From the 1960s to the 1980s, the so-called “Third Wave” of emigration led over
300,000 Soviet citizens, including several dozen now well-known writers, into Western exile. The only legal basis for emigration was an Israeli visa, which explains why the majority of Third-Wave emigrants had a Jewish background—though by no means all of them, since the indispensable prerequisite was an invitation from Israel and not the “nationality” line in one’s Soviet passport. To this day, teleological narratives of these émigré biographies dominate, typically framing the United States as the a priori destination of choice. In contrast, recent work, in most cases autobiographically inspired, on the history of emigration has paid more attention to the question of precise trajectories and ruptures The workshop serves to delineate a field that has so far been treated at best historically-(auto-)biographically and only rather occasionally, but which has not yet been recognized in its structural and constitutive significance for the biographical self-reflection and for the literary work of emigrants of the Third Wave.