Why a corporate lawyer walked away to write

Long before he was a corporate lawyer, and long before he was an author, Daniel Jaffee was a boy in suburban New Jersey, slipping down to the basement to plunk out short stories on his mother’s old manual typewriter. 

Now 70, Jaffee has written a memoir, Russian Silhouette. It draws on seven trips to the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia between the 1970s and the 1990s, and it is as much about the people he met there as it is about the way they helped him understand himself.

For Jaffee, writing began as a hobby. His parents had lived through the Great Depression, and he recognised the importance of a solid career with a steady income. Law was the option they suggested.

“I couldn’t have told you what it was lawyers did day-to-day, but I was gearing up to become one, nonetheless,” he recalled. So, he went to Harvard Law School. 

Russian came into the picture through that same practical thinking. In the mid-1970s, with a career in international law in mind, he figured the Soviet Union was one of two countries worth watching. He had studied French in high school and had family history of emigration from the former Russian Empire, so at Princeton University he switched to Russian. After Harvard Law School, he became a corporate lawyer. But he didn’t enjoy it. 

So, he made himself a bargain. If he could write the first draft of a novel while practising law and still want to write more, he would leave and write for as long as his savings held out. Over two years, before and after work, on weekends and during holidays, he drafted a novel.

“When I completed a draft and realised that I wanted to keep writing, I gave my boss six weeks’ notice, and left,” he said. Just in case, he kept his licence to practise law in force for 10 more years.

He took workshops at the Harvard Extension School, began publishing short stories and taught creative writing in an adult education school in the Boston area. Then he enrolled in a Master of Fine Arts program at Vermont College, which he said changed his life.

“The faculty pushed me to dig deeply into myself and mine the artistic potential of fears, angers, and shames,” he explained.

Around the same time, he began translating Russian-Jewish émigré literature, most notably the work of Israeli author Dina Rubina. He describes it as a writing apprenticeship, especially as Rubina corresponded with him about her choices and visited him twice in Boston while they worked on her satire of Russian émigré life in Israel, Here Comes the Messiah!

When his husband, Leo Cabranes-Grant, was hired as a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the couple moved across the country. Jaffee went on to teach creative writing for 20 years in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program.

His connection to Russian life, though, began closer to home. Soviet Jewish refugees were settling in his hometown of Cherry Hill, and during university vacations he volunteered with the local Jewish Family Service as an interpreter, taking new arrivals to doctors’ appointments, synagogue and the movies.

“While I was teaching them about life in the US, they were teaching me about life in the USSR,” he said.

A Princeton fellowship later took him to the Soviet Union for a summer, where he met his friends’ relatives and dozens of other Soviet Jews who wanted to speak with an American.

The memoir finally took shape after the death in February 2023 of one of his dearest Soviet friends, Alla Podrabinek, who had followed her dissident husband into Siberian exile.

“I wanted Alla and all the others to be remembered the way I remembered them, with love and admiration,” Jaffee said.

He chose to tell the story through his own eyes rather than presume to know what his friends thought and felt. That meant including his coming out as a gay man, which ran alongside his advocacy for Soviet Jews and dissidents.

“If I hid this truth from my reader, how could I expect a reader to trust my memoir as an honest rendering of experience?” he explained.

He also saw a parallel between their lives and his. Some of the Jewish families he met in Moscow and Leningrad had packed half their belongings into cartons but had not yet applied for permission to emigrate, fearing repercussions.

“I had my inner psychological baggage packed,” Jaffee recalled. “I was ready to come out as gay, but I dreaded taking that last step for fear of rejection by family, of encountering potential career obstacles, and so forth.”

He admitted that getting the book onto the page took work. His first draft ran to about 800 pages. He spent weeks on the floor of his home office sorting decades of correspondence and translated Soviet legal documents, then halved the manuscript before approaching his editor, who felt chapters on translating and analysing dissident trial transcripts were still too detailed and full of legal jargon. So Jaffee rewrote them from scratch.

The harder part was one he hadn’t expected. Recalling his friends’ suffering brought the emotions back.

“I can’t tell you how many times I sat at my computer and had to pause while drafting the memoir in order to cover my face simply to rock and weep for them all,” he said.

As heartbreaking as it was for him, he knew it all had to be written down. And ultimately, he wants to ensure that readers understand his core message: when we engage in tikkun olam we may well be healing ourselves.

“All civil rights and human rights activities are related because all assert the dignity of every human being.” 

Russian Silhouette is available for purchase on Amazon, amazon.com.au/Russian-Silhouette-Memoir-Activism-Identity/dp/196898304X