Editing Openai/6874b524-4134-8013-b5e6-0601c853d841 (section)

=== Assistant: Excellent. ===
Excellent. The decade from 1958 to 1968 was one of contradiction and complexity—a genuine thaw, yes, but one whose warmth came in fits and starts, punctuated by censorship, paranoia, and the ever-lurking shadow of what had come before.

This was the high point of the Khrushchev Thaw, when Solzhenitsyn published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, jazz and film enjoyed brief moments of openness, and a new generation of Soviet youth—unburdened by war, but not yet crushed by Brezhnevian stagnation—began asking different questions.

For the Gershovitz family, these were the years in which old silences finally broke—but not always in the ways they hoped.