Never Alone: Prison, Politics, and My People

by Natan Sharansky, Gil Troy

Overview

A classic account of courage, integrity, and most of all, belonging


In 1977, Natan Sharansky, a leading activist in the democratic dissident movement in the Soviet Union and the movement for free Jewish emigration, was arrested by the KGB. He spent nine years as a political prisoner, convicted of treason against the state. Every day, Sharansky fought for individual freedom in the face of overt tyranny, a struggle that would come to define the rest of his life.


Never Alone reveals how Sharansky's years in prison, many spent in harsh solitary confinement, prepared him for a very public life after his release. As an Israeli politician and the head of the Jewish Agency, Sharansky brought extraordinary moral clarity and uncompromising, often uncomfortable, honesty. His story is suffused with reflections from his time as a political prisoner, from his seat at the table as history unfolded in Israel and the Middle East, and from his passionate efforts to unite the Jewish people.


Written with frankness, affection, and humor, the book offers us profound insights from a man who embraced the essential human struggle: to find his own voice, his own faith, and the people to whom he could belong.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781541742420
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	09/01/2020
Pages:	480
Sales rank:	122,042
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Natan Sharansky lives in Jerusalem with Avital He has two daughters and six grandchildren. Gil Troy is a professor of history at McGill University in Montreal and has a residence in Jerusalem.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Living Life Backward 1

Part I Nine Years in Prison

1 Life Without Freedom, Life Without Identity 9

2 Discovering Identity, Discovering Freedom 33

3 Becoming a Refusenik 49

4 Joining the Dialogue 67

5 Living Free in Prison 93

6 My Dialogue with the Jewish Community: Imagined Reality? 107

Part II Nine Years in Israeli Politics

7 Becoming Israeli 137

8 Imprisoned by Politics: More Power, Less Freedom 153

9 Encountering One People Divided by One Religion 173

10 A Minority of One on Democracy and Peace in the Middle East 191

11 Devastated by the Rabin Assassination 215

12 A Dissident in Politics 239

13 Watching the Dialogue Deteriorate on Campus 257

14 Seeing the New Anti-Semitism Through 3D Glasses 287

Part III Nine Years in the Jewish Agency

15 Why the Jewish Agency? 309

16 Reliving My Exodus with Ethiopian Jewry 317

17 Reforming the Jewish Agency: Because We Need One Another 335

18 Bridge Building Hits the Wall: The Kotel Fiasco 357

19 Iran and Our Feeling of Mutual Betrayal 385

20 Does Anti-Semitism Unite or Divide Us? 401

21 Imagine a Dialogue of One, a Dialogue of Us 425

Epilogue: The Israel-Diaspora Chessboard 439

Authors' Note 445

Acknowledgments 447

Index 451

Editorial Reviews

10/05/2020

In this inspirational account, Soviet dissident Sharansky (Defending Identity) chronicles his life story and offers his perspective on the evolving relationship between the state of Israel and the Jewish people. In the book’s strongest sections, Sharansky describes growing up in Ukraine under Stalinist rule, where “being outed as Jewish was like being diagnosed with some debilitating disease.” He learned the art of “doublethink,” publicly professing allegiance to the regime while harboring private doubts, and fully embraced his Jewish heritage after Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War. In 1973, Soviet authorities denied his request to emigrate to Israel. He joined the “Refusenik” and democratic dissident movements, was surveilled and arrested by the KGB on trumped-up treason charges, and served nine years in the gulag before international outcry led to his release. Arriving in Israel in 1986 at age 38, Sharansky cofounded a new Russian immigrants’ political party and became head of the Jewish Agency for Israel. He forcefully articulates his center-right political views, including opposition to the Oslo peace accords, and defends Trump administration policies on Israel while condemning the president’s “moral dithering” after a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va. The result is a worthy introduction to the life and work of one of the world’s most famous political prisoners. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"Admirers of Sharansky will appreciate this insider's account of Israeli politics and his independent-minded life."—Kirkus Reviews

"In this inspirational account, Soviet dissident Sharansky (Defending Identity) chronicles his life story and offers his perspective on the evolving relationship between the state of Israel and the Jewish people... The result is a worthy introduction to the life and work of one of the world's most famous political prisoners."—Publishers Weekly

"We cannot help but be awed by it, and pray that his faith be vindicated soon."—Commentary Magazine

“Never Alone is a terrific read throughout and, remarkably, the authors fill the potentially prosaic sections on Israel and the Jewish Agency, which could have been a letdown after the descriptions of Sharansky’s heroism in facing down the KGB, with gripping and inspirational stories that illustrate how a man of principle, character, and wisdom can make a difference in every field of endeavor.”—Mosaic Magazine

"A gripping account."—The Times of Israel

"This book can be read on two levels. One is the series of public issues that Natan Sharansky addresses with strong conviction: his belief that Palestinian democracy must precede Palestinian statehood; his consequent opposition to the Oslo agreement and the Gaza withdrawal, then to the Iran nuclear accord; his euphoria at the airlift of Ethiopian Jews to Israel; his distress at the rise of anti-Semitism and at the religious and political rifts among Jews in Israel and the Diaspora. The other level is more significant, at least to me, having known Natan for about forty-five years. It is the personal and intellectual journey that he describes as he explains himself. Here is an exceptional man, schooled in Soviet doublethink, then finding his Jewish identity and his ideology as a free-thinker, separated from his new wife for a dozen years and locked for nine in the Gulag before rising to high Israeli leadership. Trauma victims know that recovery often depends on good people's support. That he had, giving him power to make from his suffering a lodestar that guides his judgments. You might disagree with him here and there, but you cannot help liking him, because you cannot help looking through the issues into his heart of idealism."—David K. Shipler, a former New York Times Bureau Chief in Moscow and Jerusalem, is the author of seven books, including the best-seller Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams, and the Pulitzer Prize-winner Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land.

"Sharansky is at his core an optimist, and one who holds an undying belief in the power of the Jewish community. He hopes this book can prove that the worldwide Jewish community is not as divided and fractured as it may seem."


—The Jewish Insider

From the Publisher

2020-08-11
The noted Soviet dissident and Israeli activist recounts a long history of “living life backward.”

Trained as a physicist, Sharansky (b. 1948), who co-authored this memoir with historian Troy, spent nine years in Soviet prisons for supposed anti-Soviet crimes. The rest of the time he was either alone—“I always found solitary comfortable, if I could read or write there, if it was warm, and if there was food to eat”—or with a bunkmate or two whom he suspected of being KGB informants. Meeting with Nelson Mandela long afterward, the two political prisoners compared notes: Mandela’s sentence was three times longer, but at least he had visitors. Finally, Sharansky was released and immigrated to Israel, where he immediately began agitating for the acceptance of 400,000 of his fellow Soviet Jews. They arrived, a flood of outstanding scientists, artists, and scholars who had followed the guideline that in order to survive they had to excel, and “almost overnight, the number of Israel’s doctors, engineers, musicians, and chess players doubled.” Sharansky allied for a time with Benjamin Netanyahu, opposing the Oslo Accords and other treaties with Palestine on the grounds that they elevated “[Yasser] Arafat’s terrorist dictatorship on the Palestinians, instead of cultivating the more grassroots democratic leadership that was sprouting in the 1990s.” For this, he was pegged a rightist, although as the years passed, he became a sort-of-liberal critic of Netanyahu and his party—and he doesn’t have much good to say about Donald Trump, either. Charmingly, he describes his backward approach to life events: He celebrated his bar mitzvah at 65, which allowed him to “appreciate my Torah portion’s relevance and explain it to everyone without having my rabbi write my speech for me.” Since he was imprisoned immediately after his wedding and didn’t see his wife for years, he has since worked to make his marriage a happily-ever-after story.

Admirers of Sharansky will appreciate this insider’s account of Israeli politics and his independent-minded life.

Kirkus Reviews

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