The American Jewish Soviet Experience

Anat oly Sharansky, now Natan, was born in 1948 in the Ukrainian Soviet city of Stalino (now Donetsk), a time and a place where being a Jew was, in his words, “a disease without cure, a sentence to a life without hope,” and “an invitation to be pitied.” His parents—witnesses to the prewar terror of Stalin’s regime, Hitler’s Holocaust, and Stalin’s postwar anti-cosmopolitan campaigns—guided their son on the path of Soviet Jewish “survivalism,” a term that does not have resonance for postwar American Jews, though it would be easily recognized by their parents, and unfortunately, perhaps, by their grandchildren. Read Full Article »