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In the experience of Emil Draitser, a professor of Russian literature at Hunter College in New York City, memoir writing was only for ballet dancers and former generals. But ultimately to relieve himself of the baggage of growing up Jewish in the Soviet Union under Stalin and to share the story of his early struggles with his son, Draitser wrote his new memoir, "Shush." The book details his early life, from 1937 through the death of Stalin, much of which was spent identifying with the oppressor and living in shame of being a Jew.

Draitser first realized that he needed to explore deeply his early struggle to juggle the strands of his Russian and Jewish identities in a country where anti-Semitism was rampant after a talk at SUNY Albany on Jewish humor. In conversation with his host, who had left Poland at age 8, Draitser remembered the professor confronting him with the following observation: "The moment you say the word 'Jewish' you automatically lower your voice." Having already been in America a good 20 years by this time, Draitser was surprised.

Then, a few months later, a similar incident occurred that "reinforced the need to attend to the issue." During an interview with a program collecting oral histories of Eastern European Jews, Draitser found himself unexpectedly emotional. "The interviewer asked me about growing up Jewish, and I started telling him, and all of sudden I felt a lump in my throat -- as a grown man!" The graduate student interviewer noted his emotion and assured Draitser that many others had reacted similarly. "I realized there was nothing wrong with me personally," said Draitser. "This is the story of my generation."

Even little things contributed to his realization that Americans needed to hear his story, for example, his annoyance at Frank McCourt's observation at the beginning of the memoir "Angela's Ashes." "What irked me was that in the opening pages the author writes, 'Many people complain about the poor childhoods of their kin, but what could be worse than being an Irish child in America?'" Of course, in Draitser's eyes growing up under Stalin in the Soviet Union was far worse.

Draitser's final reason for writing this memoir was to explain to his son, who grew up in the United States, why he left the Soviet Union. Although the overt reason was being blacklisted for a satirical article deemed critical of an important Soviet official, "Shush" lays bare a deeper, lifelong struggle juggling the strands of his Russian and Jewish identities in a country where anti-Semitism was rampant.

Draitser's alienation from his Jewish self started when he began attending school at the age of 8, after returning to his hometown of Odessa from Tashkent, where he had spent the war years with his mother. He was very young when the two escaped from Odessa on the last train out before the Germans arrived, a train that dodged bombs along the way. But when children in his class would remark about how his family had hidden out in safety in Tashkent during the war, he felt somehow guilty, not fully understanding that while he and his mother were in Tashkent, his father was at the front and his uncles were fighting in the war.

Living in an environment of lies and insinuations, perhaps shame and denial of his Jewish identity were the only way to go. Stalin, for example, would claim that he did everything to save the Soviet Jews, including organizing an evacuation to Tashkent, where ostensibly the Jews flourished, said Draitser, who then asked, "If that were true, how come 2 million Jews perished on Soviet soil when the Germans invaded?"

So when Draitser's schoolmates taunted him, he did not know how to handle it. "As a child, I did not want, in the face of all the attacks, to admit to myself that I was Jewish," he said. Of course, what it means to be Jewish was not clear to him. His mother came from a religious family and did try to do something, at least food-wise, at every Jewish holiday.

But the language his family spoke at home was primarily Russian, and his school curriculum was Russian. "I knew Russian literature; I don't know Jewish literature. I knew Russian language, proverbs, sayings, and folklore," he said.

Draitser viewed himself as thoroughly Russian, except that he wasn't really. He yearned for a name that was Russian, being teased mercilessly for his very Jewish sounding name.

"With a name like Samuel Abram Draitser," he said, "you have nowhere to hide. If your name sounds European, it is assumed to be Jewish as a fact." He noted that his school friend, an ethnic Russian adopted by a Norwegian engineer who came to Russia in the 1930s, had the last name of Henriksen. "He was as Russian as you can be, but for all the children in our class, he was a Jew," said Draitser. "He couldn't escape it. I remember him laughing; he could laugh it off and I couldn't."

Although Draitser's parents spoke Yiddish between them if they did not want the children to understand, Draitser saw himself as entirely a Russian speaker. In the book, he talks about his total surprise when his younger brother, an excellent actor, mimicked Draitser coming home from school in the afternoon and saying, "Epes essen?" (Is there something to eat?), using the Yiddish he was in complete denial of even understanding.

During the whole period following World War II until after Stalin's death, Draitser said, the Soviet Union saw waves of anti-Semitic campaigns; although they used words like "cosmopolitans" to denote the enemy, it was clear this was a codeword for Jews.

Draitser explained how the editorial articles in Pravda at the time were, on the surface, extremely boring, but not so if you looked beneath the surface.

"If you try to understand what they are saying, it becomes absolutely captivating," he said. "What are cosmopolitans? Those who believe that Russian culture is inferior to world culture -- usually literary critics who wrote bad reviews of a Russian play or a book by a Russian writer." The clincher was that next to the Russian pen names of the critics would appear, in brackets, their real names, for example, "Petrov [Shapiro]."

Although the elaborate language of anti-Semitism was too complicated for a child, the hatred of Jews that was always simmering in the background had a profound effect.

"It created tension between what was permissible at that time to talk about and what was not," said Draitser. "The word 'shush' succinctly describes the whole situation. You cannot be Jewish openly; you have to hide your identity and keep a low profile as much as you can."

When in 1952 doctors, and in specific Jewish ones, were accused of plotting to kill all the Kremlin leaders, Draitser felt guilty by association. "You are in a country in which power belongs not to you, and by association you feel guilty as child," he said.

Draitser continued, "This is why this condition of being Jewish without the possibility to defend yourself you figure out is like the Stockholm syndrome on a personal level." This syndrome refers to the psychological phenomenon wherein hostages express adulation and have positive feelings toward their captors. Draitser explained, "Your survival instinct tells you to understand your captors, that maybe there is some truth in what they are saying. You try to find something you can live with."

As sad as many parts of the memoir are, what Draitser called his "tipping point" -- the description of which he read to the assembled group -- is a backhanded affirmation of his Jewish identity. It takes place before Passover in 1951 when his mother dragged him, then a young teenager, along with two bags of flour to a bakery on the edge of town where the flour would be traded for matzah. He was an ornery teen, longing to sleep another three hours, and a proud Russian with no interest in Jewish ritual, so he was not in a great mood.

But something happened to him when he stepped into the house where the matzah was being baked by a jolly, young, curly-haired baker. He wrote, "To my surprise, this tiny semidark bakery, lit by a single weak bulb sticking out from a bare, badly plastered wall, feels like home."

When the baker hands him the freshly baked matzah and wishes him "Gut Yontev" (Happy holiday, in Yiddish), Draitser was taken aback. "At first I am frightened by the unexpected geniality, the special, familial closeness expressed by a total stranger," he wrote.

Draitser had to decide whether to respond in Yiddish, which was the language of his shame, or in Russian. As the scene replayed itself many times as Draitser grew up, he slowly understood all of its dimensions. The baker, he realized, probably understood and empathized with the quandary of the confused, Russified teenager. But even as a young teen Draitser understood that responding to the greeting in Russian would be inappropriate. "I do not yet understand but intuitively sense the incongruity of such a response," he wrote, "a response to a Jewish greeting spoken in a language of mockery and harassment."

His muttered response of "Gut Yontev" under his breath to the baker, Draitsen understood later, was his first step out of his own personal slavery. "I did not understand that by accepting the matzo from the hands of another Jew, I took the first step of my private Passover, my own exodus, my own private flight toward freedom," he wrote. But like the Israelites who had to wander in the desert for 40 years to give up the shameful habits of slavery, it has taken Draitser many years to fully assume the habits of freedom. Perhaps his new memoir "Shush" has helped him complete this process.