The Free World

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my agent, Ira Silverberg, and my editors at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Lorin Stein and Eric Chinski.

Excerpts from the novel appeared in The New Yorker and The Walrus, and I am grateful to Deborah Treisman and Jared Bland, respectively, for their editorial contributions.

Lucia Piccinni, John Montesano, and Giorgio Bandiera helped with the Italian translation, Esther Frank with Yiddish, and Detlef Karthaus with Esperanto.

Rosalba Galata and Susan Davis provided information about HIAS and JDC, and Enid Wurtman offered her expertise on the Soviet emigration process. Any errors of fact remaining in the novel are mine.

Nell Freudenberger, Wyatt Mason, and Anna Shternshis read early drafts of the manuscript, and I am indebted to them for their insights.

I am grateful to the many people who shared their recollections of the period, particularly Sara Bezmozgis, Alexander and Musia Mozeson, Lev Milner, Michael Vilinsky, Seva and Irina Yelenbaugen, Hirsh and Stella Vivat, Lev and Elena Aleinikov, and David and Emma Tsimerman.

I offer my enduring gratitude to Simon Friedman (1935–2003) and to Zebulon Sharf (1915–2008), whose story is intimately connected with that of his brother, Mordecai Sharf (1913–1942).

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council provided financial assistance, and the MacDowell Colony offered its hospitality: this book would have been much harder to complete without their help.