#refuseniks

#Repost @mattxiv

may the universe reward their bravery

I just got the coolest thing ever in the mail.

On this day in history: Natan Sharansky, a Jewish refusenik, was freed after nine years in Soviet prisons on false charges of espionage. He endured brutal interrogations, solitary confinement, and hunger strikes—but never broke.

His release was a victory for the global Soviet Jewry movement and a testament to the power of resilience and justice.

A leading Jewish activist, Vladimir Slepak became the most famous of the refuseniks, Jews whom the Soviet Union refused to allow to leave. The Soviets often gave no explanation for the denial of an emigration visa, though they frequently attributed it to state security. Slepak was told that because he had worked as an engineer years earlier, it was feared that he would divulge Russian secrets to the West. The explanation wa s absurd, since any technological know-how that Slepak and the several thousand other refuseniks had, had long been superseded by the West's. One refusenik, Benjamin Bogomolny, actually entered the Guinness Book of World Records as "most patient' - he waited twenty and a half years to get permission to leave Russia (1966-1986 - from the time he was twenty till he was forty).

The refuseniks' plight was horrendous. As soon as they applied to leave Russia, they were fired from their jobs; because the government is the only employer in Communist societies, it became impossible for them to find other work. Many Jews throughout the world sent the refuseniks money, a hefty percentage of which the government confiscated. Although many refuseniks were highly educated, they often had to accept whatever jobs were offered them (for example, cleaning streets at night) to avoid being arrested as "parasites (a Soviet classification for any able-bodied person unemployed for more than two months). Yosef Begun, a Jewish mathematician who taught an underground Hebrew class, was fired from his job when he applied to live in Israel, then convicted for not working and sent to Siberia.

In Novosibirsk the Poltinnikov family, Isaac, Irma, and their daughter Victoria, all three physicians, were refused permission to leave for Israel for nine years. Throughout this period, they were forbidden to work in their professions and were constantly harassed. The KGB periodically arrested them, subjected them to long interrogations, and on one occasion killed their dog. When the family was finally given permission to emigrate in 1979, Irma and Victoria concluded that it was a KGB trick, that they would all be arrested at the airport. Isaac Poltinnikov did leave and went to Israel. He immediately invited his wife and daughter to join him. The Soviets refused them permission. Irma died soon thereafter from malnutrition (she was afraid to leave her apartment), whereupon Victoria committed suicide.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, pro-Soviet Jewry organizations focused tremendous efforts on securing the refuseniks' emigration. It became common for Jewish communities and Jewish schools throughout the United States and Europe to "adopt" refusenik families, often writing and telephoning them. At many Bar and Bat Mitzvah celebrations, a young American Jew would "twin" himself or herself with a child reaching Bar or Bat Mitzvah age in Russia.

The refuseniks themselves served as the leadership of the Russian-Jewish revival that started after the 1967 Six-Day War. When my friend Dennis Prager visited Russia in 1969, a refusenik named Tina Brodetskaya asked him to smuggle out a document attacking Soviet antisemitism. When he asked her if she wasn't afraid of being sent to prison, Brodetskaya said: "Where do you think I am now?" Brodetskaya was subsequently permitted to leave for Israel.

With the rise of Gorbachev's policy of glasnost (greater openness and freedom), most of the longest-waiting refuseniks were permitted to leave, after having spent many of what should have been the most productive years of their lives unemployed, in fear of arrest, and under constant attack by their peers and neighbors.

By Fergie Chambers

Her favorite person Flaubert says, When you

write the biography of a friend, you must do it

as if you were taking revenge for him. Who says

we have to live like everyone else? She drops a line down

onto the page: In a poet’s household, some people secretly love

bad news. Like a dog in the kitchen, she investigates this scrap.

It could be a nod from Naturalism to Realism,

or a salute the other way around. It could be just

the sort of thing one writes when one feels

the stirrings of happiness close at hand.