Review of Gregori Freiman's I seem to be a Jew

I just finished reading a book called I seem to be a Jew by Grigori Freiman. (The title apparently invokes a line of the poem Babi Yar by the prominent post-Stalinist Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko.)

(The copy I have is one signed by the translator Melvyn Nathanson to Marshall Shulman. Unsurprisingly, I found it in a bookstore near Columbia University.)

It is an old book, from 1980. It is about the situation in mathematics in Russia during the cold war. The author was a mathematician (I wonder what ever happened to him) who went on about the state of anti-Semitism at the time in the Soviet mathematical hierarchy.

Mathematics has been singled out over and over agin by those in the know as a stronghold of academic anti-Semitism in Russia. One does not hear similar stories about Soviet physics or biology. There are still some traces of this in mathematicians who moved here from the former USSR.

I should offer an aside, that I happen to personally know a few Russian emigre mathematicians who are genuinely princes among men, and very fine people, who in no way exhibit any signs of anti-Semitism, and I have absolutely no reason to believe that they are bigoted in any way. On the other hand I have quite a bit of second-hand information about other mathematicians (in my own university) who brought their bigotry with them. In my experience, the more prominent they are the less they have time for the pettiness of anti-Semitism. I am grateful for that.

The book itself is very much a product of the cold war, and it shows on every page. It can be quite informative though. It si odd to look in to a society where it was normal to expect that your mail was read, and there was even an organization which officially did that. It is odd to see how one's travel was controlled so carefully, and all the other stuff that goes along with a repressive regime that was the Soviet Union.