They Were Fighters: Oral Histories of Jews Leaving the Soviet Union By Yanina Kisler

What drives people to abandon everything to start again in a new country?

An amazing event happened in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. It involved a third-of-a-million people, Jews who gave up all they had to emigrate from the Soviet Union and start their lives over again. This event was remarkable because large numbers of people do not typically abandon a secure existence to pursue a new life in an unknown land. Through interviews with 100 Jews who emigrated during the height of Soviet power, and more who left after its collapse, the book reveals stories about their lives in the Soviet Union, the complex motivations behind their decisions to flee, and how they view their legacy.

Most Jews in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 80s were well educated, had at least reasonable living conditions (by Soviet standards), and were established in their jobs. The only thing they knew about life elsewhere was Soviet propaganda that depicted people starving and dying on the American streets. In addition, the Soviet government treated people who wanted to emigrate from the USSR as enemies and traitors, and they faced the danger of being arrested, exiled, or, at the very least, losing their jobs and being ostracized. And yet a third-of-a-million Jews walked away from everything they had worked for their whole lives, left friends and family behind, and went into the unknown seeking something they could not have in the Soviet Union—a life in freedom.

In an accessible, engaging style, Yanina Kisler, herself an emigrant from Soviet Ukraine, provides a human-centered view of life in the Soviet Union under socialism and communism, and the toll it took on the Jews living there. Their stories, in their own voices, combined with a historical narrative, form an amazing, and now often-overlooked, tapestry of Jewish experience in the Soviet Union in the two decades before the country dissolved.