revolution with the classical musical canon, the overwhelming majority of the performers were Jewish musicians trained by Jewish teachers (45 percent of all teachers at Moscow and Leningrad conservatories appointed in the 1920s were Jews). The Soviet Union competed against the capitalist world in every aspect of life, but before its athletes began to participate in international competitions in the 1940s, there were only two spheres in which the land of socialism confronted the “bourgeois world” directly, openly, and according to conventional rules: chess and classical music. Both were almost entirely Jewish specialties, and both produced some of the most celebrated and highly rewarded public icons of the 1930s, among them the future chess world champion Mikhail Botvinnik and a whole pantheon of Soviet music laureates including David Oistrakh, Emil Gilels, Boris Goldstein, and Mikhail Fikhtengolts. 30 And then there was war. The Spanish civil war was narrated for Soviet citizens by the country’s most famous journalist, Mikhail Koltsov (Fridliand), and conducted on their behalf by some of the country’s best secret agents and diplomats, most of them Jews. During the war against the Nazis, the Soviet regime spoke with two voices: the mouthpiece of Russia’s rage and revenge was Ilya Ehrenburg (Stalin’s main cultural ambassador), while the sublime baritone of the socialist state belonged to Yuri Levitan (Soviet radio’s official announcer). At least 40 percent of Moscow writers killed during the war were Jews. One of them was my maternal grandfather, Moisei Khatskelevich Goldstein, an immigrant from Poland by way of Argentina, who wrote to my ten-year-old mother in February 1943: “On the 25 th anniversary of the glorious Red Army, in whose ranks I now serve, my wish is that you do well in school, as the great Party of Lenin-Stalin demands.” A month later, shortly before his death, he wrote, in imperfect Russian, to my grandmother: It is hard to imagine the suffering of the people who were under the German occupation. For millennia to come, people will tell stories and sing songs about the suffering of the Russian woman. Her husband has been killed, her children taken away, her house burnt down, and yet there she stands, amid the ruins of her house, like a monument, a living image of the will to live. She lives, and will live on. 31 Some of the Jewish members of the Soviet cultural elite were old rebels like Tevye’s Hodl, F. A. Moreinis-Muratova, and V. G. Tan-Bogoraz, who left their blind fathers to fight the tsar and came of revolutionary age in the underground