for one, might deny permission to emigrate for the same reasons he might grant it), but Party leaders seemed to agree that, in some cases at least, the benefit of getting rid of troublesome subjects justified the anguish of having to watch them prosper in exile. Finally, some Party leaders were prepared to discourage the Jews from leaving by granting them some of what they wanted. But what did the Jews want? Brezhnev, the top Party leader, had a rather narrow view of the question. On March 20, 1973, he reported to the Politburo the surprising fact that the Soviet Union had a Yiddish magazine. And so I asked myself this question: we have a certain number of Gypsies, but surely not as many as Jews, right? And we don’t have any laws against the Jews, do we? So why not give them a little theater of five hundred seats, a Jewish variety theater, which would be under our censorship, and its repertoire under our supervision. Let Aunt Sonya sing Jewish wedding songs there. I am not proposing this, I am just thinking out loud. Or how about opening a school? Some of our kids even study in England. Mzhavanadze’s son is going to school in England. My own granddaughter graduated from a so-called English school. They do study the language, but the rest of the curriculum is standard. So I’m wondering: why not open a school in Moscow, and call it a Jewish one? The curriculum would be standard, but they would teach Yiddish, their national language. What’s the big deal? After all, there are three and a half million of them, compared to 150,000 Gypsies. So I had this really bold idea. Of course, I’m always full of ideas. Anyway, I realize no one has proposed this before, but why not allow a Yiddish weekly? We do have some little Jewish weeklies in Birobidzhan. Not everyone will be able to read it. Some Jew, some old Abramovich will read it, but so what? It all comes from TASS anyway. . . . I am speaking freely because I am not raising my hand to vote yet. I’m just thinking out loud for now, and I am keeping my hands on the table, that’s all. 211 None of Brezhnev’s bold ideas came to pass, but the reason he was entertaining them—and the reason the Jewish emigration ranked so high on the Politburo’s agenda—was unrelenting political pressure from the United States. By the early 1970s, Beilke’s children—now one of the most politically and economically powerful communities in America—had rediscovered their Soviet cousins and adopted them as “the distant fragments of their families that had