This is a vivid, true story of Soviet Russia during the last decades of the USSR. It provides a lesser-known insider's view that breaks stereotypes. As a daring memoir of a young woman searching for her Jewish roots, defying society, and her family, the tale includes love, hatred, betrayal, loyalty, dissidents, Soviet prisons, Academic Town in Siberia, antisemitism, and the Jewish movement during Perestroika. It is not just history-this volume addresses many contemporary burning questions such as underpinnings of antisemitism, the psychology of trauma, and the forces that sustain or dismantle totalitarian regimes.