Leap Year Torn Apart is a bilingual, English-Russian rhymed biographical tale recounting the tragic fate of a Russian Jewish family devastated by events in Stalin's final years, during the early 1950s.
The English translation is followed by the rhymed Russian original.
Initially written in Russian and translated into English by the author in collaboration with the late Canadian-American poet Jayne Berland, this tale draws heavily from Soviet media narratives of the time.
These publications maligned Jews who were leaving the Soviet Union in growing numbers, accusing them of unpatriotic motives, material greed, and selfishness.
This propaganda aimed to obscure the harsh realities faced by Jews in Russia: feelings of exclusion, limited opportunities for professional advancement, and restricted access to prestigious educational institutions. Jewish individuals who publicly resisted these injustices faced severe persecution, as did those who chose to emigrate, encountering both humiliation and state opposition to their cultural identities.
This rhymed narrative serves as a powerful counterpoint to Soviet propaganda.
It is a factual account of what befell one Jewish family during Stalin's final years-a time when his paranoia turned viciously against the country's Jewish intellectual and medical communities. Stalin's delusions, abetted by his brutal security apparatus, cast a shadow over all Jews in positions of authority, civilian or military.
To survivors-and more often, to the families of those who perished during Stalin's purges-the Presidium of the Supreme Court of the USSR would later send official letters, some reading: "The case of [individual's name] is hereby dismissed based on complete absence of evidence of a crime."
One such letter arrived for the author's father as well.
This rhymed tale is intertwined with the emotional arrival of a daughter, named after the author's late mother, and stands as a lasting tribute to one family's resilience and legacy.
