No comments about The Hebrew Letters of Prester John (School of Oriental & African Studies).

2 comments about It Seems I Am a Jew: A Samizdat Essay on Soviet Mathematics (Science and International Affairs).

1. The memoir of a Jewish mathematician. Freiman recalls the special obstacles he and other Jewish students of mathematics faced in the USSR. To get a doctorate in mathematics one had to pass an oral exam given by a member of the anti-semetic Stekov Institute. Only it seems if you were Jewish you got an especially difficult and in most cases impossible exam to pass. Because the exam was oral with no paper record of the questions asked, the examiner could easily fail the Jewish students by asking research level questions. A grim reminder of the policies of a terrible regime.



2. Written in the late 1970s, this disturbing essay on Russian anti-Semitism provides - in hindsight - a clear example of one of the many corrupting, self-destructive forces that operated within the Soviet bureaucracy and contributed to the eventual collapse of the Soviet empire. The author, Grigori Freiman, was a noted mathematician, a professor, and a member of the Communist Party. His samizdat essay was a plea for fairness and justice in the selection of Jewish candidates for advance training in mathematics. He also warned that Russian anti-Semitism was undermining the future of mathematics in the Soviet Union.
   
   Samizdat refers to the self-publishing of underground literature in Russia under Communism. A copy of Grigori Freiman's samizdat essay reached the United States in 1978. Southern Illinois University Press in 1980 published this small book, It Seems I Am a Jew, in cooperation with the Committee of Concerned Scientists. Melvyn Nathanson prepared the introduction as well as translated Freiman's essay into English.
   
   It Seems I Am A Jew is less than 100 pages (even including the forward, introduction, and a three part appendix). The essay itself is riveting, and most readers will likely read this disturbing essay in a single sitting. I highly recommend Freiman's remarkable essay to a wide audience that includes essentially any reader interested in history, concerned with the current political situation in Russia, or concerned with injustice wherever it occurs.
   
   The appendix will appeal more to readers that have an interest in mathematics. Extremely difficult test questions were reserved for Jewish students (and sometimes for testing non-Russians from the more distant Soviet republics). These questions were designed to ensure that all Jewish candidates failed, even Jewish winners of the Soviet Union's Mathematics Olympiad. By the late 1970s the mathematics section of the Soviet Academy of Sciences had nearly achieved the goal of Judenfrei mathematics.

1 comments about Great Jewish Thinkers of the Twentieth Century (The B'nai B'rith History of the Jewish People).

1. This work outlines the basic thought of a number of significant Jewish thinkers. It is a first- class introduction to the subject.

No comments about A Refuge from Darkness.

No comments about This is how seventy looks: Stories of my life.

No comments about Inheriting the Holocaust: A Second-generation Memoir.

No comments about Heroes of the Holocaust: Extraordinary True Accounts of Triumph.

No comments about My Righteous Gentile: Lord Wedgwood and Other Memories.

No comments about Rachela.

No comments about Federman's Travels: By Bike and Boat from Poland to the Land of Israel.