The Pen­ny is Gone was writ­ten in secret in 1982 by a physi­cist liv­ing under KGB sur­veil­lance and haunt­ed by a ques­tion: why are the Jews — loy­al cit­i­zens, pro­duc­tive sci­en­tists, root­ed by gen­er­a­tions into the land — leav­ing the Sovi­et Union? No coun­try has ever alien­at­ed its Jews with­out pay­ing for it. And few coun­tries have so sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly per­fect­ed the archi­tec­ture of anti­semitism as did the Sovi­et Union. Draw­ing on his sur­vival of the Siege of Leningrad, his vast learn­ing, and his own slow pro­fes­sion­al destruc­tion at the hands of a sys­tem that denied what it was doing, Bezverkhny builds an argu­ment that, alas, has not aged a day. The author died soon after writ­ing The Pen­ny is Gone, trapped inside the Sovi­et Union, but his ideas lived through the typed man­u­script that trav­eled with his fam­i­ly to Amer­i­ca as the USSR was dis­solv­ing. His name­sake grand­son has trans­lat­ed it for the first time. This is their sto­ry, and the sto­ry of over a mil­lion Jews who found refuge in the West.