oxcart in Kazakhstan, and finally allowed to retire to Moscow, where he was shunned by his old apparatchik friends (who had all read Ginzburg’s manuscript). 191 One of Beilin’s old friends was Samuil Agursky, the erstwhile nemesis-in- chief of the Hebrew language who spent the last years of his life reading books on “ancient Jewish history.” As his wife, Bunia, lay dying, she told their son, Mikhail, “I should have lived my life very differently.” To which Mikhail responded, “I’ve always told you that you should have lived your life differently.” And when Hope Ulanovskaia, the onetime child revolutionary and professional spy, arrived in Israel at the age of seventy, she met some women who had left the Pale for Palestine at about the same time she had left her native shtetl for Russia. Visiting their kibbutz, she felt “regret that she had not lived her life the way she should have” and “humility before her contemporaries who had chosen a different path.” According to her daughter, she knew that “her life could have been as beautiful and productive as the life of these old kibbutzniks.” 192 Hodl’s children all agreed that she had not lived her life the way she should have—and that neither, if they were old enough to have been happy in the 1930s, had they. The leather-clad bard of the civil war’s “flashing bayonets,” Mikhail Svetlov, metamorphosed into the much lionized sad clown of the 1960s, whose witticisms were written down and widely circulated. (The best known was: “What is a question mark? It is an exclamation point that has grown old.”) The “Komsomoler of the 1920s” and “pitiless” collectivizer, Lev Kopelev, became one of the best-known Soviet dissidents of the 1970s—as did his wife, Raisa Orlova, who had been a buoyantly happy member of the “first Soviet generation.” Another member of that generation was Mikhail Gefter, a “frenzied” Komsomol inquisitor in Moscow University’s History Department during the Great Terror who went on to become a leading moral philosopher of the perestroika period and president of the Russian Center for the Study of the Holocaust. Hope Ulanovskaia’s daughter, Maia, spent more than five years (1951–56) in prisons and camps for belonging to a student organization called the Union of the Struggle for the Cause of the Revolution, almost all of whose members, including all three founders, were young Jews (Hodl’s children). It was Maia’s son (and Hope’s grandson), born in 1959, who talked both of them into emigrating to Israel. 193 One of the leaders of the Jewish emigration movement was Samuil Agursky’s son Mikhail (the one who reproached his mother for having lived her life incorrectly). Among his fellow activists was David Azbel, whose uncle,