Description: A memoir of activism and identity, exploring the author's journey supporting Soviet Jews and dissidents, and his own path to self-discovery and coming out.
Brief description: Daniel M. Jaffe lived the story at the heart of Russian Silhouette. As a Politics major at Princeton University in the late 1970s, he concentrated in Russian Studies, volunteered as an interpreter for newly arriving Soviet Jewish immigrants, earned a university fellowship for language study in the USSR, and wrote an award-winning thesis on the Soviet Jewish emigration movement, a chapter of which was later published in the British journal Soviet Jewish Affairs. At Harvard Law School, he studied international and Soviet law, wrote a thesis comparing Soviet and American civil rights laws on the free exercise of religion, and chaired the International Affairs Division of the Harvard Jewish Law Students Association - while also serving on the law school's Committee on Gay and Lesbian Legal Issues.After law school, Daniel practiced as counsel for a financial services firm. But the pull toward writing - toward the stories and people that had shaped him - proved stronger than the pull toward a legal career. He left to write.
Review Quotes:
"Daniel Jaffe takes us on a series of missions behind the Iron Curtain to connect with Jews trapped in the Soviet Union in the days before glasnost and perestroika. His recollections from the 1970s and '80s are rich in detail and crackling with tension. He combines family sagas with political intrigue, exploring the damage caused to himself and others by anti-Jewish persecution and anti-gay sentiment, both overt and covert. The result is a real-life spy thriller wrapped in an intimately personal memoir."
-Wayne Hoffman, author of The End of Her: Racing Against Alzheimer's to Solve a Murder"Once I started reading Russian Silhouette, I didn't want to put it down. It's a page turner that will break open your heart to the complex world of secrecy and persecution behind the Iron Curtain. Author Daniel M. Jaffe's memoir is veritable time travel guided by a human rights activist whose own identity propels him to deep understanding and advocacy despite the risks.
-Annette H. Levine, Professor, Latin American Literature and Jewish Studies, Ithaca College; co-editor of Landscapes of Memory and Impunity in Jewish Argentina"In this richly compelling memoir, Daniel Jaffe recounts his passionate determination to help Soviet Jews survive the oppression and persecution they faced and how this commitment helped shape his life as a gay man in the U.S. Through the stories Jaffe tells, the friendships he formed, and the successes he achieved, the book is an inspirational call to fight for justice."
-John D'Emilio, author of Making Gay History: Memoir of a Scholar-Activist"This memoir transforms a Soviet-era life into a deeply felt meditation on courage, concealment, and connection, rendered with striking historical clarity and emotional precision. Through encounters with dissidents, refuseniks, and the quiet tensions of everyday survival, it reveals not only a world on the brink of change, but the intimate costs of repression and the fragile emergence of self-recognition. As both a reader and an author attentive to the architecture of meaningful storytelling, I was struck by the discipline and restraint behind its voice: never overstated, yet profoundly affecting. This is a work that lingers, reminding us that the moral questions of the past are not settled, they are inherited. The future, in many ways, will require books like this."
-Dr. Karine Rashkovsky, author of An Improbable Life: My Father's Escape from Soviet Russia