I left Minsk, Belarus – blessed be that moment – for America in October of 1992. Afterwards, I visited it twice, in 1994 and 2017, each time leaving the city, my home of 31 years, with the firm intention to never go again. However, in the summer of 2024 I changed my mind and did travel to Minsk. Moreover, seeing Jewish religious life reviving there, regretfully not as quickly and noticeably as it is doing in Moscow, made me want to repeat this pleasant experience.  

What had compelled me to make the trip is a book I have been working on about my late father, Zvi Hirsh Mikhlin, who was a shochet from 1944 to 1973 in Bobruisk, the small town about 100 miles south-west of Minsk where I grew up. I assumed that if I could find some confirmation of this fact – the mention of his name in a publication or any information in a local historical museum – it would be helpful for publishing my book.  

I spent numerous hours in the Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress in Washington DC, trying in vain to find my father’s name in one of the dozen books about Jewish life in the Soviet Union. Surprisingly, my Bobruisk is mentioned in almost every one of these books. It was one of only a few places in postwar Belarus, besides Minsk, of course, where was a functioning synagogue. I was thrilled that at least the fact there was a shochet in the town is proven. My father’s name isn’t mentioned even in a recently published book about Jewish life in Belarus during the final decade of the Stalin regime by Leonid Smilovitsky, a Belarusian-born historian, where many fascinating details about religious life in Bobruisk are uncovered, even the names and addresses of its 75 religious residents.

My face beamed with excitement when I woke up in the morning. Even six time zones away from America, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, I felt myself amongst the Americans celebrating the country’s 238^th birthday and was overwhelmed with gratitude to the country that adopted me and transformed me into a happy, content, and fulfilled person. This was the second summer that I had come to this small town on the marvelous shores of the Baltic Sea or, more accurately, of its Gulf of Riga, to escape the heat and humidity of the Washington D.C. area and to work on my memoirs. I was delighted to notice the Latvian national flag at a single-story office building located exactly in front of the window where I was sitting and writing. Latvia also had something to celebrate on the Fourth of July. It was windy, and the flag, two red strips with a narrow white one between, was cheerfully fluttering in the breeze.