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1 " Isn’t it better to arrest and prosecute a hundred innocent people and catch among them one spy than to let the spy go free? "
― Chaim Potok , The Gates of November
2 " (Question: What will happen after Cuba builds communism? Answer: It will start importing sugar. Question: What’s the difference between capitalism and communism? Answer: Under capitalism, man exploits man; under communism, it’s the other way around) "
3 " Better that ten innocent people should suffer,” he said, “than one spy get away. "
4 " The Communist Party, a seeming haven for the radical intelligentsia and apparently uninterested in the ethnic and religious origins of its members, became the sole refuge of certain marginal Jews, who believed it would bring a great and true salvation to the world, a revolutionary universalism in which the destructive differences that divided humankind would once and for all be forever dissolved. It mattered little to most Russians that these Jews were no more Jewish than their non-Jewish atheist party comrades; that they did not speak for or identify with Jews, and indeed were often the enemies of Jews. Further, because many Jews stepped into the vacuum created by the disintegration of the tsarist bureaucracy, it now seemed to many Russians that Jewish government officials were everywhere. Their sudden appearance, concurrent as it was with the Revolution and the Civil War, forever linked those events in the minds of Russians, for whom the Jew now became the evil cause of the Fatherland’s unutterable misery. "
5 " Are there American variations of Solomon Slepak, those rendered so rigid by ideas that all reason fails them? Prudence, a cautious awareness of nuances, of complexities, of consequences, a perception of the unity of the American experience, and a saving sense of irony and humor—pervasive in the Founding Fathers and lacking in contemporary ideologues. Can we learn something from these chronicles about iron righteousness and rigid doctrine, about the stony heart, the sealed mind, the capricious use of law, and the tragedies that often result when theories are not adjusted to realities? Do the chronicles seem to reveal a glaring and almost obvious truth: the larger the nation, the more tumultuous its demise? Are we approaching the finale now to the bright possibilities once inherent in this land? Is that old America forever gone? Indeed, did it ever exist? Were we seduced as schoolchildren into a vision of a land green and golden from sea to shining sea, a land as illusory for many Americans as the Motherland of Solomon Slepak was for Volodya and Masha? Perhaps the more sensible question is not about what we once were but about what we intend ourselves to be one day. Things are happening to us today that we don’t seem able to explain. Can we enter the uncertain future without the corrosive cynicism, the clutching greed, the divisive self-interests—the beasts that destroyed the world of Solomon Slepak and rendered it uninhabitable to his family? "
6 " And so the land lay atomized, all in fear of all, in a miasma of dread, with no possibility of organized resistance because the terror struck at individuals, each instance of it a separate and personal experience—the knock on the door, the abrupt arrest, the sense of shocked disbelief, the certainty that an error had been made and would soon be corrected—and everyone thinking, Don’t look, don’t listen, don’t ask, how do I know, maybe he really was a spy, I’m not doing anything wrong, it won’t touch me. "
