Quote:The reason Russian Jews were well-educated and ready to start prosperous careers more or less the moment they landed in the US was that they were extremely well-educated and prosperous before they left Russia. Much oppressed under the pre-revolutionary regime, Jews were instrumental during the Russian Revolution of 1917, and they and their children reaped tremendous benefits from their involvement in it during the subsequent decades. In fact, Jews did so well in the USSR that they crowded out Russians from many top jobs: although they made up just 1.5% of the population, by the 1950s over half of all directors at the many institutes, research centers and laboratories of the Soviet Academy of Sciences were Jewish. Jews made up a third of the Soviet Writers’ Union; a quarter of all university lecturers; and so on.

Members of my own family followed this trajectory. My grandfather grew up in a shtetl, spoke Yiddish with his mother, moved to St. Petersburg after the revolution, joined the Communist Party and eventually became a professor of Russian literature with a grand apartment on a city square and a country mansion. both stuffed with art and priceless antiques, a live-in housekeeper and nanny and a private limousine with a chauffeur. Jews like my grandfather dislodged the old aristocracy and became la crème de la crème of Soviet society.