When They Come for Us We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry by Gal Beckerman (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010) $30
Beginning in the 1960’s the American Jewish community, the Soviet Jewish community and the Israeli government all focused on the need for free immigration from the USSR for the 3 million Jewish citizens of the Soviet Union. In the United States, it was an era of protest. The civil rights movement captured the country’s attention, the anti-war movement galvanized the country’s youth. In the USSR Jews began rediscovering their lost heritage. Stalin was dead; and although his persecution of the Jews resulted in the decimation of the Jewish intellectuals, and indeed Jewish culture on all levels, small groups throughout the vast country were coming together surreptitiously to celebrate their culture and religion.
In Israel surrounded by hostile neighbors, the government looked upon the Soviet Jewish community as a massive immigrant group whose numbers would almost double their population of Ashkenazi Jews. As all three groups came together for this cause, the story of this movement was, as the book’s subtitle implies, epic in scope.
Beckerman begins in Riga, Latvia, in 1963 where a group of Jews are meeting in the forest of Rumbuli to reclaim the bodies of 25,000 Jews who were murdered when the Nazis marched into Latvia. These weekly meetings begin to take on the aspect of a Jewish revival with songs and dancing as well as the grim task of locating the bodies and giving them a Jewish burial. The author then focuses on the United States where two Jewish activists in Cleveland began lobbying for human rights in the Soviet Union, particularly for Jews.
Back and forth the narrative goes from the United States to the Soviet Union and back to the United States again. The actors in this drama are larger than life. Beckerman chronicles hardships and bravery of the Soviet refuseniks like Anatoly Shcharansky and Ida Nudel, and he brings to life American activists like Meir Kahane and Senator Henry Jackson — a cold warrior who made human rights his mantra in his quest to defeat the USSR. As the author points out, the movement to free Soviet Jews brought the American Jewish community together in a way that has not again been equaled.
This was a cause everyone — Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, the unaffiliated — could support. For anyone who was involved in a Bar or Bat Mitzvah pairing with a Soviet twin; for the people who protested by sending packages of matzah to the Soviet embassy or participated in a rally; for anyone who attended a Safam concert and sang “We are Leaving Mother Russia”; for everyone who sponsored a family from the Soviet Union when they arrived in the United States; and most of all for all those Russian émigrés who are now members of our community — brave individuals who risked so much in order to emigrate from the USSR: this book is worth reading and enjoying. It brings back a time, not so long ago, when we were all idealists, determined to do right, and believed in a righteous cause.
Andrea Kempf, a librarian at the Billington Library at Johnson County Community College, has reviewed books for many publications, including Library Journal and The Jewish Chronicle.
