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information about Israel. The Moscow activists were vital to the Riga Jews because they had access to an essential resource: the Israeli embassy. The Jewish diplomatic presence in the heart of the Soviet capital had existed since the fall of 1948, when Golda Meir (then Meyerson) made a climactic visit to the Moscow Choral Synagogue. As the first Israeli ambassador to the Soviet Union, she drew tens of thousands of weeping, ecstatic Jews into the street during the High Holy Days. From then on, one of the embassy's main missions became finding a way to keep the light of Jewish culture flickering. The effort primarily involved planting Israelis with Slavic backgrounds in the Moscow embassy and giving them innocuous titles such as "agriculture attaché." Their real job was to travel all over the country and distribute Israeli mementos such as miniature Jewish calendars and Star of David pendants, which were usually handed off in a handshake. They visited synagogues and attended the scarce Jewish cultural events. But while the Israelis certainly boosted morale, there was only so much they could do to help the nascent activists. Any overzealousness could get them kicked out of the country or trigger a diplomatic crisis that Israel couldn't afford, especially given the Soviets' recent alliances with Arab states.
    These minimal gestures—as dangerous as they were for the embassy staff—were not enough for the self-proclaimed Zionists who began to coalesce in Riga in the early 1960s. The brand of activism they wanted to pursue fell into the Jabotinsky strain of Zionism. They were not afraid of confrontation. In fact, confrontation seemed the only way to get the Soviet Union to allow them the freedom to express themselves as Jews. As for their more distant hope of living in Israel one day, they knew no one was going to hand them that on a platter. They would have to fight. As early as 1964, the group planned to send an open petition to American Jewry demanding that they do something to help the Soviet Jews. Lydia Slovin was charged with confronting an Israeli official on vacation in Minsk with the idea—the Zionists wanted Israeli consent before they sent off the letter. She was told firmly by the Israeli official to drop it. But listening to albums and looking at postcards of Israel, celebrating Passover and Hanukkah, soon became insufficient for the activists. They were restive. And yet they were afraid to openly discuss the possibility of applying for exit visas. No one was allowed to emigrate from the Soviet Union; people like Schneider had been arrested for even trying. So the Zionists turned to samizdat. Finding material for duplication, copying it using borrowed typewriters and mimeograph machines, and then distributing it demanded organization and provided an opportunity to expand their circle.
    There were only a few sources of samizdat. In Riga, private libraries from before the war that contained unpublished works by Dubnow, Jabotinsky, and others provided much of the material. Tourists dropped off articles and pamphlets, sometimes given to them by the Israeli embassy. And the embassy staff members themselves covertly deposited books in places where Jews might find them, on park benches and inside synagogues.
    No book caught the imagination of these Zionists like Leon Uris's novel
Exodus.
Published in 1958,
Exodus
was a strange blend of Zionist polemic, Jewish history, and, most important, soap opera. The book had a huge cast and was about six hundred pages long, but it was centered on the character of Ari Ben Canaan, a member of the Aliyah Bet operation that was illegally smuggling Jews into Israel during the British mandate. It opens in Cyprus with Ben Canaan's attempt to pilot a boatload of Jews from detention camps through the Mediterranean to Palestine. It follows him through the war of independence and the trials and tribulations of his father, a Ben-Gurion type of Labor Zionist establishment character, and his uncle,