Nearly all of the other Yiddish writers had vanished, Der Nister knew. Since 1948, the Soviet secret police had begun collecting them one by one as if trying to assemble a living encyclopedia of Yiddish literature, arranging them alphabetically in their prison cells and then lining them up by library catalogue number in front of the firing squad. Der Nister could look through his hidden shelves of recently banned books by all the writers he and Chagall had known and rattle off the dates when each one had been arrested. Anyone with the slightest talent was already in jail. Der Nister imagined Lefortovo Prison in Moscow as a kind of artists’ café. After a while he felt insulted not to have been invited.