A BOOK chronicling the landmark campaign by Australia, and notably the Jewish community, to help free Jews from the Soviet Union so they could emigrate to Israel and other destinations, has won a major literary prize.
Co-authored by Sam Lipski and Professor Suzanne Rutland, Let My People Go: The Untold Story of Australia and the Soviet Jews 1959-89, launched last year, has been jointly awarded the 2016 Prime Minister’s Literary Award in Australian History.
The book shares the PM’s award in the Australian History category with historian Geoffrey Blainey’s The Story of Australia’s People.
Judges stated Lipski and Rutland “have produced a path-breaking book about the struggles of the Soviet ‘refuseniks’. Replete with new information, [it] draws on a vast array of primary and secondary sources. These include ASIO files, Rutland’s painstaking research on Australia and Soviet Jewry, as well as unfettered access to the massive archive about the campaign for Soviet Jewry of Lipski’s friend Isi Leibler,” who is a former president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and activist for Soviet Jews.