THE THAW

On 5 March 1953, Captain David Stavitsky, feeling angry and frustrated, sat down to write a letter to Joseph Stalin. Similar to what happened in many other places, David’s wife, Raisa, a physician, had been fired from her job a few days earlier. Her hospital administrators had invented a lame excuse, acting on their own initiative or on directives received from their superiors. This was a time when Jewish doctors were perceived as a dangerous—and at the same time strikingly visible—liability in the entire Soviet state healthcare system. Jews comprised less than two percent of the post–World