Daniel M. Jaffe

I'm very excited about my memoir, "Russian Silhouette: A Memoir of Activism and Identity." So much of my life experience led me to writing it. As a Politics major at Princeton University in the late 1970s, I concentrated in Russian Studies, volunteered as an interpreter for newly arriving Soviet Jewish immigrants, earned a university fellowship for language study in the USSR, and wrote an award-winning thesis on the Soviet Jewish emigration movement, a chapter of which was later published in the British journal, Soviet Jewish Affairs. At Harvard Law School, I studied Soviet law, wrote a thesis comparing Soviet and American civil rights laws on the free exercise of religion, and chaired the International Affairs Division of the Harvard Jewish Law Students Association — while also serving on the law school's Committee on Gay and Lesbian Legal Issues. I've been writing fiction and short memoir pieces for the past 35 years, and I've also translated contemporary Russian literature. Everything has been leading to "Russian Silhouette," my tenth published book.