revulsion, ‘bribe takers, scoundrels.’ ” His parents’ pathetic attempts to stop him cause him to explode. “You’re disgusting,” said Sergei through clenched teeth and in a terrible rage. “Do you understand—disgusting. I hate you!” he said as he pushed his father away and jerked at the doorknob. “Serezha! Sergei! Think about what you are saying!” implored his mother, grabbing him by the sleeve of his trench coat. “Let him go to hell! To hell! To hell!” screamed his father. His sister Ida came rushing in, wearing a Ukrainian dress with lots of ribbons. Mimicking and gesticulating, as if she were out of breath, she kept pointing toward her room. This meant: “Quiet, for God’s sake, I have people over, and they can hear everything.” Sergei slammed the door behind him, rattling the pink cups in the buffet. 20 The Jewish Revolution—or violent family romance—was as much a part of NEP and Stalin’s Great Transformation as it had been of the Russian revolutionary movement, the Bolshevik takeover, or the civil war. No tsarist decree had condemned Tevye’s religion and livelihood as uncompromisingly as might his daughter Hodl—in her new capacity as writer, scholar, or Party official. Kirshon, Roizman, and Levin were all Jews (as well as proletarian writers), and even Malashkin’s anti-Semitic book was reportedly much admired by one of the most influential Jews in the Soviet Union, Molotov’s wife Polina Zhemchuzhina (Perl Karpovskaia). When NEP came to an end and all remaining private entrepreneurs—with Jewish “fathers” prominent among them—were being hounded, robbed, arrested, and kicked out of their homes, most of the OGPU officials in charge of the operation (including the head of the “hard currency” department of the OGPU Economic Affairs Directorate, Mark Isaevich Gai [Shtokliand]) were Jews themselves. By 1934, when the OGPU was transformed into the NKVD, Jews “by nationality” constituted the largest single group among the “leading cadres” of the Soviet secret police (37 Jews, 30 Russians, 7 Latvians, 5 Ukrainians, 4 Poles, 3 Georgians, 3 Belorussians, 2 Germans, and 5 assorted others). Twelve key NKVD departments and directorates, including those in charge of the police (worker-peasant militia), labor camps (Gulag), counterintelligence, surveillance, and economic wrecking were headed by Jews, all but two of them immigrants from the former Pale of Settlement. The people’s commissar of internal affairs was Genrikh Grigorevich