socialism had been a tragic mistake. Between 1968 and 1994, about 1.2 million Jews left the USSR and its successor states (at 43 percent of the total, a larger emigration than the one of which Beilke and Chava had been a part). The first wave, which reached Israel between 1968 and 1975, carried with it most of the ideological Zionists (such as Markish and Agursky) and many of Tsaytl’s grandchildren from the former Pale of Settlement. The flood that followed was mostly U.S.-bound and included many of Hodl’s Moscow and Leningrad grandchildren (about 90 percent of whom went to the United States). The Israeli government attempted to curb this trend, but it was only after 1988, when the overall proportion of those going to America reached 89 percent, that the United States agreed to significantly decrease immigration quotas for Soviet Jews. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Israel opened its own consulates in the Soviet Union, closed down the notoriously porous transit point in Vienna, and ultimately succeeded in preventing the majority of the 1989–92 refugees (the largest group of all) from “dropping out” en route. By 1994, 27 percent of all Soviet Jewish émigrés from the USSR had been taken in by Beilke’s grandchildren, and 62 percent by Chava’s. 213 Wherever they ended up, most of Hodl’s descendants have remained faithful to the late Soviet concept of belonging. They are Jews by blood, Russians by (high) culture, and religious not at all (outside of the Pushkin cult). They are, therefore, not fully Jewish according to their American and Israeli hosts (many of whom seem as disappointed as anyone who has sheltered a long-lost relative). Indeed, they are like reverse Marranos: public Jews who practice their Gentile faith—complete with special feasts, rites, and texts—in the privacy of their homes. But this is a temporary condition, because the most important thing that all of Tevye’s descendants share is the knowledge that they are all Tevye’s descendants. Or rather, they all share Tevye’s most important belief: “Anyone can be a goy, but a Jew must be born one.” All Jews are Jews “by blood”; the rest is a matter of “absorption” (to use an Israeli term). Sooner or later, the Soviet Jewish émigrés to Israel and the United States will “recover their Jewishness” in its entirety. This does not mean going back to Tevye’s religion, of course (any more than any renaissance means actual rebirth). In Israel, full recovery implies the supplanting of the Russian intelligentsia canon with the Israeli Hebrew one; in the United States, it requires the replacement of the Russian intelligentsia canon with a blend of Protestantized Judaism and Zionism. It is a high price to pay, but most of Hodl’s grandchildren are willing to pay it. Because Hodl “should have lived her life differently,” the life that she did live must be forgotten. As one of Hodl’s daughters, Tsafrira Meromskaia, put it,