Shush!

"The old man wears a skullcap, and I m puzzled and secretly irritated: why declare to everybody that you re a Jew?" Growing up in Odessa in Soviet Ukraine in the post-Holocaust years, under Stalin, Draitser despises his Jewish identity. Mocked at school, he absorbs the virulent anti-Semitism. He hates Yiddish. Now a professor of Russian at Hunter College in New York, he looks back, blending historical overview with a present-tense narrative of how it feels to be a child taught to despise his culture. More than the commentary, the unforgettable drama--and the answer to the racism--is the…