for those who had never experienced it. For Alfred Kazin, Socialism would be one long Friday evening around the samovar and the cut-glass bowl laden with nuts and fruits, all of us singing Tsuzamen, tsuzamen, ale tsuzamen! Then the heroes of the Russian novel— our kind of people—would walk the world, and I—still wearing a circle-necked Russian blouse “ à la Tolstoy ”—would live forever with those I loved in the beautiful Russian country of the mind. Listening to our cousin and her two friends I, who had never seen it, who associated with it nothing but the names of great writers and my father’s saying as we went through the Brooklyn Botanic Garden—“Nice! But you should have seen the Czar’s summer palace in Tsarskoye-Selo!”—suddenly saw Russia as the grand antithesis to all bourgeois ideals, the spiritual home of all truly free people. I was perfectly sure that there was no literature in the world like the Russian; that the only warm hearts in the world were Russian, like our cousin and her two friends; that other people were always dully materialist, but that the Russian soul, like Nijinsky’s dream of pure flight, would always leap outward, past all barriers, to a lyric world in which my ideal socialism and the fiery moodiness of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique would be entirely at home with each other. 13 But of course they already were entirely at home with each other. For most New York Jewish intellectuals of Kazin’s generation, socialism had indeed arrived—exactly where it should have. The land of the free in spirit had become the true Land of the Free; the Russian soul had leapt outward to offer salvation to the world; Russia without a tsar had become that country of pure flight led by young men with obstinate lines by their mouths and young girls with touching braids above their foreheads. Of the three great Jewish destinations of the first quarter of the twentieth century, one was an actually existing Promised Land. America was a compromise and the promise of a fulfilled Mercurianism; the Jewish state in Palestine was a dream of a handful of idealists; but Soviet Russia was a dream come true, which offered hope and a second home to young American Jews and inspiration (and a possible alternative destination) to Zionist pioneers. In Soviet Russia, young Jews had, in fact, grabbed the “rings attached to heaven and earth” and pulled heaven down to earth (as Babel put it). Even the enemies of the victorious Jewish Bolsheviks seemed to admit their primacy. In Jabotinsky’s The Five , a successful Odessa grain merchant’s family