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Born in 1937, Tomas Venclova is a Lithuanian scholar, poet, author and translator. He lectured at University of California, Berkeley, where he became friends with the poets Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky. He is currently a full professor at Yale University. [Listener: Andrzej Wolski; date recorded: 2011]

TRANSCRIPT: And so I decided then to emigrate, the only question being was how? It was then possible to emigrate, especially if you were Jewish because Jewish groups in the West were putting a lot of pressure on the American government. The American government was putting pressure on the Soviet government and in fact an agreement was reached that if a Jew wanted to leave for Israel he could do that – with difficulty, but he could. It was necessary, so to speak. One had to get together a lot of documents, which wasn’t always easy to do but it was necessary. At one time there was a tax brought in that meant a person had to return the money which the authorities had spent, as it were, on their education – that tax was abolished but it was being enforced at one point. In a word, if you were a Jew, you could leave, however difficult or easy it was. And lots did leave – far from all of them – to go to Israel. Many went to Europe or the United States. Lots of people who weren’t Jewish also left. Sometimes people from mixed marriages, sometimes people who weren’t Jewish at all but who, as it were, were ostensibly... were going to go to Israel.

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