to Sweden. Also known as the Leningrad Hijacking, it sounds daring and
Operation Wedding: A conversation with Anat Zalmanson-Kuznetsov Continue Reading
[Editor’s Note – Want to read this in Russian? Click here to read a translation of my Q+A on Booknik.ru] Memoirs about Soviet-Jewish life during the immigration period of the 1970s and 1980s have not yet saturated the memoir genre, so I’m excited to tell you about a new book that’s just come out this month. Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story is the second memoir by writer
Leaving Russia: An interview with Maxim Shrayer on his new memoir Continue Reading
I am really excited about today’s post — an interview with Lisa Paul, whose memoir, Swimming in the Daylight, is about her time in Moscow and friendship with Soviet refusenik and dissident Inna Meiman. In 1985, after returning from her trip, Lisa went on a hunger strike to bring attention to her friend’s plight and need for an exit visa so she could get cancer
1980. I was just barely two years old, but already a stateless refugee when my family arrived in Canada that winter. Six months earlier, we’d left the Soviet Union, travelling first to Vienna and then, by train, Rome. That year, we were among the 50,000-odd Jews who’d been permitted to leave the USSR. We were part of a wave of emigration that took place between