Her hosts were kind, welcoming people and, to Galina’s secular gaze, very Jewish. Arnold wore a yarmulke and Zara’s kitchen was kosher; they attended synagogue every Saturday and they encouraged Galina to join them. They observed a staggering number of special Jewish laws — laws previously unknown to Galina, whose favourite food at home had been salo, pork fat, and whose major key to Jewishness was Leon Uris’s Exodus. She never told Zara and Arnold about salo, but she did explain about Ishkod, the Russian version of Exodus, which her mother, like so many Soviet Jews, had read in samizdat.

Ishkod came to Lidiya in the late nineteen-sixties after the Six-Day War in Israel, and following a new batch of anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist measures in the Soviet Union. It was a faded carbon copy on tissue-thin paper; the print was so pale that Lidiya said hers must have been the last of the four sheets when the typing was done. Ishkod provided Soviet Jews both then and later with a model of Jewishness, replete with strength and hope and a country, too, although Israel’s struggles with her neighbours meant that as a homeland it never appealed to Lidiya, who longed for a life of freedom and peace.

Pork fat, Leon Uris’s Ishkod, and entrenched Russian anti-Semitism had contributed to Galina’s Jewishness, so it was not surprising she found Zara and Arnold’s Judaism so foreign. After attending a few Shabbat services, she’d had enough. ‘Perhaps later,’ she said to Zara, ‘when life here is no longer so strange.’ But even as she spoke, she knew she would never embrace their kind of Jewishness. It was too late for her — she suspected it was too late for most Soviet Jews. It wasn’t just the revolution’s official removal of religion from their lives, Orthodox Christians had experienced that too. There was something else, something specific to Russian Jews that she only realised once she moved to Australia: when you’ve been the target of anti-Semitism all your life, this actually contributes to the sort of Jew you are. And it doesn’t change: despite your having crossed the world, despite witnessing other forms of Jewishness, despite your wishing it were not so.