Life in Refusal

When Alison, an adventurous young political scientist, travels to Russia to document the dawning of glasnost and perestroika, she meets Benjamin Charney, a rocket scientist whose applications to emigrate have been denied repeatedly by Soviet authorities. He is an elegant, humble and wise cancer stricken member of the Jewish "refusnick" community whose illness is complicated by an acute heart condition. Soviet doctors refuse to operate on him. Alison, a Jew in denial of her own identity, is reluctantly drawn into Ben's world and eventually becomes a forceful advocate for him. She meets him again ten years later, following the fall of the Soviet empire, in the United States and again, poignantly, from beyond the grave.