Emil Draitser - Shush! Growing Up Jewish under Stalin

FIRST AND FOREMOST, I WANT TO THANK (alas, posthumously) my parents, Soybel Bendersky and Abram Draitser, who, quite early in my life, through their deeply expressed emotional attachment to things of the past, unknowingly helped me understand much later in my life that the past should never be discarded from our memory. For the past not only often bears on the present but also offers us glimpses of the future. After their death, not unlike many other children, I realized that I missed them much more than you would expect when parents pass away after living a long life: my mother in 1994, at age seventy-nine, and my father in 1999, at age eighty-nine.

In hindsight, however, I wish I had been more inquisitive and learned more details about their lives and the lives of my grandparents and great-grandparents. But, alas, as a Russian proverb goes, we are all wise after the event, zadnim umom krepki. My only excuse is that, in our hard-working blue-collar family, there was hardly ever time for a leisurely gathering near a fireplace, complete with father smoking a pipe and mother knitting a sweater. To begin with, my father never smoked, my mother never knitted, and, during all my formative years, we lived in a communal apartment in which a fireplace was considered a bourgeois luxury. All the bits of information that eventually found their places in this book came from snippets of verbal exchanges between my parents and their close kin and family friends. As a rule, these exchanges were made on the go, while all involved were busy with a chore at hand.

Once I decided to write this book, to revive events of years long past, to avoid losing many important details, I spent many hours talking to the members of my extended family: my brother, Vladimir; my uncle Misha and my aunt Asya; as well as my cousins, first and second, and their spouses: Eva and Efim Ingerman; Yan and Natasha Tenster; Maya Khanis and her husband, Lev; Boris and Zhanna Bendersky; and the late Fira Kagan.

Talking to my adult children, Svetlana, who grew up in Russia, and Alinka and Max, raised in America, was also illuminating. During our talks, Ive learned a great deal about myself that, as many other parents discover, does not necessarily coincide with my own view of me and my life. This boosted my efforts to present myself as objectively as is humanly possible. (To what extent I succeeded in this, of course, the reader is the final judge.) To the same end, conversations with my American relatives and dear friends, Charlotte and Edith Barr, who showered me and my family with their generous attention during our first, quite painful, stages of adaptation to life in a foreign land, helped me to better understand the way in which my personal story, set in quite different times and on quite different soil, has to be told to be as fully comprehended as possible by American readers.

Berta and Yasha Sklyansky, Jane Hamer, Dr. Gregory Massel, ZhenyaTurovsky, Dr. Boris Gasparov, and Dr. Tatyana Novikova read some chapters of the manuscript and offered their feedback.

Nellie Peltsman, Boris Zamikhovsky, Mila and Sergei Rakhlin, Yevsey Tseitlin, and Dr. Jolanta (Jola) Kunicka took on themselves the tedious work of reading the whole manuscript line by line. I appreciate their valuable feedback regarding the content and shape of the manuscript.

During the first stages of the manuscript development, I greatly benefited from the editorial input of Kaleria Nikolaevna Ozerova. The supportive responses of my colleagues Dr. Toby Clyman, Dr. Sarah Blacher Cohen, and Dr. Gavriel Shapiro renewed my energy and confidence in pursuing my project to its end.

The cheers of fellow writers Lara Vapnyar, Boris Fishman, Jennie Staniloff-Redling, Solomon Volkov, Semyon Reznik, Dr. Ieguda Nir, the late Mariam Yuzefovsky, and the late David Westheimer, who read either the whole work or substantial portions of it, have been most encouraging.

At various points in my writing, most of the time without realizing it, just by the sheer sincerity and spontaneity of their responses to my story, my friends Martin Weiss, Selim Karady, Dr. Anthony Saidy, Dr. Gary Kern, Lev Mak, Si Frumkin, Lida and Michael Feinstein, Tamara Chernyak, Dr. Jeremy Azrael, and Dr. Victor Dmitriev gave me their moral support and nurtured my confidence.

I also appreciate the efforts of Rebecca Gould and Bill Bly, who helped me to fine-tune my command of idiomatic English. In this respect, Dr. Benjamin Rifkins expertise and enthusiasm for my undertaking were both most helpful and inspirational.