HM Wins 'Refuseniks' Tale

by John F. Baker -- Publishers Weekly, 8/30/2004

A book about the epic struggles of Jews in the Soviet Union to deal with a society basically hostile to them, and their eventual mass emigration, mostly to Israel but some also to the United States, was won by Houghton Mifflin's Jane Rosenman in a competitive auction. Author Gal Beckerman is the grandson of Holocaust victims as well as a graduate of Samuel G. Freedman's writing seminar at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, and this is his first book. He tells how American Jews, successfully settled and fearful at first of jeopardizing their position by overt support for the Russian Jews, eventually joined them in their pleas to be released, and how between the mid-'80s and mid-'90s three-quarters of a million Jews fled Russia. His book is also the story of an awakening to the suffering of others in the expanding battle for human rights (he himself was a Peace Corps volunteer). The world rights buy was made from agent Andrew Blauner.