What a wonderful feature, thank you Rich! A minor quibble: "...Girsky left the Soviet Union late, around 1997..." Actually, by 1997 the Soviet Union had already ceased to exist for half a decade. Latvia left the USSR in 1991.

"They pointed at each other, with starlight burning in their limbs like daggers and icicles and fireflies, and then fell to judging their limbs again, each finding himself intact, hot, excited, stunned, awed, and the other, ah yes, that other over there, unreal, a ghostly prism flashing the accumulated light of distant worlds."

https://goo.gl/wLJUqn

https://goo.gl/NAtda1

https://goo.gl/Q4MptQ

https://goo.gl/FJmhtF

The Glass Bead Game wouldn't hurt, either.

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https://goo.gl/NyixbI

"Gerard" Schwartz, not Gerald.

Fascinating stories. The first one, about the casual ignorance of the immigration official who decided musicians weren't artists, is infuriating though. I'm glad all these people made it here.

When Miropolsky's family learned that the Germans were planning to invade Ukraine and exterminate all the Jews in the area

Not to be a dick but the Nazi leadership hadn't decided on the "final solution" until way after the invasion of the Soviet Union.