{"id":19429,"date":"2024-10-27T11:00:52","date_gmt":"2024-10-27T09:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/?p=19429"},"modified":"2024-12-03T14:34:02","modified_gmt":"2024-12-03T12:34:02","slug":"the-freedom-to-be-sharasky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/the-freedom-to-be-sharasky\/","title":{"rendered":"The Freedom To Be Sharansky"},"content":{"rendered":"Historians rarely write in collaboration with those who make history. A few years ago, I was fortunate to do just that.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Natan Sharansky at 76 starts his workdays at 5:30 a.m. He has been married to Avital for 50 years, although she adds \u201cminus 12\u201d because she refuses to count the ones during which the Soviet authorities forcibly kept them apart as they dared to defy the Communist system and seek emigration to Israel. Those years of separation include the nine from 1977 to 1986 when he was trapped inside the Soviet prison system, including stays in Moscow\u2019s notorious Lefortovo jail and Perm 35 in the Gulag archipelago.<\/p>\n

In 2018, as he completed another nine years\u2014his near-decade leading the Jewish Agency for Israel, the Jewish world\u2019s largest nongovernmental organization\u2014Sharansky felt compelled to recount some key episodes and lessons of his life in his effort to balance the twin goods of freedom and identity, thoughtful patriotism and civil dialogue. He asked me to co-author that book.<\/p>\n

We made an odd couple. I was raised with my name, \u201cGil Troy,\u201d to fit in as an American while being a proud Jew, living in one of the most Jew-friendly countries; he was forced to stand out despite his perfectly Russian original name, \u201cAnatoly,\u201d because he was a Jew living in one of the most Judeophobic countries. I spent most of the 1980s at Harvard, learning to be an American historian. He spent most of the 1980s in the Gulag, fighting to stay alive as a political prisoner. When I first noted our Harvard-Gulag \u201980s gap, without skipping a beat, Natan quipped, \u201cThat means I have moral clarity, and you don\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

Miraculously, Avital\u2019s unlikely but determined campaign of persuasion\u2014during which she crisscrossed the globe and lobbied Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Fran\u00e7ois Mitterrand, and many others for years seeking their assistance in securing the freedom of her husband\u2014finally paid off. In 1986, many of us watched Sharansky zigzag across the Glienicke Bridge connecting East and West Berlin after a KGB agent had told him to \u201cwalk straight\u201d to freedom, a final act of defiance.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s not actually what we saw. In fact, after landing in East Berlin, it was on the airport tarmac that the then-named Anatoly Shcharansky (note the Russian letter \u201cshch\u201d he bore as the opening sound of his surname rather than the softer Hebrew \u201cshin\u201d) zigzagged away from his Communist captors into a waiting car. In a 1988 speech, Ronald Reagan said of that moment, \u201cIt was one of those moments when laughter and tears commingle, and one does not know when the first leaves off and the second begins. It was a vision of the purest freedom known to man, the freedom of a man whose cause is just and whose faith is his guiding light.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the time he had reached the bridge, he was already free and no longer had Communist masters to disobey. Nevertheless, people keep telling him, and me, how they are still inspired by that moment, which I\u2019m sure they are, only it wasn\u2019t on the bridge!<\/p>\n

Although we wrote the book collaboratively, the most pressing question I was trained to ask as a biographer stayed with me: What made this man tick? There were 250 million Soviet citizens, including 2 million Jews. Why did he become not just a refusenik\u2014a Jew who sought and was then refused permission to emigrate from the Soviet Union to Israel\u2014but one of the few Jewish activists who also worked as a dissident with Andrei Sakharov and the Soviet human-rights movement? That synthesis made him the regime\u2019s most famous political prisoner. And how did he endure nine years of solitary confinement, punishment cells, hunger strikes and forced feeding, yet then emerge with a ready smile and quick wit?<\/p>\n

Sharansky explains, matter-of-factly, that in 1967, when he was 19, the anti-Semitic jibes he had grown up enduring suddenly changed form. After Israel won the Six-Day War, even close friends started joking about his being a bully and not a coward. Fascinated that something that happened in a country he had never visited could change people\u2019s impressions of him, he started learning more about the Jewish state and his Jewish identity.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce I discovered my identity, I then discovered my freedom,\u201d he explains. Still, discovering your freedom is not the same as fighting for it.<\/p>\n

I most appreciated his courage when I discovered a New York Times Magazine article from 1984 titled \u201cHow I Was Broken by the KGB.\u201d Using language similar to Sharansky\u2019s, the economist Victor Krasin described how he first overcame his fears and became a dissident. Speaking out became \u201cour victory over the slavery in which we had lived for almost half a century.\u201d Krasin endured the same KGB tactics used against Sharansky. But, ultimately, Krasin \u201cwas afraid\u201d\u2014of being executed for treason. And so, during a press conference that the Russians triumphantly orchestrated, he was forced to denounce his fellow dissidents. Broken, Krasin felt \u201cnothing.\u201d \u201cMy soul was empty,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n

Arrested in 1977, four years after Krasin cracked, Sharansky realized they could control your body, but that only you can control your soul. So, he recalled, \u201cI find myself, standing there naked, trying not to show my nervousness, I tell myself: \u2018They cannot humiliate me. Only I can humiliate myself.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Sharansky characterizes his emergence from doublethink as a universal process anyone can undergo. Yet struck by how few people actually took that bold leap (the refuseniks never gathered even as many as 150 signatures on any petition), I tended to think of Sharansky\u2019s attitude as peculiar to him and a very select few like him.<\/p>\n

Then I read an essay by a 32-year-old Egyptian dissident named Adel Abdel Ghafar writing about the Arab Spring of 2010\u20132011. He offered the revelatory explanation that \u201crevolutions are made by everyday people who are no longer afraid.\u201d Indeed, in East Germany, Hungary, Romania, and now in Hong Kong, Iran, and, sadly, Russia again, rebelling against the rulers first requires ordinary people to overcome the fear imposed on them by those rulers.<\/p>\n

I realized that when I had read Sharansky\u2019s prison memoir Fear No Evil in 1988, I didn\u2019t grasp his main message. I remembered the physical privations he detailed: the cold so intense that whenever you\u2019re served hot water you try defrosting by moving the crude cup around your body; the hunger so gnawing; the disgusting torture when you are force-fed through various bodily orifices during hunger strikes.
\nWhat I missed\u2014and what I hope our book Never Alone: Prison, Politics, and My People shows\u2014is the psychological grandeur required to sustain hope and belief. And just how deep Sharansky had to burrow into his own mind\u2014and how vividly he imagined the Jewish people\u2019s support by his side\u2014to make sure he continued to believe he was never alone.<\/p>\n

We children of freedom don\u2019t get it. I told a friend as Natan and I were working together how, in 1983, Sharansky had rejected a \u201chumanitarian\u201d offer to be released because of his ill health. He did so, he said, \u201cbecause the Soviet Union wasn\u2019t humanitarian.\u201d As a result, he served another two-plus years.<\/p>\n

My friend asked the logical, American question: \u201cDoes he regret those two lost years?\u201d I wondered\u2014how do you ask someone that kind of question?<\/p>\n

One day, as we brainstormed about a course Sharansky was teaching to young Israelis, I explained that those of us born into freedom don\u2019t understand those who fought their way into freedom\u2014and got up the nerve to ask my friend\u2019s question.<\/p>\n

Sharansky and I were sitting, as usual, at his dining-room table. It felt like time stopped, and that he had traveled 3,000 miles back into the Gulag. He looked at me quizzically, as if the thought had never crossed his mind. He would never, ever surrender.<\/p>\n

\u201cOtherwise, we would have lost,\u201d he said slowly, mystically. \u201cAnd I would have let everyone down.\u201d Returning to his more analytic mode, he explained that in the mid-1980s no one knew when the Soviet Union would fall. Note \u201cwhen.\u201d Like most Americans, I was barely in \u201cif\u201d mode then. Had giving in to his interrogators made even one dissident more vulnerable to KGB pressure, he would have felt that all his efforts up to that point had been wasted.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what Sharansky means when he talks about \u201cthe interconnectedness of souls.\u201d It took a full week of us sitting across the dining-room table with him speaking slowly and deliberately for me to grasp this mystical journey out of his living physical hell and finding the power to transcend his actual physical self. That ability to disconnect from his isolated surroundings but connect with everyone who ever was or might be a political prisoner\u2026or with Avital or his mother thousands of miles away\u2026or with a one-time tourist from Philadelphia or a visiting rabbi from New York\u2026all of that meant he was never alone. That became our book title. The leap might seem imaginary, but the feeling kept him alive.<\/p>\n

This freedom from fear is the key to understanding Natan Sharansky\u2019s life: \u201cI was nine years in the Gulag, nine years in Israeli politics, and nine years in the Jewish Agency\u2014and I don\u2019t know where I suffered most.\u201d<\/p>\n

In each period, he fought for freedom. His first nine years were an internal struggle, learning to free himself from fear. His next nine years, he stood out as a dissident in Israeli politics, an outsider at heart, now serving on the inside. He was mocked by the Oslo-worshipping left and the territory-hungry right, and for condemning Yasir Arafat and his terrorists who imposed fear not freedom on their own people while talking about \u201cpeace.\u201d Finally, while heading the Jewish Agency, in some ways the world headquarters of the Jewish people, Sharansky spent nine years explaining that a healthy identity\u2014pride in your own heritage\u2014offers the best escape from fear, anxiety, anomie, and toward true freedom.<\/p>\n

That commitment to freedom from fear is why Sharansky finds this moment so sobering, and why the message of the book we published in 2020 is still so timely. To our far right, an aggressiveness, a bullying, a hijacking of nationalism steers what should be proud, constructive, expansive identities away from their loftiest, most democratic, inclusive ideals into a defensive, often aggressive crouch. To our far left, an aggressiveness, a bullying, a negation of nationalism and of pride in one\u2019s own people comes wrapped in a totalitarian demand for unanimity of opinion chillingly familiar to a refugee from Marxism. Having experienced the intellectual vacuum that comes from no freedom, Sharansky is dismayed watching a similar intellectual vacuum grow when there\u2019s no tolerance.<\/p>\n

Moreover, as someone who grew up seeing a dictatorship wield Jew-hatred to crush Jews and unite others, Sharansky has always associated anti-Semitism with authoritarianism. To see it thriving on the left, in campuses, in what should be healthy democracies, is worse than jarring.<\/p>\n

The book\u2019s message to Jews\u2014that you are never alone when you\u2019re a part of this community, so choose unity\u2014is a broader message to all liberal democrats. You can avoid alienation and isolation by connecting to something greater than yourself and remaining free enough to express that identity publicly and proudly.<\/p>\n

Natan Sharansky cringes when people call him \u201ca hero.\u201d People often asked John F. Kennedy how he came to be a hero that night in August 1943 when a Japanese destroyer rammed PT-109. Shrugging, JFK would say: \u201cIt was involuntary. They sank my boat.\u201d Ultimately, Natan Sharansky has taught me that heroism, or more important for him, moral clarity, does not need to emerge from an \u201cAha\u201d moment or turning point. Working with him reaffirmed my own Zionist and American life lessons\u2014that we all yearn to belong and to be free.<\/p>\n

Originally published in Commentary Magazine<\/a>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Historians rarely write in collaboration with those who make history. A few years ago, I was fortunate to do just that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":19430,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","topics-antisemitism-and-de-legitimization","library-op-ed","library-publications"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19429"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19429\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19831,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19429\/revisions\/19831"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}