The Free World

August 1978. Brezhnev is in the Kremlin. Nuclear missiles stand primed in their Siberian silos. The Iron Curtain divides East from West. And in the muggy darkness of a train compartment, the young Krasnansky brothers—with their wives, their parents, and a pair of sleeping little kids—are crossing Italy. Italy! The destination of every Russian Jew who refused to play by the rules and go to Israel. Italy! Where all you have to do is spin the globe, choose a country (Canada? New Zealand?), and wait for the papers. Italy! For the Krasnanskys, it might as well be the moon.

Alongside thousands of other Russian immigrants, they will spend half a year in the village of Ladispoli, on the outskirts of Rome, experiencing the full range of the human circus that is Italy—love affairs, freedom, a nostalgic reliving of the Soviet past, and blind and frantic negotiations with an unknowable future. Part holiday, part exile, these six months will be—for good and ill—the greatest adventure of their lives.