Lifting the Iron Curtain one more time

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Gal Beckerman's five years with Soviet Jewry

Issue of October 15, 2010, 7 Cheshvan 5771

By Michael Orbach

Midway through writing “When They Come for Us We’ll Be Gone,” his chronicle of the Soviet Jewry movement, Gal Beckerman attended a barbecue in Israel. It wasn’t an ordinary barbecue. For one thing, it was held every year on June 15. For another, to be invited, participants had to have taken part in a failed plot to hijack an airplane to escape from the Soviet Union in 1970. An exception was made for Beckerman, 34, who wasn’t  alive at the time.

“I was the only non-hijacker,” Beckerman laughed. “It was pretty great; it was kind of bizarre. By this point these people had become superheroes to me. I had studied them, and suddenly I’m in the back of the car with Mark Dymshits and Sylva Zalmanson [two of the hijackers]. I sat between the two of them with Sylva trying to set me up with her daughter.”

The hijacking plot eventually came to serve as a crux of Gal’s book which was published by Houghton Mifflin at the end of September Dimshits, a retired army pilot, and several other Jews who had been refused the right to emigrate attempted to hijack a small plane and fly to freedom in Israel through Sweden. Most of the participants felt the plot would fail, but figured that the daring nature of the plot would spur greater attention to the plight of their fellow Soviet Jews. The hijackers were caught on the tarmac. However when the Soviet Union attempted to make an example out of the so-called Jewish terrorists, the attention backfired. The death sentences for the pilot and the lead plotter were commuted and the prison terms were reduced for the other participants. The hijackers were right. The spectacle of the attempt drew international attention to the then-fledgling effort to free the Soviet Jews. What was once a small grassroots effort, overnight became a cause célèbre.

“These people who were willing to sacrifice their lives to get out,” Beckerman said. “A group of people who were willing to go to such crazy reckless brave lengths to escape. It made the Soviet Union look like a prison.”

As the hours passed during the barbeque vodka stated flowing and the language switched from Hebrew to Russian. Beckerman says that he began to understand less and less of the conversations, but gained an insight that would color his book: the ordinary quality of even the most heroic.

“I saw them for who they were: just a group of normal people...” Beckerman explained. “What made them extraordinary is they couldn’t accept the status quo. The injustice of it prevented them from live ordinary lives and that’s what made them extraordinary.”

Beckerman’s foray into the world of Soviet Jewry began shortly before his bar mitzvah, when he was given a sheet of paper with the name of a Jewish Russian boy about his age. He was told to invoke the name of his Russian “twin” when he read from the Torah portion, an event that he writes in the introduction to “When They Come For Us We’ll Be Gone, “filled me with such dread I wasn’t sure I’d remember my own name, let alone this other boy’s.”

Beckerman ended up compulsively chanting the name, “It calmed me down,” he wrote.

More importantly, for Beckerman’s future career, the name left him with a question.

“The paradox of the Soviet Jewish experience — a people not allowed to fully assimilate but also not allowed to develop a separate national identity or to leave — was too confounding,” Beckerman wrote.

A little more than fifteen years later, as a student in the Columbia School of Journalism, Beckerman took a class with the well-known Jewish journalist Sam Freedman. Each student had to prepare a book proposal. Beckerman picked the struggle for Soviet Jewry.

In conversation, Beckerman invokes his ghost twin and his own family history as the impetus for the book.

“I had always been looking for a way to write about the period after the war,” Beckerman explained. “My grandparents were Holocaust survivors. I wanted to know how they got from that cataclysmic experience to the normal people I knew, how had they excised that demon, the war after the war.”

He also offered a more “banal” reason for his choice.

“I’m a story teller,” Beckerman said. “I think at the very basic level, I saw a good story and I have always dreamed about writing a book and I saw a book here.”

Freedman knew he was witnessing something when Beckerman finished his proposal.

“I knew Gal was a talented and ambitious student when he was in my class,” Freedman explained via email. “His book proposal came in at 130 pages, about three times the length of most classmates. I remember cursing him under my breath when I started to line-edit it. But I couldn’t put it down.”

After emerging with a working proposal in 2003, three agents rejected the proposal before a fourth took it and made a quick sale to Houghton Mifflin.

“I kinda woke up and now I have to write this giant history book and I don’t really know how one writes history,” Beckerman said.

What followed was a feverish five-year period for Beckerman, where he conducted hundreds of interviews, spent days in oral recordings in the New York Public library basement and read pretty much anything that had to do with the Cold War. All the while, with the exception of a six month fellowship in Germany, Beckerman worked full-time as a journalist (he currently writes for The Forward).

“A lot of that time was devoted to getting confident that I could tell this story in an authoritative way,” he explained. “I got to the point where I could interview someone and when they talked about their friends I knew them as well; I knew their parents’ stories; I had read the memoirs their best friend had written.”

What emerged was an enthralling 500-page tome that reads, at different times, like a noir thriller, a philosophical treatise and a political drama.

The book even surprised Beckerman’s former mentor.

“I was not prepared for the brilliance and scope of the finished book,” Freedman said. “It’s not a good or even great first book by a new author. It’s what a call a career book — a book most writers spend their entire careers trying to write. I’m blown away that Gal did it his first time out.”

Beckerman wrote a defining chronicle of a forgotten Jewish triumph: how Soviet Jews, dissidents, international activists and world pressure, raised the Iron Curtain.

“Why didn’t the Soviet Union go the way of China?” Beckerman asked. ”Why was it not possible to open up economically with a totalitarian grip on its population? I think the answer is that for 25-30 years there was a Soviet Jewry movement pushing for leaders to respect the basic human rights for an individual. The fact that there was this group, along with the dissidents, made it a factor that it became part of any process of reform.”

“If the Soviet Jewry movement didn’t lead to the fall, it led to the shape the fall would take.”