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a Menachem Begin look-alike who heads an organization called the Maccabees, which bears a close resemblance to the Irgun, the terror organization that tried to bomb the British out of Palestine. There is, of course, a love story. Kitty Fremont, a newly widowed, non-Jewish American nurse, finds herself enmeshed in the Jewish independence movement and falls in love with Ari Ben Canaan. The book manages to tell the stories of the Holocaust, early Zionism, and the Russian pogroms. It gives the Zionist movement an incredibly romantic glow.
    For the handful of Zionists in the Soviet Union, and especially among those in Riga, the book was pure sustenance—many tears fell on the thin typewritten pages. And it served as a remarkable recruiting tool. It's difficult to determine exactly how the book entered these circles, but it's safe to assume that the Israelis had a hand in it since all the copies appeared around the same time. Even though it was written in English, a language not widely spoken in the Soviet Union, the book spread like a virus. In Riga, it found its way to Boris Slovin. Boris hadn't yet met his future wife, Lydia, a blond lawyer; their Zionist cells hadn't crossed. In 1962, Slovin was working at a train station as an electrician. One day a non-Jewish coworker showed him a book he had just been handed by an Israeli diplomat who must have mistaken the Latvian for a Jew. It was
Exodus.
The book was in English, and the coworker thought Slovin might be able to decipher it. Slovin couldn't, but he took it home and passed it on through the Zionist network until Lydia, who knew a bit of English, was brought on as a translator. She wrote a version out longhand, and she was so unsure of her English that if a word she looked up in her Russian-English dictionary had multiple meanings, she simply put all the possibilities in parentheses. Boris received her handwritten translations, typed them out on carbon paper making four copies at a time, and then burned Lydia's originals. He shortened the final version and excised any anti-Soviet sentiment, and he also edited a bit, removing any reference to the affair between Kitty and Ari Ben Canaan, thinking that intermarriage would send the wrong message to Riga's Jewish youth.
    Ezra Rusinek, the bare-chested, Israeli-looking man who caught Mendelevich's eye on his first trip to Rumbuli, had managed to get hold of a copy in German. He found a translator and then spent a year meticulously typing out all six hundred pages of the text and making five copies, three of which stayed in Riga and two of which were sent to friends in other cities. So secretive were the separate cells of Riga Zionists that Rusinek was not aware that Slovin was engaged in a similar project. Copies proliferated everywhere. One major source was the prison camps. A group of Jewish inmates inside a Mordvinian camp, Dubrovlag, sneaked in a copy and held nightly readings in which the few political prisoners who spoke some English would read and translate the story. Eventually they transcribed their version into a notebook, which then got passed from one generation of prisoners to the next, converting a few to Zionism along the way. Some who heard it in camps wrote out the story from memory when they were released. By 1964,
Exodus
was a blockbuster in the samizdat circuit. Mendelevich even had a copy, which his cousin had asked him to hide above the cast-iron stove in his room.
    But it was more than just the pull of Israel that suddenly inspired Jews to take such risks. It was the push that came with growing knowledge of what had happened during the war. When Adolf Eichmann, a top Nazi official, was captured in Buenos Aires by the Israelis and given a hugely publicized trial in Jerusalem, Jews all over the world confronted the facts of the Holocaust for the first time. Never before had the details been so openly discussed, as survivor after survivor took the stand and faced the glass box where the bored-looking Eichmann