Between Tel Aviv and Moscow: A Life of Dissent and Exile in Mandate Palestine and the Soviet Union

Leah Trachtman-Palchan was an ordinary woman who lived an extraordinary life. This was a life of migration, dissent, exile and survival. Born in the final years of Tsarist Russia, her family was forced to leave their small town following the repeated pogroms of the Civil War era. A two year voyage followed, bringing them all to British Mandate Palestine in 1921. Here what seems like a typical Jewish story of migration from Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century took an unexpected turn. As a teenager, Leah joined the Communist movement in Palestine--illegal under the British Mandate. She was arrested, imprisoned and eventually deported by the British to the Soviet Union. This memoir is filled with colorful, and sometimes harrowing, sketches of the people who passed through her life during the era of Stalin's Great Purges and the evacuation of factories to Siberia during World War II. Shedding new light on both Mandate Palestine and the Jewish experience in Soviet Moscow, this book reveals the remarkable story of a woman living through some of the most pivotal events of twentieth-century history.

Leah Trachtman-Palchan was born in 1913 in present-day Ukraine. Her family emigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1921 and she lived there until she was exiled to Moscow in 1931. She returned to Israel in 1971 and died there in 1995.

Nir Arielli is Lecturer in International History and Politics at University of Leeds. Leah Trachtman-Palchan was his Great Aunt.