About three years later Michael Slutsky returned from prison entirely exonerated. To this day no one seems to know why he was arrested. The KGB colonel and his family remained in the apartment.

Gorky Street had six lanes of traffic, a center lane, and wide sidewalks. Cars, trolleys, buses. No trucks save on days when military parades took place. On those days tanks, motorized artillery, and trucks carrying rocket launchers and soldiers assembled on the street on their way to Red Square. Most of the apartment buildings were seven to eight stories high. People crowded the balconies to watch the parades assemble and pass by below.

There were few parades during the war and few moments of celebration. The troops that paraded past the reviewing stand in Red Square on November 7, 1941, in commemoration of the Bolshevik Revolution, marched straight from the celebration to the front lines. And there were no speeches from Stalin save the one he delivered about ten days after the start of the war, when he was sufficiently recovered from the shock and depression that had all but paralyzed him in the early days of the German invasion: “Comrades! Citizens! Fighting men of our army and navy! Brothers and sisters, I turn to you, my friends…”

In the Slepaks’ apartment building on Gorky Street, there were never any public announcements of private grief. The notice that a soldier had been killed in action would come by mail from the local office of the military. Upon receiving the notice, the family might apply for a pension if the one killed was the breadwinner and request to be moved up on the list of those waiting for a new room or apartment. Inside the room or apartment there were tears for the dead. But very rarely were flowers or wreaths placed on doors or in windows. The Communist regime had done away with the old customs. Visible displays of grief were frowned upon by the authorities.

Volodya does not know how many families in his apartment building lost relatives in the war.

During the war years, universities and institutes found themselves hard pressed for students; most eligible young people were in the armed forces. Special courses were organized for those who had completed eighth or ninth grade to prepare them for their high school graduation exams.

The same month Volodya returned to Moscow, he underwent a medical examination and was informed, to his dismay, that the rheumatic fever he had contracted in Bolshaya Sosnova had damaged his heart. As a result, he was disqualified for the demanding toil required of munitions workers.

There was much discussion then between Volodya and his father about the future. Volodya began to study for his eighth-grade exams-the equivalent of tenth grade in America-which he took and passed in July. Passing meant acceptance into the institute of ones choice, where one could attend special courses toward a high school diploma. Volodya had selected the Aviation Institute, which was purported to offer highly specialized engineering courses in aviation engines, navigational equipment, radio electronics, aircraft armament. He chose radio electronics. It was, he thought, the most interesting area of aviation engineering. And the faculty was reputed to be excellent.

In September 1943 Volodya began the special course of study in the Aviation Institute, and the following August he passed his exams. He and his parents appeared in the large auditorium of the institute, together with hundreds of others. One after the other, the students were called to the podium, where the rector of the institute shook their hands and presented to each a certificate of graduation. A student then delivered a brief talk, thanking the party and the government on behalf of all the students.

One easily imagines Solomon Slepak in that auditorium, recalling the year 1913, when he was refused acceptance by the High Technological Institute of Moscow because he was a Jew. Now, one generation later, his pride in his son’s achievement! And in that of his daughter, Rosa, a student in the faculty of philology at Moscow University. How vindicated, all the blood spilled in the cause of his Bolshevik dream of a new world for Jews and all humankind.

At that time Solomon Slepak still worked as chief editor of foreign books in a major publishing house and was also a member of the Jewish AntiFascist Committee, which had been created by Stalin in April 1942 as a means of influencing what he assumed to be the wealthy and influential Jewish community of the United States. The idea had originally been conceived by two Polish Jews, Victor Alter, an engineer, and Henryk Erlich, a lawyer, both of them leaders of the Jewish Labor Bund, who had fled from the advancing Germans in 1939, entered Soviet territory, and been arrested by the NKVD. Accused of being spies and counterrevolutionaries, they were sentenced to death, only to be set free about two years later. The Soviets had promised the Polish government-in-exile, which was in England, that all arrested Poles would be released.

In September 1941 the two Bundist leaders, who were then living in the Hotel Metropol in Moscow, received a request from Beria to submit a list of Jews who might serve on the committee. The list, which included the celebrated Russian Yiddish actor Solomon Mikhoels, was approved by Beria, who then asked that the two men write a memorandum to Stalin outlining the committee’s tasks.

In the memorandum they urged that the Soviet government create a Jewish anti-Hitlerite committee to include members from Nazi-occupied countries, the Soviet Union, the United States (which had not yet entered the war), and Britain; that the committee mobilize the support of world Jewry in the war against the Nazis; that it undertake to care for Polish Jewish refugees inside the Soviet Union; that a Jewish Legion be established inside the United States to join the Red Army.

The memorandum, dated in the early days of October 1941, was duly delivered to Stalin.

With the German Army rapidly advancing on Moscow, the two Bundists then left for the city of Kuibyshev near the Urals, along with all the other Soviet leaders except Stalin. In the office of the Grand Hotel in Kuibyshev, on the night of December 3, 1941, a phone call summoned the two men to a meeting with Beria. They left the hotel and were never heard from again. Years later it was discovered that Stalin had penned on their memorandum the words Rasstrieliat’ oboikh (“Shoot both of them”).

A few days after the disappearance of the two Bundists, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and Hitler declared war on the United States. The idea of a Jewish antifascist committee was not forgotten; a number of Soviet Jewish leaders began to discuss it openly. With America in the war, it seemed all the more imperative that the influence of Jews throughout the world, who had heretofore been cold to the idea of providing aid to Bolshevik Russia, now be mobilized to propagandize for the Soviet Union, raise funds for the war effort, and lobby for the speedy opening of a second front that would ease the appalling losses being suffered by the Red Army.

And so, in April 1942, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee came into existence, with Stalin’s approval. It was the only Jewish institution in the entire Soviet Union officially recognized by the Soviet government, and it had in its ranks, among others, the writer Ilya Ehrenburg, the Yiddish poet Itzik Fefer, the Central Committee member Solomon Lozovsky, the actor Solomon Mikhoels, who was its chairman-and the Old Bolshevik Solomon Slepak.

At the request of Stalin, two members of the committee, Solomon Mikhoels and Itzik Fefer, traveled to the United States in May 1943. Stalin himself saw them off. Arriving in New York, they were greeted by Evgeni Kisselev, the consul-general of the Soviet Union. There is a photograph of Mikhoels at the grave of Sholem Aleichem, the beloved Russian writer in Yiddish, who is buried in New York, and one of Mikhoels and Fefer with Albert Einstein in Princeton. All in this latter photograph are smiling; all seem relaxed. Einstein, in his sweater and flowing hair and shaggy mustache; Mikhoels and Fefer in jackets, shirts, ties; trees in the background; sunlight. Mikhoels and Fefer met with Senator Herbert Lehman, who had been governor of New York State; with President Roosevelt’s noted friend Rabbi Stephen Wise; with Marc Chagall, who had painted sets for the Jewish State Theater in Moscow during the years following the Revolution, when Mikhoels had been the director.