cannot be explained nor can it be visualized. Whether culmination or aberration of history, the Holocaust transcends history. . . . The dead are in possession of a secret that we, the living, are neither worthy of nor capable of recovering. . . . The Holocaust? The ultimate event, the ultimate mystery, never to be comprehended or transmitted.” 203 Jewish American Communism had flared up one last time in the Jewish Century before finally yielding to nationalism. Relatively few of the erstwhile cosmopolitans would become “neoconservative” champions of Israeli-style uncompromising belligerence and “moral clarity,” but virtually everyone would join the “normal” modern nations in finding a decent cover for their nakedness. The place of ethnic Jews in America would ultimately depend on how normal or how unique Israel would become. Meanwhile, the existence of ethnic Jews in the Soviet Union was becoming untenable. Most of those who had given up on Communism preferred American Liberalism (with or without the Jewish national content), but there were always those who looked to Palestine. The Moscow International Youth Festival of 1957, which launched the adulterous love affair between Soviet youth and all things foreign, included a much sought-after Israeli delegation; the “ideological struggle” waged by the Soviet state against alien penetration included periodic campaigns against “Zionist propaganda”; and the most influential heretical texts that tempted the Soviet intelligentsia away from Party orthodoxy included underground translations of such “Zionist realism” classics as Howard Fast’s My Glorious Brothers and Leon Uris’s Exodus . (Both books had the advantage of combining redemptive Jewish nationalism with militant Apollonian secularism; Fast, in particular, appeared to be a perfect icon—both Soviet and American—of a Communist ideologue and Stalin Peace Prize laureate awakened to the truth of Jewish chosenness and Soviet anti-Semitism.) 204 The most important episode in the history of Soviet (and American) Zionism was the Six-Day War of 1967. “I sat at my dacha glued to the radio, rejoicing and celebrating,” writes Mikhail Agursky. “And I was not the only one.” Ester Markish, for one, “listened to the radio day and night. . . . The Jews were openly celebrating, saying to each other: ‘We are advancing!’ When the threat of war loomed over Israel, many Russian Jews made the unequivocal choice: ‘Israel is our flesh and blood. Russia is, at best, a distant relative, and possibly a total stranger.’ ” 205 The children of the most loyal of all Soviet citizens had become the most alienated of all antiregime intellectuals. Back in 1956, Mikhail Agursky’s “sympathy” for Israel had not yet “reached the level of full identification.” In