Elisheva Kott

A Wedding in Darkness: One Life in the Twilight of Russian Jewish History Elisheva Kott

Within merely a few decades after the Russian Revolution, the mighty Russian Jewish community, world-largest and millennium-old, turned into a faint shadow of itself. Never before had world Jewry experienced such a rapid, catastrophic collapse of such an immense and long-established community. Never before had so many young Jews rushed so eagerly after false prophets-in this case Communist ideologues leaving in their wake the ruins of their own nation and contributing to horrific cataclysms throughout the world. In this frank account, Samuil Khasin offers a remarkable personal view of the forces behind the astonishing collapse. Through the lens of one representative family's life, he sheds a penetrating light on the dramatic evolution of his generation and country from enthusiastic acceptance of Bolshevism to devastations of Stalin's terror to bitter disillusionment and rejection. Speaking as one of those who were both victims and participants of the momentous events, he helps to explore the mystery and the horror of the tragically intertwined historical disasters-the rise of Soviet Communism and the collapse of the Russian Jewry.