Thanksgiving All Year Round A Memoir [Paperback]

This book first delves into the authors ancestry, thereby providing a partial slice of Russian Jewish history. It then offers an individual perspective on what it meant to grow up in the Soviet Union in the aftermath of WWII. It also gives a personal account of the rise and development of Jewish national awareness. It next describes a struggle for the immigration to Israel in the late 1960s and the early 1970s through job loss, persecution, arrests, imprisonment, and trial. It further relates the authors life in Israel, including his work at the Voice of Israel, study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and service in the Israel Defense Forces. Finally, it explores the authors academic career in the United States, from the graduate school at the University of Illinois to professorship at Cornell University. Thanksgiving All Year Roundis most appropriately named. It is the buoyant saga of an incorrigible optimist. Nothing daunted, Shapiro first flings himself against the all-powerful Soviet regime by which he is made to feel a misfit and then against the red-tape and apparent idiosyncrasies of the free societies to which he has escaped and where he is determined to make good. Written by a person with an obvious literary flair, Shapiro's book provides manifestly authentic details of everyday life in the intellectual milieu of Moscow after Stalin and will be read avidly by students of Soviet society and of the Soviet Jewish movement. The book describes the authors eventful life, which spans over seventy years, in three different countries and on as many continents. Gavriel Shapiros academic reputation is enhanced by an impressive memoir of his life. It is fascinating to follow Shapiros account of his life trajectory from the rise of his Jewish identity in the assimilated family, to his struggle with the Soviet authorities for the right to emigrate, to his career as a nationally and internationally recognized literary scholar. Had these events been merellÍ