PRIVILEGE LOST

Elyashiv recounts his five-year-long fight for survival inside America’s violent prisons in this memoir.

To those on the outside, the author was a “nice Jewish guy,” a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and a skilled practitioner of martial arts with a distaste for bullies and his own business teaching jujitsu and Krav Maga. An affair with a student at his dojo drew the ire of the woman’s husband, an agent from the Department of Veterans Affairs, who hounded Elyashiv, ultimately sticking him with an unfounded charge of conspiracy to defraud the VA. His 15-month sentence was soon extended (after a heated and physical confrontation with a corrections officer) to a crushing five years in Florida’s prison system. The atmosphere inside was one of exploitation, rape, and cruelty. Elyashiv faced additional beatings, even while sequestered in solitary confinement, where he spent time recalling his own dysfunctional upbringing. In Florida’s most dangerous prisons, he found unexpected friends and allies among addicts, thieves, and murderers, playing Dungeons & Dragons and strumming a guitar between vicious fights with fellow prisoners and abusive officials alike. Elyashiv’s memoir is written in an easy, casual style, its conversational approach contrasting starkly with the personal horrors and the sights, sounds, and smells that accompanied the brutality he both witnessed and was forced to participate in. The book is packed with action scenes—the author’s descriptions of thrown elbows and chokeholds have a ruthless vividness that puts MMA commentators to shame. Emotional gut punches, such as the death of Elyashiv’s beloved Bubbe while he was behind bars, hit equally hard. The author’s legal battle against those who wronged him doesn’t get nearly the same attention as the fights “in the Grid,” creating an odd imbalance in a story so focused on the consequences of injustice.

An unexpectedly action-packed memoir with a timely message about injustice in an unjust justice system.