FROM TAJIKISTAN TO THE MOON – reveals the history and struggles of a Jewish boy from a unique Soviet perspective. It is a story of war, anti-Semitism, survival, perseverance, good fortune, and success, which could have happened only in America. A solemn promise I made to my mother during the darkest days of the war prompted me to write this memoir.

In my early years, living in the once peaceful city of Beltz, in what is now Moldova, I felt like a foreigner among my own neighbors. I spoke only Russian while the community spoke Yiddish and the schools taught only Romanian. Yet, even more than language barriers would keep me as an outsider for many years. I would remain in perpetual exile, always in search of a passport to forge my way though an endless maze of barbed wire fences at political and personal borders.

Without warning, my childhood was shattered and my family was plunged into the madness and savagery of World War II. We were bombed out of slumber at 4 am on June 22, 1941, eight hours before Soviet foreign minister Molotov announced that Russia was attacked by the Nazis and we were at war.

For six weeks, running through fields, sleeping on the hard cold ground, dodging bullets, and surviving on whatever food we could forage, my parents and I barely kept ahead of the German lines.

Somehow, my parents and I survived. Left behind in the rubble were eleven members of our family who were captured and brutally murdered.

As a ten-year-old boy, I learned the terror of bombings, the sounds of flying bullets, the pain of near starvation, the torment of the hunted, and the omnipresence of death.