A Story of Jewish Dignity
A profound meditation on systemic antisemitism, survival, and identity — told through the eyes of a physicist who lived through the Siege of Leningrad and the long shadow of Soviet oppression.
About the Book
Through essays, personal vignettes, and historical reflection, Emil Bezverkhny examines one of the defining questions of Soviet Jewish life — weaving his own experience as a physicist, a survivor of the Siege of Leningrad, and a witness to systematic persecution into a luminous, heartbreaking testament.
The Penny Is Gone captures the resilience of the human spirit amidst oppression: the struggle to preserve dignity, the indelible mark of exile on identity, and the meaning of belonging when the world you knew has been taken from you.
Translated by Emil Pitkin, this is a book for anyone who has asked what it means to endure — and what is lost, and what is kept, when a people are forced to leave their home.
Praise
Antisemitism is the politics of the pointing finger. The Penny Is Gone points a finger back and cries 'j'accuse!'
The story of Soviet Jewry is one of the great sagas of modern Jewish history. Yet that tale of suffering and resistance is rarely invoked today. Fortunately, we have this beautiful, heartbreaking memoir to remind us of the dignity and heroism that sustained Soviet Jews and inspired Jews around the world.
An entrepreneur and data scientist, the younger Emil has translated his grandfather's writings skillfully, preserving their literary (and distinctly Russian) qualities, while producing an eminently readable book… What results is a memoir—even if Bezverkhny insists he has not written a memoir but an attempt to unearth ‘the roots of today’s tragedy’—which places readers in the restless mind of a man who did everything right, suffered enormously, and was in the end let down by those who promised him utopia…
About the Author & Translator
Emil Pitkin is Emil Bezverkhny’s grandson. Born in 1987 in Leningrad, he was brought to America by his parents in 1989. He graduated from Harvard with an AB degree in mathematics and earned a PhD in statistics from the Wharton School. He is an author who has founded and led technology companies and now serves on the business school faculty at the Wharton School. His next novel, Fate and Chance, is slated for publication in 2026.
Order the Book
Order your copy today through Amazon or directly from the publisher, Ben Yehuda Press.
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