The problem was that until 1983 17-year-old learners could ride 250cc machines on provisional licences MPs reduced the limit to 125cc With the RD350LC a new category of racing was born Phil West is right. It's her way of never forgetting the family heritage of ideological and religious persecution. Her book is truly exceptional, and deserves a prize.Lesley ChamberlainThe reviewer's book'Motherland' is published by Atlantic next week. There's never a moment in this book when Jewish identity becomes a loaded political abstraction. Gessen evokes compellingly real, complex lives.Yolochka, Sasha and family emigrated to the US in 1981. Six years later, perestroika made travel abroad possible for Ester and Rozalia, in their 80s.

Meanwhile, in 1991, Yolochka and Sasha's daughter - Masha Gessen herself - went back to the country she left at 11 to find her emotional roots. Also highly educated, she was married young to an idealistic Jewish Communist killed in the war. She struggled as a single mother, first (by chance) also in Ashkhabad and, after the war, in officially anti-Semitic Moscow. Excelling in languages, she became a censor of foreign journalists' reports.The Western reporters who kicked their heels in Moscow's Telegraph Office, waiting to know if the censor had passed their copy, became fascinated by their invisible nemesis.

The brilliant US correspondent Harrison Salisbury measured his hunches against what she accepted or deleted. Rozalia delighted in the chess-game, though in later life she never forgave herself. She was one of a tiny handful who rejoiced when Stalin died in 1953.Rozalia's daughter, Yolochka, twice married and divorced before meeting her true husband: Ester's son Sasha.The story of how Ester and Rozalia met in Moscow and found they had everything in common, and agreed on nothing, is grippingly told. The Soviet political police failed to recruit Ester as an informer. Her only compromise was to marry, to get Bella and herself back safe to Moscow.