In the late 1980s, Philip Spiegel and his wife, Carolyn, traveled from Los Altos to Russia to participate in two Moscow Marathons. While there, they visited and befriended refuseniks.
Despite those moving experiences, the Menlo Park resident never imagined that two decades later he’d become an expert and an author on the topic of the Jewish exodus from the former Soviet Union.
At the age of 71, several years after retiring from a successful career as an engineer and training manager in the Silicon Valley semiconductor industry, Spiegel has published his first full-length book. “Triumph Over Tyranny: The Heroic Campaign That Saved 2,000,000 Jews” took him five years and 200 interviews to complete.
The 525-page book came out Oct. 15 and is available online and at local bookstores, as well as on Spiegel’s own Web site, www.triumph over tyranny.com.
To help launch things, Spiegel is in the midst of a sizeable book tour. He’s already had eight appearances in the Bay Area, and currently he’s on a five-stop tour through Mass-achusetts and New York. He’ll take another promotional trip to New Jersey later this month, which will be followed by even more Bay Area appearances, including a guest shot on John Rothmann’s KGO 810 AM radio show.
Busy? Well, that’s the way Spiegel wanted it. When his 2002 retirement from Advanced Micro Devices was approaching, he searched for a meaningful project to keep him occupied.
He aspired to write a book, but was wary, he said, because his only qualifications were his love of writing, a college editorship of an engineering magazine, industry technical papers and a short book about his parent’s hometown in Ukraine.
The idea for the book came to him after reading an article about Israeli children’s ignorance of the Soviet Jewish immigration.
“Even the children of Russian immigrants knew little about refuseniks or the Prisoners of Zion because they didn’t teach it in Israeli public schools,” Spiegel said. Prisoner of Zion is a formal designation issued by Israel to people who were persecuted for Zionist activities.
“No one had ever written a definitive and comprehensive history of the [refusenik] movement, so I decided that was going to be my retirement project,” he added.
When he began his research, Spiegel got encouragement and direction from two friends who were longtime activists and leaders in the Bay Area Council for Soviet Jews: David Waksberg and Morey Shapira, who both belonged to Spiegel’s synagogue, Congregation Kol Emeth in Palo Alto.
Waksberg and Shapira gave Spiegel names and contact information to help him start his research in 2003.
One of Spiegel’s first interviews was with former Secretary of State George Shultz. In 2006, he interviewed the world’s most famous refuseniks, Avital and Natan Sharansky; Natan wrote the book’s foreword. Eli Wiesel told Spiegel that the fall of communism was fostered by the fomenting of defiance among refuseniks and Russian Jews.
The term “refusenik” refers mainly to people from Eastern Bloc countries who were denied permission to emigrate by state officials.
Spiegel provides insight into this by translating quotes from KGB documents that rationalize the brutal and repressive policy against Jews.
Others around the world became activists for Russian Jewry, and Spiegel discovered a common theme in their motives. It was a chance for redemption, because so little was done for suffering European Jews during the Holocaust.
Spiegel and his wife got involved in the Soviet Jewry movement in the 1980s by organizing a letter-writing group at their synagogue.
“I have always been involved in helping Jews all over the world, from Argentina to Ethiopia,” he said.
Spiegel began the actual writing of the book in 2006, and it took him two years to complete it. Before it was published, Spiegel shared some of the chapters with Mimi Real, a European history teacher at the Lisa Kampner Hebrew Academy in San Francisco.
“The chapters he sent were not only enormously informative, but they were immensely readable, and thus engaged my 10th graders,” Real said. “At the time, there was little I could find on the history of the Soviet Jewry and refuse-nik movements that was not academic or outdated.”
Spiegel also developed and taught a five-session course titled “The Journey of Soviet Jewry” at Lehrhaus Judaica.
Now that the book is finished, and Spiegel is busy promoting it, he’s looking forward to editing the paperback version.
But he said he has no future plans to write. He’s interested in teaching about Soviet Jewry and getting others to teach it.
Moreover, five months ago, Spiegel’s first grandchild was born — so spending time with her will be his new retirement project
“Triumph Over Tyranny: The Heroic Campaigns That Saved 2,000,000 Soviet Jews” by Philip Spiegel (525 pages, Devora Publishing, $27.95)
Philip Spiegel is scheduled to appear 7:30 p.m. Dec. 3 at the Los Altos Public Library, 13 S. San Antonio Road, Los Altos. He is also slated to be a guest on the John Rothmann radio show on KGO 810 AM at 1 a.m. on Dec. 7. Full schedule of appearances: www.triumphovertyranny.com.