Banned

Leningrad, February 1976. The broad boulevards of the city, founded by Peter the Great as Russia’s “window to Europe,” lay frozen under the deep frost of a typical Soviet winter: gray, unmoving, sealed in silence. We were a Jewish family of four—my father, Gennady; my mother, Mila; my sister, Elena; and me—living in a city then called Leningrad (today Saint Petersburg) at a time when silence was often the only defense. Leonid Brezhnev, general secretary of the Communist Party, presided over a vast and crumbling empire. The world would later call it “the period of stagnation”—a term far too mild for those living beneath its weight. The economy was paralyzed, the politics rigid, but repression moved with quiet efficiency. Political dissidents, Zionist activists, Prisoners of Zion, and Jews in general were treated as suspect—perpetual outsiders in a state obsessed with control.

We lived under constant watch, not for any action or offense, but simply for being a Jewish family in the Soviet Union. And yet the strength we drew from one another, and the trust of a few close friends, gave us just enough oxygen to endure. Snow-covered streets and frozen canals reflected a city choked in frost—bitterly cold, silent, and subdued. The average temperature hovered around 23 degrees Fahrenheit, but the wind, the damp, and the endless cloud cover made it feel far colder.

Family reunification as a permissible loophole

That winter, our family received an official invitation to immigrate to the State of Israel. The invitation had come from my mother’s uncle, Rabbi Ben-Zion Brook, head of the Novardok Yeshiva in Jerusalem. It was a legitimate request for family reunification—one of the very few justifications the Soviet regime would accept for emigration. After all, why else would anyone want to leave the so-called paradise of the Soviet Union, a country that spanned 12 time zones and one-sixth of the planet’s surface? To admit that Jews wanted to leave because of ideology, discrimination, or spiritual longing would be to expose the cracks in the system. “Family reunification” was a narrow but permissible loophole.

Ben-Zion had left the Belarusian town of Rogachev in 1920, when my grandfather (my mother’s father) was five years old. Decades later, they found each other again and began corresponding in Yiddish. My grandfather would read the letters aloud, his voice trembling, while my parents listened with tears in their eyes. But before long, the KGB summoned my grandfather to the infamous “Big House” on Liteiny Street and ordered him to stop all correspondence immediately.

Then, in February 1976, the visa invitation finally arrived. Not through the mail, but in person. The superintendent of our enormous Soviet apartment block—a sprawling concrete maze of modest flats—arrived at our door with the letter in hand. Standing beside him were two young men whose presence said everything: plainclothes agents. My parents, raising two young children, were filled with fear. They had spent years secretly listening to Voice of America and Radio Liberty. They understood what this meant. The silence was about to break.

But along with the fear came a flicker of joy: Three previous invitations had simply disappeared, swallowed by the system. Now, at last, one had arrived. My father rushed to share the news with my grandfather. In a gesture both symbolic and chilling, my grandfather handed him a samizdat copy of The Black Book, compiled by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman—a rare and dangerous volume from a small, secret library he had maintained. He believed, with quiet defiance, that his children and grandchildren needed to know the truth about the world.

More than a document

The Black Book of Soviet Jewry was more than a document. It was a reckoning. Compiled in 1944 by Ehrenburg and Grossman—both Jewish Soviet war correspondents—and produced in collaboration with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, it recorded the atrocities committed against Jews across Nazi-occupied Soviet territory, containing firsthand accounts of shootings, mass graves, resistance, and loss. Originally compiled and printed in Yiddish, the manuscript was sent abroad, but its fate inside the USSR was grim. Its insistence on the uniquely Jewish nature of that suffering, and its unflinching references to local collaboration, was too much for the Soviet state to tolerate. The manuscript was suppressed, its type galleys destroyed, and its publication blocked. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was dismantled. Its members were later arrested, tortured, and executed in Stalin’s final purge of Jewish intellectuals in 1952. Possessing the book was dangerous. Lending it was reckless.

My grandfather warned my father never to take it outside the house. He didn’t have to. My father understood.

The next morning, my father was summoned to an urgent meeting at work. Just before it began, a stranger approached him, offered him a cigarette, and lit it for him. That was the last thing he remembered. He woke up the next day in a police station.

That night, my mother searched everywhere for him. No one had seen anything. My aunt Maya came to help. My great-grandmother Sofa and her friend stayed with us. I remember them sitting in the kitchen, whispering. For hours, my mother kept saying he must have been delayed. But after midnight, she told the truth.

I watched as my great-grandmother’s friend laid out a deck of cards on the table and slowly turned them over, one by one, trying to read his fate. No one spoke. No one cried. I didn’t fully understand what was happening, but I knew something was wrong. I knew the grown-ups were scared. I remember thinking, Maybe if I just stay awake, maybe if I wait long enough, he’ll come back. Maybe they’re all wrong. I remember thinking no one knew what to do.

And the most painful part: The Black Book had been with him that day.

Possession and distribution of prohibited literature

A few days later, charges were filed. First, “serious provocation.” Then, more severely, “possession and distribution of prohibited literature.” The trial was held behind closed doors. The judge demanded the source of the book. My father gave only one answer: “I found it.” Even when offered a lighter sentence in exchange for cooperation, he repeated, “I found it.”

The prosecution brought in a witness: a high-ranking army officer who claimed my father had slapped him on the subway. My mother, seated in the courtroom, could no longer stay silent. She stood and shouted, “For my husband to slap you, he’d need to stand on a chair!” She was immediately removed. She never heard the verdict: two and a half years of internal exile in the remote town of Luga, with no right to correspond with his family.

To protect us, my mother told my sister and me that our father had gone on a business trip. He returned two years later a changed man. Thinner. His hair had begun to gray. He had always been quiet, but now he was nearly silent. As far as I know, he never spoke about the days leading up to his arrest or what he endured in exile. He had internalized the silence, and it never left him.

Three weeks to leave

Not long after, we were notified that we had three weeks to leave. The emigration permit—delayed, nearly rescinded—was suddenly active. A lifetime of possessions had to be sold or abandoned. Most things were given away or sold for next to nothing. What we packed was minimal: warm clothing, some bedding, a few Russian-made items—old cameras, ballet slippers, hand-carved toys—that might be sold in the street markets of Europe, and an improbable number of books. We would leave almost everything behind, but the books—by Sholem Aleichem, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Erich Maria Remarque—had to come with us. Others—such as Isaac Babel’s works or anything from the world of samizdat, the underground, self-published literature banned by the regime—we were careful not to take, knowing they’d never make it past the peering eyes of the airport censors, who were always ready to punish you for what you carried or use it as an excuse to keep you from leaving at all.

On top of everything, my parents had to gather what was then an enormous sum of money to “repay” the Soviet government for the free education, medical care, and other social benefits we had received and were now, in their eyes, turning our backs on. These were massive sums that had to be scraped together in a matter of weeks. My parents borrowed from friends, acquaintances, anyone willing to help. It was especially difficult because both my parents had lost their jobs the moment we applied for an exit visa. That, too, was part of the system—designed to humiliate, to pressure people not to leave, or to make sure they left with nothing for daring to walk away from the supposed glory of the Soviet empire.

Books as refuge

At the airport, we were all searched. Every bag, every seam, every object. My childhood toy, a small stuffed brown monkey whose tail and arms often wrapped tightly around me as I slept, caught an officer’s eye. He pulled out a knife and, without hesitation, slit it open—first the stomach, then the hands, then the head. He ripped out the stuffing piece by piece, looking for contraband. I stood frozen. It was the first time I truly felt fear.

Satisfied we weren’t smuggling anything out, they let us board the plane.

We left by way of East Berlin, where we were locked inside the airport; then we were in Vienna, then Rome, eventually settling in the coastal town of Ladispoli, part of the quiet, makeshift network that helped Soviet Jews find their way to new lives. In the mornings, my father would set up a small table in the street market, hoping to sell the few Russian items we had managed to bring. One morning, a small gang approached. They stole everything. No one intervened. There was nothing we could do.

Our only real refuge was the books. In a world that felt uncertain and unfamiliar, we read—quietly, constantly. My parents returned to writers they knew by heart, whose words had shaped their inner world long before we left. I remember curling up with whatever they handed me, not always understanding but knowing that if I stayed inside the story, I could forget, at least for a little while, what we were going through. The books weren’t just something we brought with us. They were how we held on. They were what no one could take.

We waited weeks, then months, for the papers that would allow us to begin again in America. Along the way, we were met by strangers—people who spoke our language, knew our story, and offered food, shelter, and quiet encouragement. They had helped families like ours before. And they would again.

Daring to say what the regime wanted erased

Twenty-four years later, I returned to Russia, not as a child, but as a husband, father, and the executive director of the AVI CHAI Foundation in the former Soviet Union. With me were my wife and our two young children. For my mother, it was almost unbearable. She feared history would repeat itself. For me, the pull was undeniable. Maybe it was a sense of obligation to help revive Jewish life in the very place from which my family had once fled.

Only then did I come to understand the full weight The Black Book carried in my father’s story. His arrest had not been about ideology alone. It had been about truth—about a book that dared to say what the regime wanted erased. Now, in my new role, I could help ensure that The Black Book, along with other essential works of Jewish memory and conscience, would be published, studied, and preserved.

In time, I fulfilled my grandfather’s dream and made aliyah. Today, I live in Jerusalem with my family. My children are trilingual, but Hebrew is their first language. It’s a reality my grandfather could never have imagined. And sometimes, on cold Jerusalem nights—though never as cold as those in Leningrad—I return to a memory I’m not even sure is real. One night, during my father’s imprisonment, he came home briefly. He gently woke me, kissed me, and placed a Belochka candy in my hand—my favorite childhood treat. Dense with praline and crushed hazelnuts, coated in smooth chocolate, Belochka was a rare sweetness in a gray world, rich with the flavor of something almost like joy. That moment felt like a dream then. It still does.

And yet, it lives on—in memory, in legacy, and in the life we’ve built far from silence.

As the philosopher George Santayana once warned, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Even today, there are places where holding the wrong book, asking the wrong question, or reading the wrong story can be a dangerous act.

May the memory of my father, and of all those who suffered in those years, remain a blessing and a charge. Their silence, their strength, and their courage compel us to remember, rebuild, and continue moving forward toward a world more just, more honest, and more human.

The Black Book still rests on my shelf.

Its pages are worn.

Its weight has never left me.

And through it, my father remains near.

This article was originally published in Tablet Magazine.

Main Photo: Черная книга (Black Book) by - shakko\ Wikipedia