Never before the war, either at the institute or at the Academy of Sciences, had he ever heard conversations about it. Never—not once—had he felt a desire to speak about it to [his daughter] Nadya, to explain to her that her mother was Russian and her father Jewish. 115 His mother’s last letter would force him to hear the “call of blood.” The sight of the liberated areas—“Ukraine without the Jews,” as Grossman called it— might cause it to grow even louder. And the gradual rise of unabashed popular anti-Semitism—first in the Nazi-occupied territories, then in remote evacuation centers, and eventually in the Russian heartland—might make it impossible to resist. Ukraine, in particular, had been the main stage for the old Pale’s “two solitudes,” the revolution’s bloodiest pogroms, and the Soviet state’s war against the peasants (at least some of whom identified the Soviet state with the Jews— from anti-Semitic habit and because of Jewish visibility in the Party). Now, after “three years of constant exposure to relentless, exterminatory, anti-Semitic rhetoric and practices” (as Amir Weiner puts it), some Soviet citizens seemed to be saying, for the first time in around two decades, that they preferred their Ukraine “without the Jews.” 116 Perhaps most important, and most fateful for “state Jews” like Shtrum and Hodl’s children, the Party kept strangely silent (for the time being)—silent about the new anti-Semitic talk, about the Kiev pogrom of September 1945, and about what had happened to Soviet Jews under the Nazis. The experience of a total ethnic war had made the newly ethnicized Soviet regime even more self- conscious about blood and soil, or rather, about the blood of those who had a formal claim to the Soviet soil. The Jews were not a regular Soviet nationality, and this seemed to mean that they were not entitled to their own martyrs, their own heroes, and perhaps even their own national existence. And this, after what had happened to his mother and all of her friends and neighbors, might force Viktor Shtrum to rethink both his Soviet patriotism and his Jewish nationality. 117 This would not happen until late in the war, however. In the early stages, when more and more Soviet soil was being overrun by the Nazis, and more and more Soviet patriots of Jewish nationality were heeding the call of blood without ceasing to be Soviet patriots, the Party had not been shy about proclaiming its commitment to Jewish martyrs, heroes, and national existence. Two months after the invasion, it had sponsored “An Appeal to World Jewry” signed by four well- known Yiddishists and several Soviet cultural celebrities of Jewish background, including the Bolshoi conductor S. Samosud, the physicist Petr Kapitsa, and the