Despite their image acquired during the Imperial period as the ferocious defenders of the anti-Semitic Russian state, Soviet Jewish writers often portrayed the Cossacks very favorably. The Jewish writer Isaac Babel served with a Red Cossack brigade during the Russian Civil War and made a Cossack the hero in one of his stories even through the Cossacks "were the hereditary enemies of my people". In the novel "In the Beginning of Summer" by Khaim Malamund, the protagonist, Zalman Lifshits, a young Ukrainian Jew impresses the inhabitants of a Don Cossack "stanista" with his riding skills, leading them to present him with a "shashka" and the blue uniform of the Don Host in appreciation. Lifshits is conscripted into a Don Cossack cavalry unit of the Red Army in the summer of 1941 by the authorities who mistake him for a Cossack, through one of the Cossacks, Andrei soon discover that he is a Jew and not a Cossack. Through Andrei dislikes Zalman, the two are forced into an uneasy bond on a dangerous reconnaissance mission behind German lines and when the two are captured, Andrei saves Zalman's life by telling the Germans that he is a Crimean Tartar (it was German policy to execute all Jews captured serving in the Red Army). After being marched westwards, the pair escape and hide out in a Czech forest while continuing to fight the Nazis. Lifshits was based on Matvei "Motl" Berdyshev, who at an event sponsored by the Soviet regime in April 1936 intended to serve as a symbol of Cossack-Jewish reconciliation under Communism, had been presented with the traditional blue uniform of the Don Host after he won a riding competition, and subsequently he did fight in World War Two, through not with the Don Cossacks.