with Veniamin. In early December Elochka, Lipa’s daughter, came home from school one day and found Grandma Gita sitting on the stairs in front of their apartment. Veniamin, without warning Niuma [Lipa’s husband] or Leva, had brought her there and left her by the locked door. Grandma moved in with Niuma. I would often see her there. She was no longer the same proud and happy Grandma I had seen arrive from Poland. I can still picture her with her red wig all twisted round and her bun hanging over her ear. She could not understand why her children had been imprisoned. She kept pacing up and down the apartment, intoning: “It’s all my fault. I have brought grief to my children. I must return home immediately. As soon as I leave, things will get better again.” She was saying all this in Yiddish. Of course, Elochka and I could not understand a word of what she was saying, so Leva had to translate for us. 95 Members of the political elite suffered disproportionately during the Great Terror. Because Jews were disproportionately represented within the political elite, they were prominent among the victims. Many of Evgenia Ginzburg’s fellow passengers on the train bound for the Kolyma camps were Jewish Communists, and the same was true of Roziner’s mother’s cellmates at the Butyrki prison in Moscow. There were other women there, “but intelligentsia Communists, including my mother, kept apart from them. Practically all of them were Jews, all believed unconditionally in the purity of the Party, and every one of them thought that she had been arrested by mistake.” Roziner’s mother, Iudit, had graduated from a heder and spent two years in a Jewish gymnasium in Bobruisk before moving (in 1920) to Moscow, where she had become a student at the city’s best school (the Moscow Exemplary School-Commune). After a short stint in Palestine, where she had joined the Communist Party, Iudit had returned to the Soviet Union. 96 Members of the political elite suffered disproportionately, but they were not the majority of those affected. The Jews, who were not numerous among nonelite victims, were underrepresented in the Great Terror as a whole. In 1937– 38, about 1 percent of all Soviet Jews were arrested for political crimes, as compared to 16 percent of all Poles and 30 percent of all Latvians. By early 1939, the proportion of Jews in the Gulag was about 15.7 percent lower than their share of the total Soviet population. The reason for this was the fact that the Jews were not targeted as an ethnic group. None of those arrested during the Great Terror of 1937–38—including Meromskaia’s parents, Gaister’s relatives, and my grandfather—was arrested as a Jew . The secret police did put together