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By Root 2229 0

could not afford to openly arouse the Kremlin’s ire, American and European public opinion followed suit. In any case, American and French Jews had other priorities. But Meir and Ephraim refused to give up. They tirelessly appealed to senators, congressmen, journalists, and clergymen. They organized seminars, colloquia, and petitions. At stake were countless human beings whose only claim was their right to dignity and hope. How many were they? There was talk of millions, but that figure seemed implausibly high. “You ought to go and see,” both Israelis told me. “You have been a witness before, now you must go and find out the Soviet Jews’ true situation and testify for them.” Gershon Jacobson, a Yiddish journalist originally from Soviet Georgia, helped prepare my itinerary. I was briefed by experts. There were strict warnings: Watch out for beautiful women who turn up naked in your hotel room or railroad compartment. They will be there not because you’re so handsome, but because they are KGB. Unfortunately, the warnings proved baseless. No female members of the secret police were dispatched to entrap me.

I left for Moscow in time for the High Holidays, then went on to Leningrad, Kiev, and Tbilisi. I returned transformed. I who have striven to give testimony for the dead now found myself a messenger of the living. I immediately felt close to these forgotten, tenacious Jews. I admired their capacity to resist oppression and their fidelity to their people. Having survived the massacres of the Nazi era and the Stalinist persecutions, they proclaimed their Jewishness even in the heart of the Gulag and the cellars of the NKVD and KGB. And these were not religious men and women like the Hasidim or, before them, the Marranos, who practiced and taught the Torah and its Laws in secret, risking their freedom and their lives. No, these were people who had received a secular education, and who had been part of the Communist dream.

In The Jews of Silence I described my experience and presented as best I could the point of view of the courageous Jews whose struggle I now shared:

Their eyes—I must start by telling you about their eyes, for their eyes precede all else, and everything is comprehended within them. The rest can wait. It will only confirm what you already know. But their eyes—their eyes flame with a kind of irreducible truth which burns and is not consumed. Shamed into silence before them, you can only bow your head and accept the judgment. Your only wish is to see the world as they do.… Their eyes, all shades and ages. Wide and narrow, lambent and piercing, somber, harassed, Jewish eyes, reflecting a strange, unmediated reality, beyond the bounds of time and farther than the farthest distance.…

If only they could speak … but they do speak. They cry out in a language of their own that compels understanding.… They all speak the same language, and the story they tell echoes in your mind like a horrible folktale from days gone by.

My response was to tell the world of the clandestine gatherings—usually at the cemetery—where young Soviet Jews studied Hebrew and learned Israeli songs. I told of samizdat publications, those secretly printed, worn sheets one read with a virtually religious respect. I described the terror of old people in Kiev, Hasidic joy in Leningrad, the celebration of the Torah in Moscow, the jubilant crowd near the central synagogue on Arkhipova Street. If one day I appear before the celestial tribunal and am asked, “What did you do that was worthy of benevolence?” I will reply, “I was present at the dance of Jewish history in Moscow.”

On Simchat Torah, the celebration of the Torah, I stumbled like a sleepwalker through a huge crowd of young people singing and dancing. I moved from one group to another, taking in the beauty of their voices and the urgency of their appeals.

I wrote:

Where did they all come from? Who sent them here? How did they know it was to be tonight, tonight on Arkhipova Street near the great synagogue? Who told them that tens of thousands of boys and girls would gather here to sing and