In college, I made the ill-advised decision to join the cross-country ski team. Slow, given to daydreams, and so lacking any sense of direction that my friends had taken to using me as a sort of reverse compass, I wound my way through the woods, miles behind, dreaming of another dreamer: Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin. Growing up in a family of Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union, I first knew Nabokov not as the author of the controversial novel Lolita, but rather as that rare Russian butterfly, the Friend of the Jews. I heard stories about how he ended friendships over anti-Semitic remarks, shopped in Nazi-boycotted Jewish stores, spoke up for Israel and against anti-Semitism. Nabokov had been born into an aristocratic Russian family with a tradition of fighting for Jewish rights. He fled the Bolsheviks for...

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