The journey from the former Pale of Settlement to Moscow and Leningrad was not any less of a migration than the voyage from Odessa to Palestine or from Petrograd to New York. It could take as long and, during the first postrevolutionary years, it might be much more hazardous. Born of revolution, it involved large numbers of people, resulted in a near miraculous transformation, and constituted one of the most important, and least noticed, landmarks in the history of Russia, European Jews, and the Modern Age. In 1912, the Jewish population of Moscow was about 15,353, or less than 1 percent of the total. By 1926, it had grown to 131,000, or 6.5 percent of the total. About 90 percent of the migrants were under fifty years old, and about one-third were in their twenties. By 1939, Moscow’s Jewish population had reached a quarter of a million (about 6 percent of the total and the second largest ethnic group in the city). In Leningrad, the number of Jews grew from 35,000 (1.8 percent) in 1910, to 84,603 (5.2 percent) in 1926, to 201,542 (6.3 percent) in 1939 (also, by a considerable margin, the second largest ethnic group in the city). The numbers for Kharkov are 11,013 (6.3 percent) in 1897; 81,138 (19 percent) in 1926; and 130,250 (15.6 percent) in 1939. Finally, Kiev (in the old Pale of Settlement) had 32,093 (13 percent) in 1897; 140,256 (27.3 percent) in 1926, and 224,236 (26.5 percent) in 1939. On the eve of World War II, 1,300,000 Jews were living in areas that had been closed to them a quarter of a century earlier. More than one million of them, according to Mordechai Altshuler, “were first- generation immigrants in their places of residence outside the former Pale of Settlement.” 16 By 1939, 86.9 percent of all Soviet Jews lived in urban areas, about half of them in the eleven largest cities of the USSR. Almost one-third of all urban Jews resided in the four capitals: Moscow and Leningrad in Russia and Kiev and Kharkov in Ukraine. Nearly 60 percent of the Jewish population of Moscow and Leningrad were between the ages of 20 and 50. 17 In the words (1927) of the Soviet Yiddish poet Izi Kharik, So here is a list of all those Who have lately departed for Moscow: Four shopkeepers, a ritual butcher, Eight girls who are going to college, A few melameds, and twelve youngsters Who went there in search of employment; Fat Doba with all of her children,