NEVER ALONE

The noted Soviet dissident and Israeli activist recounts a long history of “living life backward.”

Trained as a physicist, Sharansky (b. 1948), who co-authored this memoir with historian Troy, spent nine years in Soviet prisons for supposed anti-Soviet crimes. The rest of the time he was either alone—“I always found solitary comfortable, if I could read or write there, if it was warm, and if there was food to eat”—or with a bunkmate or two whom he suspected of being KGB informants. Meeting with Nelson Mandela long afterward, the two political prisoners compared notes: Mandela’s sentence was three times longer, but at least he had visitors. Finally, Sharansky was released and immigrated to Israel, where he immediately began agitating for the acceptance of 400,000 of his fellow Soviet Jews. They arrived, a flood of outstanding scientists, artists, and scholars who had followed the guideline that in order to survive they had to excel, and “almost overnight, the number of Israel’s doctors, engineers, musicians, and chess players doubled.” Sharansky allied for a time with Benjamin Netanyahu, opposing the Oslo Accords and other treaties with Palestine on the grounds that they elevated “[Yasser] Arafat’s terrorist dictatorship on the Palestinians, instead of cultivating the more grassroots democratic leadership that was sprouting in the 1990s.” For this, he was pegged a rightist, although as the years passed, he became a sort-of-liberal critic of Netanyahu and his party—and he doesn’t have much good to say about Donald Trump, either. Charmingly, he describes his backward approach to life events: He celebrated his bar mitzvah at 65, which allowed him to “appreciate my Torah portion’s relevance and explain it to everyone without having my rabbi write my speech for me.” Since he was imprisoned immediately after his wedding and didn’t see his wife for years, he has since worked to make his marriage a happily-ever-after story.

Admirers of Sharansky will appreciate this insider’s account of Israeli politics and his independent-minded life.