Grisha’s Choice
A few days ago, I posted a piece about Grigory Perelman, the Jewish mathematician who solved the Poincaré conjecture. One of our readers, a Russian-Jewish mathematician of considerable attainment himself, sent me a private communication, essentially saying that Americans could not possibly understand what Soviet Jews had to go through. His reconstruction of the probable cause for Perelman’s decision turns the story from one about intellectual integrity to one about Jewish heartache and pride. As all of us engage the new reality of mounting world-wide anti-Semitism, his letter is a poignant reminder of how Jews lived while locked in a vise-grip of hatred. At the request of the author, I had to delete many details, since there could still be nasty consequences to friends and relatives living in Russia. The Iron Curtain may have fallen, but Russian hatred of Jews is alive and well.
I am afraid that Grisha’s words in the end of the article — why he gave up the medal — can be understood only by a well-informed mathematician who lived in Russia and knows something about the West as well.
Many people here know about anti-Semitism in Soviet mathematics but relatively few people know how discoveries — at all levels – of Jews, and then of other non-ethnic-Russian mathematicians too – were stolen by “big men.” For example, a famous problem was settled by a young Jewish undergraduate student who submitted his paper to a Soviet journal. His paper was kept there for two years — exactly the time his referee needed — with full knowledge of the editors — to publish these results under his own name. The real author was denied any access to mathematics — graduate schools didn’t take Jews at that time. Finally he found an obscure job — I think at a telephone station in a small Ukrainian town.
Yet too many people knew and talked about that. So, two years later, they published the paper of the young Jew who “also” obtained these results. The thief got all possible recognition, prestigious foreign prizes — and was allowed to travel abroad to collect them. Many people know his name because of “his” brilliant result. As far as I know, the young man was unable to obtain a graduate mathematical education. His famous paper remained his only publication. Only 16 years later, well after the USSR ceased to exist, he published three more papers, all of them in US journals. Yet in his best years he had to do something else, not mathematics.

Only in Israel gives us the story of 
