“Were there animals in prison?”
The table was beautifully set on the afternoon I asked this question, and my sister and I wore our Shabbat clothes, even though it was a weekday. My father, Natan Sharansky, wore the odd white kippa that a fellow inmate made for him from a boot sock back in the Soviet gulag. Young though I was, I knew that my father only wore it on Passover and on the “family Seder” we hold annually on the anniversary of his release. Since it wasn’t Passover, I knew that we were celebrating Abba’s freedom. And I knew that it was time, once again, to ask my parents questions about their experiences. Obsessed as I was with cats as a child, animals seemed like the best place to start.
