ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the details of a specific period of one Jewish communist's life. Chaim Sloves's Jewish communist story is long-starting in 1920 when, at the age of fifteen, he followed the Red Army to Moscow from Bialystok, and finishing in 1988, the year of his death. The chapter focuses on only one period in long trajectory—the decade of the 1950s—although, properly speaking, for him that decade began in 1948 and ended sometime in the mid-1960s. The Soviet position regarding the Jews, as Sloves gleaned it from his 1958 discussion with various officials in Moscow, is twofold. In the first place, they claim that although the Jews might once have been a people, they are no longer one. The second argument of Soviet officials is that assimilation is not only the actual state of affairs of the Soviet Jewish population but also the desirable goal.
