Riseofasuper dissident
Jenni Frazer considers Natan Sharansky’s latest reflections on prison, Israel, freedom and politics
Never Alone
Natan Sharansky and Gil Troy Public Affairs, £25
Natan comes home declared the front page of the Jewish Chronicle on February 7 1986. It also carried three images, two of Natan Sharansky himself (in one, he is giving thanks at the Kotel) and the third, of the former refusenik’s mother, hand anxiously covering her face. In a way, despite the millions of words written about the Natan Sharansky phenomenon before and since he “came home”, the pictures were almost all that were needed.
During nine years in prison while his wife of one day, Avital, toured the offices of world leaders to beg for pressure on the Soviet Union, Sharansky became the world’s best-known Jewish dissident. And, once in Israel, he was not content to slip under the radar but, instead, pursued a long and active public career, from politics to chairing the Jewish Agency.
Sharansky has not been shy about adding to the millions of words himself. Never Alone, co-written with Canadian history professor Gil Troy, is his fourth book, and he is the author of countless essays and polemics. He also, with considerable good humour, offered hints for spending time in isolation as lockdown began. I imagine nine years of political imprisonment makes him something of an expert in that regard.
Never Alone takes the reader on a roller-coaster journey, which candidly recalls his scarcely Jewish upbringing in Donetsk, Ukraine, and his teenage and young adult years of “doublethink”, the mind-set necessary in the Soviet Union, where every word that came out of someone’s mouth could be parsed and pored over for possible antipathy to the regime. He goes over ground previously recounted in his 1988 autobiography, Fear No Evil, which speaks in meticulous detail about his trialFand imprisonment. But this book, written from a different perspective, casts a long and insightful eye on his prison years. Most people know that Sharansky played chess games in his head to keep his mental processes sharp. Not everyone knows, however, how he would deliberately tease and taunt his prison guards, despite knowing it would inevitably get him into more trouble.
He is candid, too, about the splits and sulking in the Jewish world, both before and after his release, as to who “owned” the Soviet Jewry campaign, and Israel’s not terribly honourable role in pushing only for emigration to the Jewish state, rather than simply pressing the Soviet Union to let the Jews go and leave the choice of destination up to them. All these now seemingly petty quarrels are unpicked in forensic detail and, perhaps, knowing about such behaviour equipped Sharansky only too well for dealing with Jewish-world disputes when he came to chair the Jewish Agency.
He served in four Israeli governments and is only too aware that some people, believing him to have been a darling of left-wing peace activists, were seriously disappointed to see him throw in his lot with a rightwing coalition. He writes: “These seemingly right-wing positions made me unpopular with many Israeli and American opinion-makers, including many of my natural allies, the liberals who had fought with me against Soviet totalitarianism”.
But Sharansky claims he didn’t take the attacks personally: “After years as a dissident, I felt comfortable becoming the democracy outlaw…”
Just the same, there is a seam of self-justification running through the book as Sharansky seeks to explain his political decisions. Not every reader will be convinced, but many will accept the explanation that “once a dissident, always a dissident”.
Perhaps it is Sharansky’s very contrariness that saw him through the long years in prison. For myself, I couldn’t help wondering what would have happened if the clock had stopped in 1986, and Sharansky had “come home” — and stayed home, a private and unknowable citizen. Maybe it is this book’s very title that gives it away — Never Alone — always someone, or something, in his head.
Joining a a right wing coalition in Israel made him unpopular with some people