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Part One: The Foundations of the Volftsun Family Part One: The Foundations of the Volftsun Family 7 child, fought anti-Semitism to become a successful officer in the Soviet Air Force, and ultimately returned to the Torah in America. His marriage to Lyubov Braverman, who was on a similar train to Uzbekistan at the same time with her parents and siblings, joined the two families. In literature, the person who is the lynchpin of the plot is called the protagonist or hero. Frequently the most defining characteristic of a hero is the willingness to sacrifice himself for the greater good. Iosif says simply that he was fighting for his life, for his family. But perhaps we can consider him the hero of the story anyway. He would not appreciate this title, and would offer many arguments about why others are more worthy. This is what a hero does. One advantage of starting the story in the middle with focus on Iosif is that the circumstances of Iosif 's life are much more accessible to us than the circumstances of his grandparents' or even parents'. The memories we have of Shlomo Volsun and Hava Brandes are clear, since people with direct memories of them are still alive. So, too, are the memories about Leib Braverman and Malka Berman. Still, details about their early lives are difficult to pin down. If we try to reconstruct the lives of their parents, we immediately run into more difficulties than those imposed naturally by the spans of time and distance. Life in Russia, both in tzarist and Soviet times, was so perilous that for most people, especially Jews, it was dangerous to put their real thoughts and feelings down on paper. Written records were oen used against people. It was sometimes helpful for people to invent new identities and facts about themselves, and written records limited that opportunity. For much of what we know, we rely on the memory of Iosif, his sisters, and Lyubov's surviving sister. We can allow these individuals to form our bridge across time, culture, language, and political divide, for they have successfully navigated these journeys. A reader can have no better guides. To say we will start at the beginning would be to make an assumption about what a beginning is. In any human story, is there ever a point at which it no longer profits us to begin just a little earlier? At what point do we say that this relative's mother or father is no longer relevant to the story? The Torah, the book that guides all Jews and has been so central to the Volsuns' story, concludes that every generation is important. This is why The Book of Genesis starts with Adam and Eve, parents of us all, and then lists all their descendents, leaving no one out. All participate in the grand story that leads inexorably to our own lives. This is a story about the hopes and dreams of six generations of Volsuns and the three generations of Bravermans connected to them through the marriage of Iosif and Lyubov. We should say upont that because of geography, history, war, oppression, and anti-Semitism, most of these aspirations were not realized, at least not by the family members in Russia. Nonetheless, our story ends with triumph. All those hopes and dreams, ustrated for so long, have been redeemed in the latest generation. By every measure—eedom to think, to practice the Torah, earn an education, and pursue economic prosperity—the Volsun/ Braverman story is a victory. Memories are agile, but love endures. Everything else is up for grabs. Almost everything we know, we know incompletely. Nothing we are told remains the same when retold. And stories about real people living real lives far in time and distance om our own are the most incomplete of all. How much of what we're going to report here is reliable, in the sense of "this is what actually happened?" That is the wrong question. To be clear upont: We are not writing history here. Any attempt to nail down specific times and places is not especially rewarding. Facts and dates are important and we have accumulated many of them, but by themselves they are poor currency for the power of hopes and dreams. Our goal is to review events that may or may not have happened but are nevertheless true. This book, then, is about such things as suffering, the importance of education, the yearning for religious eedom, political liberty, economic independence, and, most of all, parents' fierce determination to make their children's lives better than their own. Above: Iosif, Lyubov, Yeva, Lev, and Malka (Lyubov's mother) in Moscow, 1956.

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