Synopsis
Though the family of Ashbel was among the sixty families who came to Israel with Moses, Mark Ya. Azbel did not know a single Hebrew letter until he reached the age of forty. In the Soviet Union, you must have special permission to read the Bible. In the Soviet Union practically everything Jewish is forbidden. Standard history texts make no mention of Judea or of Israel - that area of the world simply does not exist for a Soviet person. Impossible though it may seem to the Western reader, there is no mention of the Holocaust in school books. Mark Ya. Azbel's autobiography is the story of a Jew in the U.S.S.R.
To paraphrase Pushkin, one should be very wary of being bright. It was the devil who fated Mark Azbel, with his talent, to be born in Russia. In school, Azbel and his classmates spent weeks censoring their own textbooks under teacher direction. His university years coincided with the most intense anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, and Azbel witnessed the mass hysteria following Stalin's death.
At twenty-five the author received his post-doctoral degree in science after a presentation at Moscow's Institute for Problems in Physics, directed by the most prominent of Soviet physicists, Kapitsa. At thirty-two Azbel had to consider himself "the most fortunate Jew" in the Soviet the first Jew in twelve years to be accepted for a position at Moscow's Physical-Technical Institute. Soon thereafter he became scientific councilor at the Landau Institute and was nominated for the prestigious Lenin Prize.
In 1972, Mark Azbel's life changed entirely. He applied for an exit visa to Israel. Not only was he refused the visa, he was fired from all his positions, harassed, arrested, and imprisoned by the KGB. For five years Azbel lived as an outcast in his homeland. Thus began his fight for freedom, for human rights, and for the right of Soviet Jews to learn about and to practice Jewish culture and religion.
The story of the author's life as a leader in dissent and refusal is as riveting as the story of his rise to scientific prominence is extraordinary. He was an editor of the underground journal Jews in the U.S.S.R. and a participant in the 1973 fifteen-day hunger strike designed to coincide with Brezhnev's visit to the U.S. and draw Western eyes to the plight of Soviet Jews. Despite house arrest and imprisonment, he organized several international scientific conferences in Moscow, one attended by Andrei Sakharov. After a hair-raising escape, Dr. Azbel, his wife, and their young daughter finally reached Israel.
Refusenik depicts Stalinist Russia through a child's eyes; it reveals the workings of the exclusive Soviet Academy of Science and portrays its most prominent members; it enters the Gulag; it hovers in Moscow's refusenik community. Dr. Azbel's thoughts on the Russian psyche, literature, and culture have never been more timely to American readers. It is to the brave and indomitable people, to all the Soviet aliyah, that Refusenik is dedicated.
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