Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

August 22, 2025

A Jew Gets into a Bar Fight in a Ukrainian City in 1974

From the memoirs of a Soviet Jewish district attorney.

Mikhail Goldis’s Memoirs of a Jewish District Attorney from Soviet Ukraine provides not only a window into the criminal-justice system of the post-Stalin USSR, but also, in the words of his grandson Marat Grinberg, an exposition of “what it took for a Jewish attorney to survive in the halls of Soviet power.” Herewith, an excerpt from Grinberg’s translation: 

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