Back in 1965, when Russia was still the Soviet Union, a small group of American rabbis visited the country. Alerted to reports of official antisemitism and the suppression of Jewish religious life behind the Iron Curtain, they went to see for themselves.
Closely watched, they could neither speak nor travel freely. (A microphone was actually embedded in the beehive hairdo of their tour guide to monitor all conversations.) But one of the group, Rabbi Rafael Grossman of New Jersey, returned to America with a secret: He had met a Jewish couple, both Holocaust survivors, the parents of a hidden child. To preserve the boy’s Jewish identity, they’d kept his birth secret and were raising him within the four walls of their tiny Moscow apartment. On returning to the United States, Rabbi Grossman worked tirelessly to publicize the plight of Soviet Jewry. He also never forgot this family and, with the support of three members of Congress, secured their release from their Russian chains and their flight to Israel.
Anna Olswanger, author of A Visit to Moscow, was Rabbi Grossman’s writing collaborator beginning in the 1980s; the story of this hidden Jewish child appeared in a novel Grossman had set in Russia. Upon Grossman’s death in 2018, his daughter sent Olswanger a box of her father’s papers. There she unearthed a hundred pages of the unfinished manuscript. Since the facts of the family’s story had never been made clear to her — she never learned their names or where they lived in Israel – she decided to resurrect their intriguing story as fiction, in the form of a graphic novel.
In Olswanger’s adaptation, the visiting rabbi escapes the tour group, pleading a headache. He is carrying the envelope of a letter received ten years before by an American woman, Bela Gurwitz, from her brother Meyer in Moscow. She’d read about the rabbis’ mission to Russia: Would Rabbi Grossman try to get in touch with her brother in Moscow?
Illustrator Yevgenia Nayberg, who grew up in the Soviet Union, matches image to text, art to content. The muted browns and cubist angles, recalling a Braque still life, capture the somber mood of Soviet daily life. The Chirico-like receding streetscapes — line after line of square windows set within a charmless Soviet-era apartment building and receding towards a bare horizon — evoke the power of the totalitarian state to reduce what is human to nothingness. The slanted planes in many frames mirror an unreliable world in which mistrust sabotages all human relationships. The rabbi’s taxi driver is bribed, then drives off as quickly as he can, leaving his passenger, who knows no Russian, to locate apartment #35 on his own. A suspicious Meyer Gurwitz doesn’t trust the visitor who knocks on his door. The illustrator captures both men’s fear in the visiting rabbi’s wary eyes shaded by the brim of his fedora.
Reassurance comes only when the rabbi speaks Yiddish and cites a Hebrew passage from Pirkei Avot: “Al tistakel ba kankan, elah bamah sheyesh bo” (“Don’t look at the jug, but at what it contains.”)
What the rabbi sees (and will never forget) when finally admitted to the Gurwitz apartment is extraordinary: a modestly-dressed Jewish woman, her head covered, and a child (whom the rabbi named “Zev” in his account) wearing a kippa and peyot (sidelocks). The family has never allowed the child to leave, to play outside, or to attend school — all to preserve his Jewish identity:
Because we are Jews. Because Zev is a Jew, and because my son can remain a Jew only as long as he remains in this room. No one sees him here — no one from out there in the yard, no teacher in the grammar school, no militzia near the subway, no old man from down the hall. No one calls Zev “zhid.” No one yanks his yarmulke from his head. No one teaches him arithmetic and the Russian language on the Jewish Sabbath, or feeds him milk with meat from a state school lunch. No one laughs at him because he prays to God.
Zev sees the out-of-doors only through the open curtains at night, because, explains the father, “The moon doesn’t belong to the Soviets. Neither do the stars. Zev loves the moon and stars because they belong to God.”
The artist’s choice of palette parallels the story: In contrast to the somber grayish-brown of the out-of-doors, the Gurwitzes’ apartment is suffused with warm tones, and the meeting ends on a touching note against a warm, golden background:
Zev: “Is it true . . . that in Israel children go to school and learn Torah?”
I reached for his hand that had never before held a stranger’s hand. It felt frail.
Rabbi: “Yes, it is true. I’ll get you out of the Soviet Union. You’ll see Jerusalem.”
Zev’s face lit up.
The colors turn sombre again, as Meyer Gurwitz escorts the rabbi to a bus stop.
Returning to America, the rabbi keeps his promise; with the help of three Congressmen, he frees the family.
The Russian story is framed by an almost-mystical Israeli one. As the book opens, Zev looks down on the ruins of a rampart on a hill overlooking Israel’s Hula Valley. But Zev is nowhere to be seen – only the soft lines of golden hills, the meandering turquoise river, and green bushes, all evoking the beauty of northern Israel. As the color of the story frames turns black, we see an older Zev’s fallen body. He has forgotten his name but remembers his story. He remembers looking out of the window of the airplane that delivered them there. He remembers sitting with his own family – his wife, his children, the American rabbi — around the Shabbat table. And because Rabbi Grossman remained in touch with Zev’s family, we learn (in the author’s notes) that Zev himself, at age 37, died serving the country in the IDF.
Reading this book in 2025, one is keenly aware of the currency of its message. Marxist ideology has made a comeback in high schools and colleges, and this book debunks it. Frame after frame of this graphic thriller forces the reader to confront the hell of lives lived under Marxist totalitarianism. Furthermore, the surge in antisemitism on the streets and campuses of supposedly liberal democracies reminds us that Israel remains the sole guarantor to Jews of a place where they can fully participate in the national culture without hiding who they are.
For many middle grade and young adult readers, the “black book of communism” (to borrow the title of the definitive exposé of communism’s crimes by Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski and others), is an unknown. Given the sparse and allusive text of this graphic novel, it is necessary to close the knowledge gap. Olswanger wisely does this through the back matter, especially the essay “A Saga of Soviet Jewry” by Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff, which tracks the oppression of Soviet Jewry from Stalin through the 1980s.
A Visit to Moscow should be shared with as many middle school and high school readers as possible. It tells a story they need to know.
–Reviewed by Marjorie Gann/Jan. 8, 2025