Is emigrating from one's birth country and moving to a new one a mere "fight for the better life," or an act of desperation? Which requires more courage: remaining in your home country despite growing political and economic turmoil, or moving to the opposite side of the globe, with completely different cultural and behavioral values, "where people walk upside down?" Raisa Borovsky provides a surprising new perspective on this centuries-old question in her exciting historical novel, based on her own-and her friends'-personal experiences. What did it mean to grow up Jewish in the Soviet Union-the country officially based on "equality for all peoples?" How did anti-Semitism change while the country was moving from the tight government autocracy to the relative freedom of Glasnost and Perestroika? How do you decide who you are, if one of your parents is a Jew, and another one a "pure" Russian? The novel spans nearly half-a-century, from the end of the Second World War, though the years of political "thaw," "stagnation", Cold War, and then Perestroika, to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It takes the reader from the elite "island of political freedom" known as Akademgorodok (then the scientific center of the Soviet Union), to the hustle and bustle of the country's major cities, from the House of Scientists in Siberia to the infamous Butyrskaya prison and the KGB headquarters in Moscow; from the spectacular but fleeting Siberian summers to the frigid dark winters of St. Petersburg (then called Leningrad). The reader will meet world-famous scientists, Jewish refuseniks, political dissidents who may have helped to bring down the Soviet Empire, intellectuals and blue-collar workers, members of the emerging Russian mafia, and unscrupulous political leaders. You will follow a bitter-sweet narrative of a young woman through her painful search for identity as a Russian and as a Jew, her tragic marriage to a charismatic but brutally abusive man, her involvement in the Jewish cultural movement that emerged during the Perestroika of the Gorbachev's government, and the many struggles for emigration.