those days, “Israel had been a small provincial country, whereas I lived in a large metropolis, a superpower on which the fate of the world depended. I had grown up near the Kremlin, at the center of the world. Like most citizens of my country, I was a great-power chauvinist.” 206 Now, almost overnight, the center of the world had shifted to where his family sympathy lay. “The Six-Day War convinced me that my platonic Zionism was becoming the real thing and that, sooner rather than later, I was fated to live in Israel. . . . From being a small provincial country, Israel had become a power one could identify with.” And from provincial poor relations, the half-forgotten Israeli cousins had turned into heroes and possibly patrons. As Ester Markish put it, “the photographs of Israeli aunts, uncles, and cousins twice removed had been kept in the remotest drawers; it was better not to discuss them out loud or mention them in government questionnaires.” Now, they had become “the distant fragments of our families that had survived Hitler’s and Stalin’s pogroms.” They were strong; they were virtuous; and they were free. According to a popular Soviet joke from the late 1960s, Rabinovich is confronted by an NKVD investigator: “Why did you say on your questionnaire that you had no relatives overseas? We know you have a cousin living abroad.” “I don’t have a cousin living abroad,” says Rabinovich. “And what is this?” says the investigator, showing him a letter from his Israeli cousin. “You don’t understand,” says Rabinovich, “my cousin lives at home. I am the one living abroad.” 207 After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, more and more Soviet intelligentsia members felt abroad at home and, as Elena Bonner would put it, “alone together.” Or rather, more and more Soviet professionals were becoming Russian intelligentsia members (“foreigners at home”). And the most foreign of them all were the hereditary strangers—the Jews. Not only were the Jews heavily concentrated at the top, targeted for discrimination (for that very reason), and seen as tribal aliens in an increasingly tribalized state—they did, unlike most of their fellow professionals, have a different Jerusalem to turn to; they did, literally or metaphorically, have cousins who were at home abroad. Returning to their Moscow apartment after receptions at the Israeli Embassy, Ester Markish and her children “felt dejected: it was as if we were leaving our homeland for a foreign land.” Mikhail Agursky, Maia