I was born into an assimilated family. My parents, Mikahil Nisonovich Kosharovsky and Sima Markovna Galinskaia, were married in 1937in Kiev, in their final year of studying paper production. In 1938 my older brother Daniel was born there. I was born six months after the Soviet Union entered World War II on the Allied side. Mother later told me about her harrowing journey: pregnant, with a three year-old son, she struggled to reach the east, braving chaotic transportation and German bombardment. Father was evacuated separately with the plant’s equipment. I was born after we reached our destination in the settlement of Novaia Lialia. My younger brother Leonid was born there a year and a half later. My parents’ profession entailed living in small workers’ settlements because paper production was very destructive for the environment. There were practically no Jews in these locations.

After the war my father was sent from one factory to another because of the need to rebuild destroyed enterprises. The entire family thus led a nomadic life. My two brothers and I attended high school in four different towns, which deprived us of a chance to develop childhood friendships and a natural feeling of a homeland. We did not really experience antisemitism because my father had an important position as chief engineer and the enterprises provided a livelihood for almost the entire adult population of these towns. The schools, hospitals, and other municipal services also depended on those enterprises, which were quite large. In the city of Kondrovo, for example, where my older brother and I finished high school, about six thousand people worked in the cellulose-paper complex.

My parents tried to inculcate in us an interest in the exact sciences. My father assembled an excellent professional library. Occasionally he would take us to the factory and show us the enormous paper manufacturing machines, which extended several hundred meters. The paper manufacturing process was fascinating: the liquid mass was poured onto a vibrating, lattice-like table that extracted the excess moisture and distributed the mass equally along the surface. In the next stage a system of numerous shafts, drums, and webbing processed the material over a length of several hundred meters, and in the end the finished paper emerged from the machine in huge rolls. The noise level was so high that it was difficult to hear someone nearby.

My parents encouraged us to study and to participate in school and club activities. They did not discuss Jewish topics at home and, as was common, they would switch to Yiddish only when they didn’t want us to know what they were talking about. My first serious encounter with anything Jewish occurred in 1956, when I was fifteen years old. The newspapers were excoriating Israel for its “aggression against Egypt”; my father was gloomy and taciturn and my mother tried to protect his peace and quiet. He usually would disappear for days at the factory and during this time we practically did not see him. We children were engrossed in our own problems and, honestly speaking, I didn’t fully understand what connection there could be between Israel and our town and us.

Father decided to end his manufacturing career in the year that I finished high school. He moved to the Sverdlovsk design institute and then went to teach at the Sverdlovsk forestry institute, where he worked for many years as a lecturer, the head of the department and secretary of the institute’s party organization. My parents didn’t permit me to study at a Moscow institute, where I wouldn’t be under their care.

I graduated in 1964 from the Ural Polytechnic Institute in Sverdlovsk with a master’s degree in aircraft electronics. I was assigned a job[1] at an automation research institute that dealt with the development of a guidance system for long-range ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads. This was a Soviet strategic weapon and the institute was tops in its field.

This was the period of the strategic arms race with the U.S. and we were encouraged in every way. A creative atmosphere reigned in the laboratory. I soon felt that I had landed in a prestigious place; evidently my father’s impeccable reputation and my own achievements in school and institute had played a role in my assignment. The Jews in this institute had a good reputation. They headed the majority of the laboratories and they were treated with respect. A magnificent touring club functioned under the auspices of the institute, and I enjoyed going with co-workers on trips. I continued to engage in boxing, which I had enjoyed as a student. On a trip in 1965 I met an attractive woman named Sonia who became my wife.

The Kosharovsky family came from the shtetl of Kosharovka, in the Pale of Settlement, some ten kilometers from the now infamous Chernobyl and one hundred kilometers to the north of the Ukrainian capital Kiev. Only my paternal grandfather adhered to the Jewish tradition and religion but even he was not consistent. Before the Bolshevik revolution he worked in the timber trade. A few years after the revolution he was put in charge of the timber industry in the region. At that time he succumbed to the general mood and abandoned religion. The family legend says that he had a tempestuous youth. In 1934 embezzlement was uncovered in the division that he headed and Grandpa Nison was arrested. He served a long and difficult term, contracted tuberculosis in jail, survived by a miracle, and after his release turned to religion. From that time on he did not deviate from his chosen path and scrupulously observed all the religious injunctions. He had a permanent seat in the synagogue and when the synagogue was closed, he and the other older men organized a prayer house where they went every morning. When I became “infected” with Zionism, he was the sole adult relative who never tried to dissuade me. At the same time, he did not argue with the others or defend me, but his eyes spoke better than any words. I knew that I had his silent but constant blessing.

My paternal grandmother, Hanna Lokhovskaia, was one of five sisters. One of them, Mania Lokhovskaia, like my parents, graduated from an institute in Kiev but afterwards she was attracted to Zionism, was arrested, and sentenced. Her life was short.

My maternal grandfather, Mark Galinskii, was a religious teacher, a melamed. I never met him. He was the private teacher of my maternal grandmother Hanna, and, as would happen, the girl fell in love with her instructor. But he was poor and her parents opposed the marriage. Hanna persisted and in the end she was expelled from her parents’ home and deprived of her dowry and inheritance. My grandfather and grandmother enjoyed a long life together in harmony and love. They had three daughters and one son. The son died at the front during the war but the daughters remained close. We would visit them in Kiev regularly and Grandma Hanna, who lived with her eldest daughter, would care for us unassumingly and warmly.

The Six-Day War turned my life upside down. Was it because of the pressing anxiety before the war, the feeling of impotence, or the fear of another Holocaust? I cannot forget it. I wanted to cry out in the streets. The authorities were gloating…everything that I had been taught fell apart… I couldn’t understand anything and for the first time I began to feel that the country in which I was living was my enemy.

For whom was I working?

Later it became clear that it was the USSR that prepared the Arab countries for war against Israel. The Soviet Union had almost no doubt about the outcome—equipped with Soviet arms, their clients ought to be victorious. The Arabs’ victory would also solve the problem of Soviet Jews’ loyalty, making them more industrious while further deprived of rights. Even if the outcome was not decisive, then the Arabs would constantly need to purchase Soviet arms and seek economic and political support from the USSR. A total defeat was completely unforeseen. In the face of it the Soviet leadership lapsed into hysteria, which it tried to conceal with clamorous and primitive anti-Israeli propaganda. For me, however, the victory was a triumph as it was for the other Jews and many Russians.

The contradictions that I encountered kept me in a state of constant tension. At night I would listen to the “Voices”[2] and in the day I would “serve my time” at work and I talked and talked and talked…

Once something strange, almost mystical, happened that left a deep mark on me. It occurred when, deep in thought, I was walking along a noisy street and my head was buzzing from lack of sleep. Suddenly, everything around me vanished, it became quiet, and the passers-by and cars disappeared. A bright light illuminated my consciousness and I saw with piercing clarity who I was, where I was going, and what I wanted. I knew that this was not a fantastic trick, that I was seeing my path…. It was a divine beacon to my atheistically educated soul.

I don’t know how long this lasted but then once again the street became noisy and the cars were moving.

This ended all doubts.

Until my departure another long twenty-two years would pass. It would be difficult and unbearable—fear, pain, exhaustion; there would be children who would grow up in the midst of all this….

At the most difficult moments I would return in my mind to that spark of consciousness, to that clarity and my strength would return.

I began to seek out like-minded people. New questions fired my mind and it wouldn’t be fair to demand answers from my parents. They had experienced the cruelest times. They had lived under Stalin and gone through World War II. FEAR of the all-powerful cruel regime had been implanted in their hearts.

We grew up in a different period and we were not that intimidated. Khrushchev’s struggle against Stalin’s personality cult and Brezhnev’s struggle against Khrushchev’s personality cult had already passed. Now it was the time of Brezhnev’s personality cult… Jokes about the old men in the Kremlin circulated openly throughout the country and people were not arrested because of them.

The system disintegrated not only ideologically. The nation was drinking itself to death, crime was on the rise, and families fell apart. This occurred against the background of the decay among the elite and their aspirations for personal enrichment and western material objects. Elections were a blatant farce and the total shortage of goods and services was glaring. At the same time the resounding refrain in every article, every public speech, and television appearance was, “Life has become better…” The state pretended that it was paying the workers and the workers pretended that they were working… Antisemitism…. It was absurd. The system was stuck and rotting in all areas except for the military-industrial complex, which sucked the country dry.

Yes, we grew up and matured without any particular respect for the regime and without any special fear of it. The obligatory study of party history that was adapted to suit each new leader, the study of Marxism-Leninism, and taking exams on the subject were perceived as an unnecessary, formal burden and a total waste of time.

The apparatus of suppression, however, functioned very well: dissidents were arrested and it was dangerous to stick out too much or to go against the constantly changing “sole true” party line. I did not go against the stream. Until the Six-Day War technology satisfied me completely and I tried not to delve too deeply in the contradictions and absurdities of the regime although it was more than tempting.

Two things kept me safe. The first was the clear understanding that I belonged to a national minority and it was not my business to tell the majority how it ought to live. The second was the powerful lesson that I received in childhood.

It happened in a history class in the fifth grade of the Kondrovo middle school, when I was eleven years old. The school had many pupils from the neighboring villages. The villagers were not given internal passports and were therefore unable to move freely around the country—a Soviet version of serfdom. When we were told once again about the extraordinary achievements of the October Revolution, I asked about this. Our history teacher, Nina Ivanovna Tarasova, also our homeroom teacher, explained that it was done in order to halt the flow of refugees from the villages into the cities—the country, after all, needed bread. Bread indeed was in short supply. One had to get on line long before dawn and wait for many hours in order to receive one loaf, if there was enough. I should have stopped but I continued, “How does this fit in with the unprecedented gains of the October Revolution? After all, serfdom was abolished long before it and it would seem that the farmers’ current situation is even worse now.” I posed the question without malice or mischievousness but in pronouncing the final words, I felt that something was wrong. Everyone froze in expectation. The teacher tried to say something…. Finally, coughing, she almost screamed in class that people had struggled and spilled blood for this country; posing the question in that way insulted her feelings. Tears streamed from her eyes and she fled from the classroom.

In the evening my father returned from work with a despondent look. I tried to justify myself, “You yourself taught us to ask the teacher.” I sensed that it was unpleasant for him to talk about this. “There are issues that must not be discussed with outsiders,” my father finally said.

He explained to me at length that this was a political question; I still did not understand a lot of things and I should first ask him: “Children usually don’t come up with such questions; they could think that it came from the family and we all would suffer as a result.”

It was 1952 and signs of the new antisemitic campaign that would culminate in the infamous Doctors’ Plot of 1953 were already in the air.

“You shouldn’t stop thinking and observing,” he added. In technology such inconvenient questions don’t exist…it’s better if you occupy yourself with it and don’t do anything foolish.”

That conversation determined my academic preferences. I no longer considered the humanities a worthy field of study because it required thinking in a particular way and avoiding painful questions. Technology absorbed me completely until the Six-Day War, which helped me understand that I had become a technologically educated slave.

On what was I wasting my life? I didn’t understand anything about life other than technology. I wanted to leave but couldn’t. It was unbearable to be in the Soviet Union but I was forced to remain. My interest in technology waned and was replaced by an interest in Jewish issues and a search for a way of leaving for Israel.

I was drawn to Jews. Not that I had earlier shunned Jewish companionship but now I sought it purposefully. I began to attend Jewish get-togethers and birthday parties. At one of them in the apartment of Sasha Gurovich I met some medical students and we began talking. We agreed for starters to look for material on history, culture, and language. Since there wasn’t anything in Russian, we decided to head for the library of foreign languages.

The three of us went in and registered, as was required, listing the year of birth, address, place of study or work, nationality and something else and sat down with the catalogues. A few hours later we requested Shapiro’s Hebrew-Russian dictionary. No doubt we were the first to order this book because the librarian looked at us with a long, studied glance. They brought the book and we were able to leaf through it in the reading room.

The library visit had unexpected consequences for the medical students. They were summoned to the personnel department [which in Soviet institutions was usually operated by officials linked to the KGB] for a conversation about unhealthy nationalist interests and about Hebrew, which is spoken only in Israel. Under threat of expulsion, they were warned about the inadmissibility of Zionist activity within the walls of the institute. The warning about a possible expulsion was also conveyed to their parents. The fellows were thoroughly intimidated and our first group dissipated without managing to take shape.

At work I had access to second level secret information; this imposed a three-year quarantine on contacts with foreigners or an trips abroad. A month after the Six-Day War I applied to leave my place of work but it took half a year in order to obtain permission. I understood that I would not be allowed to leave the country right away and that it might take three years or more to stick out the quarantine. During all these years I would have to support my family, raise my children, and prepare as much as possible for life in Israel.

In 1968 my father died very suddenly. I always respected and somewhat feared him. His life and unexpected death reflected the bitter and sad irony of Jewish diaspora fate. He lived all his life as a Russian—which he wanted—and devoted all his talent to Russia, but he died as a Jew. Before leaving for vacation that summer, he left orders for repair work in the forestry department. When he returned he saw that his orders had not been carried out. He gave the administrative manager a dressing down—in the Russian manner—he knew how to do this. The latter retorted to father, “You Jews, you yourself go on vacations, you rest, and then you return and you drink the blood of us Russians with renewed vigor.”

Two days later he had a massive heart attack.

Father was given a state funeral. The coffin with the body was placed in the foyer of the Forestry Institute. We stood near the coffin and people passed by. Then the cortege of dozens of cars set off to the cemetery.

At his father’s insistence it was a Jewish cemetery. Grandpa also insisted that father be buried according to the Jewish religious rite and no other way. Kadish was recited; father was wrapped in a shroud, and lowered into the grave without a coffin.

Behind my back I heard the astonished whispering of the party big shots.

It was a well-tended Jewish cemetery with stone gravestones, metal fences, and tall trees. Next to it was a Russian cemetery with crosses, birch trees, and low fences.

After they set up the gravestone, Sonia and I went to put the grave in order. Just then an inebriated party of eight people emerged from the Russian cemetery. “Look at those Jews,” one of them called out. “When they’re alive, they suck our blood and after death… look at the mansions they build.” They stopped about ten meters from us and began to taunt us with antisemitic jokes. I was filled with anger and humiliation.

“Go away, he just buried his father,” Sonia cried out. “Well, now let’s put the little Yid next to his little papa,” wheezed one of them in a sailor’s vest and he moved toward us. Sonia stood in front of me but I pushed her aside, knocking her over. My ears were ringing, a red glaze covered my eyes, my hair stood on end, and my hands merged with the shovel into one whole. A savage cry burst forth from my throat: “Two will lie with me….”

Then something unexpected happened. They stopped suddenly. Fear froze on their faces mixed with astonishment. “Well, you know, chap, yes, we didn’t mean anything bad….” One of them stepped forward and extended his hand in reconciliation. “Yes, forgive us…” but I couldn’t separate my hand from the shovel. They hurried away and for some time I heard, “Forgive us, fellow…”

I leaned over toward the gravestone and slowly slid to the earth. Weakness and emptiness washed over my body and I began to shiver. It took me a week to recover.

From that time, I think, Sonia understood conclusively that I must not stay in that country. Everything moved in one direction.

After leaving the automation institute I found work in a civilian enterprise, the Institute of Hygiene and Professional Illnesses, in the laboratory of medical electronics. The noted academician Doctor Vladimir Viktorovich Rozenblat established the laboratory. It was his “baby”; it developed instruments that were used in studying how people functioned in real, at times extreme situations as, for example, sportsmen during training or workers engaged in dangerous professions. The research was conducted with the help of sensory devices attached to the body of the person under study. The information gathered was transmitted by radio waves to an apparatus at a distance that registered the data.

Several technicians and engineers, some of whom were able specialists, worked in the laboratory. Although I was given the position of chief engineer, my salary was less than a third of what I had been earning in the automation institute. In order to compensate me some way for the loss of income, Rozenblat offered me additional work repairing and modifying the apparatus in the Institute. I willingly agreed and did not regret it.

Almost all of the institute’s laboratory directors were Jews. I established good relations with my co-workers. Sometimes at their request I would adapt instruments and devices to the conditions of experiments and would add if necessary our telemetric equipment, which enabled measurements to be made at a distance. Working with these people provided me with rather interesting and useful information that was helpful in the future. I found it particularly valuable to apply their knowledge of the functioning of various aspects of memory to foreign language study. When I myself began to teach Hebrew, I gladly experimented on myself and my students.

Doctor Rozenblat had over twenty graduate students; it was a real factory for producing scientific personnel. Rozenblat perceptively sensed the boundaries of science and boldly forged into unknown areas; he had an abundance of topics for new research. Two graduate students were already working on dissertations in our lab. Rozenblat suggested that I join them. His proposal was phrased very much in his peculiar style: “Yulii Mikhailovich [that’s me] you have a pretty good chance of becoming a candidate of science [equivalent of a doctorate in the West] in three years. There is a very interesting topic. You have a week to take the graduate exams in electronics, a foreign language, and Marxism-Leninism, without, of course, taking time off from your work obligations. If you can do this, you will be most worthy of becoming one of my graduate students. If not, it’s also not so terrible; you can remain an engineer. Any questions?”

Work in science? Now? My first impulse was to refuse politely but that kind of proposal was a great honor; people waited in line for years for Rozenblat. If I refused, people might suspect me of “bad” intentions; in conversations about Israel I had already managed to reveal something about my views. But I still had to live somehow for a minimum of another three years. And when all’s said and done, what was I losing? If I was already destined to spend several more years in Russia, then I would spend that time usefully. The pause was not long—there were no questions.

The question remained, however, whether, without leaving my work, I could master German and Marxism-Leninism in one week. I was, in fact, capable of rising to challenges and Rozenblat’s tough conditions aroused my venturesome spirit. I was not worried about the exam in my area of specialization—probably a few hours of preparation would suffice. Marxism-Leninism would take about a day and a half in the library and some luck at the exam.

The biggest problem, undoubtedly, was the foreign language test. People usually prepared for it for a year or two with a tutor. It would be truly difficult to brush up on it in three or four days. My colleagues regarded me with some sympathy and curiosity. The biggest question thus was how to handle the German. It would be an understatement to say that I didn’t like it and couldn’t make sense out of it. Indeed, I couldn’t stand it! Because of what the Germans had done to the Jews. But, in fact, all languages describe the same things, that is, our surroundings and life there. Having struggled through the detested German, I would find it much easier to learn the completely unfamiliar but already treasured Hebrew language.

The Soviet Union had a very specific approach toward foreign languages—for the most part, behind the Iron Curtain foreign languages were needed in order to steal intellectual property in the West. We were taught mainly how to translate from a foreign language into Russian. No one ever seriously considered teaching us conversational language; after all, the overwhelming majority of Soviet citizens were prohibited from communicating with foreigners.

This somewhat simplified my task. With great difficulty I managed to find a tutor and convince her to prepare me in such a short time (the director of one of the laboratories had given me a recommendation). I enthusiastically told her about various memory systems, how it was possible to activate several of them simultaneously, how to teach a sleeping person with the help of special taped texts, and so forth. She listened for a long time then asked whether we had tried out any of these methods. I answered honestly that we hadn’t but I was willing to be the guinea pig if she didn’t object. So we tried. I don’t know how much time she spent with others on lessons but with me she spent six hours a day in two sessions. I took a vacation from work without Rozenblat’s knowledge.

I passed the exam. The tutor refused to take money from me; it was so interesting for her. I later used many of those techniques for teaching Hebrew. As a graduate student I became “one of the gang” at work, which significantly simplified my further stay at the institute.

Over half a year passed after my move to “civilian status” before I groped for my first serious Zionist-oriented contact. It turned out to be Valerii Kukui, who lived200 metersfrom me. Then Boria Edel’man appeared and Liuba Zlotver. In the winter of 1968-69 we would meet in the evenings, walk along the frozen Sverdlovsk streets and talk and talk.

On Saturdays we started to meet at the home of Boria Edel’man, who was a very hospitable host. He had Jewish music, postcards and letters from Israel, and knew Jewish dances. His mother lived in Israel and another family from our circle, the Kertsnus family, also had relatives there. Their genuine invitations from Israel enabled them to apply for exit visas, which at the time seemed like a hopeless undertaking.

Kukui then invited me to his home. He had an abundance of samizdat, more than I had ever seen. He watched silently while I avidly selected old journals, typescript books, brochures, and postcards. I wasn’t much interested in the democratic movement samizdat but I happily took the old Jewish journals and the new one, Iton, which had been produced on thin onion skin paper. I also found at his place the Russian-language Hebrew instruction manual of Shlomo Kodish. It was new and apparently had been lying untouched for quite a while. “Take it, I don’t have time for that now,” Valera said. Remembering my successful experiment with German, I tried to learn Hebrew at a gallop but it didn’t work. Hebrew is constructed differently than Russian or German: the alphabet is very different as is the grammar and there are almost no words in common and there was no one around to turn to with questions. On enthusiasm alone I managed to get through eight lessons but I was unable to advance further without outside help.

Our Saturday meetings gradually became stale. Much had already been discussed; the same old music became boring, and the novelty was losing its charm. I began to think that our group would fall apart unless our meetings would be truly useful and interesting. We were united by a desire to go to Israel; therefore it seemed to me that Hebrew study could be seen as preparation for our departure and it would add content to our Saturday meetings.

The group welcomed the idea and the attendance rose noticeably. At first we would discuss the latest news and then Edel’man would serve a meal with wine and cognac; after this, having rested a bit, we would turn to studying Hebrew. Everyone was equipped with pens and notebooks and industriously copied down the new material. As there were no textbooks, there was no homework. I must admit that at no other time did I prepare for the lessons so diligently, working out how and what I would say down to the last details.

It was a happy time with the feeling that we were all one family.

Almost half a century has passed since then and each of us has gone his own way. Some managed to leave the USSR quickly, others were detained for many long years, and some endured prisons and labor camps. One was more successful in Israel while another one less so. But we continue to keep in touch and when one of us marries off a child or grandchild or celebrates an anniversary or other family occasion, then the group gets together. We have our common memories and things to dream about together. But at that time we faced harsh ordeals.