The gates of November (39 page)
Read The gates of November Online
Authors: Chaim Potok
Tags: #Mariya, #Dissenters, #Social Science, #family, #Jewish Studies, #Jewish communists - Soviet Union - Biography, #Communism & Socialism, #Fiction, #Religion, #Political Science, #Europe, #Political Ideologies, #History, #History - General History, #Historical - General, #History Of Jews, #Judaism, #Vladimir, #jewish, #Russia & the Former Soviet Union, #Solomon, #Historical, #Solomon - Family, #Refuseniks - Biography, #Jews - Soviet Union - Biography, #Soviet Union, #Jews, #Jewish communists, #20th century, #Refuseniks, #holocaust, #General, #Slepak family, #Biography & Autobiography, #Slepak
That April about fifty refuseniks received invitations to a Passover Seder to be held in the Moscow residence of the American ambassador to the Soviet Union. The arrangements had been scrupulously attended to by several American Jewish women led by Sara Inick, wife of the American cultural attaché. The matzah and wine were flown in from Israel. In a large ballroom stood a dozen tables, all meticulously arranged for Passover. At each table sat a number of Americans: diplomats, press people. Ambassador Arthur Hartman and his wife greeted each person who entered. When everyone had arrived, the ambassador and his wife came over to Masha and Volodya, who had only the day before ended his hunger strike. They sat together at the same table. The ambassador put on a skullcap, and the Seder began. The refuseniks took turns reading from the Haggadah.
In the middle of the reading, George Shultz, the American secretary of state, entered the hall wearing a skullcap. He went slowly from one table of refuseniks to another, shaking hands, exchanging words, handing each person a book or memento. He recognized all the refuseniks, knew them by name, seemed awed and reverential in their presence. These activists—their names and photographs by now mythic symbols of defiance against tyranny, displayed everywhere, on placards, in books, schools, at demonstrations—were men and women who had for years defied, paid a terrible price, and were continuing to defy, a pitiless empire. Alexander Lerner was there that evening. Masha and Volodya Slepak. Viktor Brailovsky. Nahum Meiman. Iosif Begun. And many others. When George Shultz approached Masha and Volodya, he shook their hands and said he had a gift for them. His assistant handed him a photograph, which he gave to Masha and Volodya: a picture of Sanya and Leonid and the grandchildren taken at the time of the two brothers’ hunger strike in front of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., to commemorate their parents’ seventeenth year in refusal. Shultz then briefly addressed the refuseniks. He said he and the American administration would never cease fighting for the freedom of Soviet Jewry. Then he introduced the new American ambassador; Ambassador Hartman was soon to retire. The reading of the Haggadah continued. At the conclusion of the Seder every family was presented with a box of Israeli matzos and every woman there received a red rose. Then all but a half dozen guests left.
In another room of the embassy, the half dozen guests who had remained, Volodya and Masha among them, spoke at some length with Richard Schifter, George Shultz’s aide in human rights issues. He had accompanied Shultz into the hall, and the refuseniks in the room knew him well; it was his third or fourth visit to Moscow. Later, as the refuseniks left the protected grounds of the embassy and returned to Soviet soil, they passed under the scrutiny of many KGB eyes.
Congressman Scheuer was back in Moscow that August and again asked Gorbachev to release the Slepaks. Gorbachev said that if the Americans and Soviets signed an arms agreement, the Slepaks might be released. When Masha heard that, she thought: We are being sold like slaves, one by one, children and parents separately, each kept behind for a possible higher bid.
Suddenly, in September, one of the long-term refuseniks received permission to leave. Then others. And then Iosif Begun and Ida Nudel. For all the friends of the Slepaks, the card from OVIR, the exit visa. Only Masha, Volodya, Alexander Lerner, and a very few others were left. Masha thought she and Volodya were deliberately being separated from their old friends. To be alone in Moscow. Another exile. Interminable.
On October 13, 1987, at 2:00 p.m., the telephone rang in the Slepak apartment on Vesnina Street. Volodya wasn’t home. Masha lifted the receiver.
A man’s voice asked, “Is Vladimir Semyonovich at home?”
“No,” said Masha.
“Is this Maria Isaakovna?”
“Yes.”
“This is Deputy Chief of Moscow OVIR.” He gave Masha his name, but she has since forgotten it and it is therefore absent from these chronicles. “You are granted permission to leave the USSR. Please come tomorrow to the OVIR office to get the card with the list of documents you must bring with you in order to obtain your visas.”
Masha had the presence of mind to say, “But tomorrow is Wednesday; it is not a reception day at OVIR.”
“It will be for you. When you arrive, ring the bell. A militiaman will open the door. Tell him your name, and say that Major [another forgotten name] is waiting for you. The major will give you the card with the list of the documents you must bring when you come for your exit visas.”
Masha, stunned and disoriented, hung up the telephone. After eighteen years of waiting—that was it? A telephone call instead of the usual postcard! She had expected the heavens to part, the earth to tremble. This was so … ordinary. She sat waiting and after a while began to think she had imagined it all, had dreamed it; there had been no call.
Volodya returned. She told him about the telephone call. He refused to believe it. Finally he said, “Tomorrow we’ll go to OVIR. If they give us the card, we’ll know it’s real.”
The next day they went to OVIR. A guard let them inside. The empty building echoed with their footsteps. They felt like sleepwalkers. An official handed them the card with the list of documents they would need to bring in order to receive exit visas. Masha held the card. What they had endured for this little piece of paper!
They went over to the restaurant where a farewell party was in progress for Ida Nudel. Masha followed behind Volodya, who entered holding the card high over his head and announcing that they had received permission to leave. There was a large crowd—friends, correspondents. Pandemonium erupted Joy. Tears. Exhilaration. If Slepak is getting out, we’ll all get out! The correspondents wanted interviews.
There was much to do. They collected the many papers they needed, paid for the visas and for the loss of their Soviet citizenship. With the papers and a bank receipt in hand, they came to OVIR and got their visas. Showing the visas, they were able to book seats on a flight to Vienna. Then they went to the embassy of the Netherlands, which at the time represented Israel in the USSR, and received their visas to Israel. Their Austrian transit visas they obtained in the Austrian Embassy. All those visas enabled them finally to purchase the plane tickets they had booked.
In the meantime they were saying good-bye to all their relatives. They visited the graves of Masha’s father and Volodya’s mother. And stood in silence awhile before the grave of Solomon Slepak. They sold some of their furniture and gave away many of their possessions to relatives and to fellow refuseniks. About 150 people showed up at the farewell party in the apartment, among them Richard Schifter, aide to Secretary of State George Shultz.
Once again, by sheerest chance, in the apartment that evening was Sister Gloria Coleman, the Catholic nun from the United States who had become involved in the Soviet Jewry movement. Unaware that they had received permission to leave, she came with others to visit the Slepaks and stumbled upon the celebration. She recalls a crowded apartment filled with laughter and joy and remembers seeing Volodya, “an amazing-looking man, wonderfully well-looking, considering what he had been through, sitting there amid the reverence and respect being shown him by the refuseniks and the press. He was effusive. The whole room radiated with excitement, elation.” She went over to Volodya and introduced herself. He took her hand in both of his. She was warmed by the way he immediately engaged her, brought her into the celebration, indeed by the way the refuseniks made all who were there, including the press, part of the evening’s happiness. They did not play to the press; they involved the press as people in the drama of their lives.
The day before their departure Volodya and Masha brought their baggage to customs in the airport. Seven suitcases. They waited five hours and then stood watching as the customs agents picked everything apart. It was four in the morning when the agents were done. They had, they told Masha and Volodya, no blank forms for the baggage receipts. “But don’t worry, when you come tomorrow to check in, the receipts will be there for you.”
About two dozen people—relatives and very close friends—were at the airport to see them off. It was late afternoon of October 25, 1987. In an odd juncture of events, their son Sanya had left the Soviet Union precisely ten years before. The clerk at the counter who went through their tickets and documents could not find the baggage receipts; they would be unable to claim their baggage. To the devil with all the baggage, thought Masha, frantic. Let’s just get out of this place! The chronicles record that it was a wet, cloudy day, the air filled with a mixture of snow and rain. The Soviet aircraft was a TU-154, and the flight number was SU-263. It departed for Vienna at 8:15 p.m.
During the flight an attendant came over to Masha and Volodya and handed them their baggage receipts. They had been found on the floor of the aircraft, she said. The final knife thrust of the KGB, thought Masha.
When she and Volodya descended the stairway and stepped onto the tarmac in the Vienna airport, they were met by Ambassador Max Kampelman, head of the American delegation to the Soviet-American Disarmament Conference in Vienna. Inside the terminal waited Sanya; Senator John and Teresa Heinz of Pennsylvania; the American ambassador to Austria; Marion Wiesel, wife of Elie Wiesel; a representative of the Jewish Agency, which was responsible for the settlement of Soviet immigrants in Israel; and the Slepaks’ close friends Kirill and Irina Khenkin, who had come from Munich, where they worked for Radio Liberty, one of the stations Volodya used to bring in on his radio during his years in the forests outside Moscow, on camping trips in the Ukraine, in the apartment on Gorky Street, and as he navigated the hospital elevator through the waves of noise thrown up by the Kremlin against the outside world.
There were many journalists in the terminal. The press conference lasted about twenty minutes. As soon as it was over, the American ambassador asked Masha and Volodya to join him at his residence for dinner. They could spend the night there, in a room already prepared for them.
The next day Masha and Volodya and Sanya flew to Israel in a Lear-jet chartered by Senator Heinz, Elie Wiesel, and Patti and John Thompson, a Christian couple from Nashville. When the pilot announced that they were above Israeli waters, Volodya opened a bottle of champagne. They gazed out the windows at the blue glitter of the sea, and Masha saw the beaches of Tel Aviv below. The jet landed, and Masha and Volodya came out the door and down the stairs and stepped onto the soil of Israel. It was a warm, sunny October day. A huge crowd of relatives, friends, and reporters greeted them in the terminal. Leonid, involved at the time in a controversy with Israeli authorities over his passport and not wanting to touch down in Israel lest he be obliged to serve in the army, was not present. Volodya opened the press conference. “Finally we are here.…”
The chronicles record that Masha was wearing her amulet.
Three days later they celebrated Volodya’s sixtieth birthday in the Jerusalem residence of Chaim Herzog, president of Israel. From the residence Volodya telephoned Moscow and talked with Alexander Lerner, who, some weeks later, received his exit visa and went to Israel. When the festivities at the residence of the president ended, Volodya and Masha made their way to a more private party arranged by some of their closest friends, immigrants from the Soviet Union, one of whom owned the Jerusalem discotheque where the second party went on and on until the very early hours of the morning.
The chronicles further record that Volodya and Masha flew to the United States that November and were greeted at Kennedy Airport by the five grandchildren they had never seen; three of the children were Leo’s, and two Sanya’s. They then traveled about for two months, pleading the cause of other refuseniks and raising funds for the Soviet Jewry movement. They were looked upon as valiant figures and listened to with profound regard as they spoke about the thousands of refuseniks still remaining in the USSR, their fate uncertain even in the days of perestroika and glasnost. Not until the dissolution of Communist power in 1991 would the word “refusenik” begin to fade from the worlds agenda.
Finally the chronicles tell us that in June 1988 Masha and Volodya set out with a number of other refuseniks on a goodwill and fund-raising mission to London, Los Angeles, Australia, and New Zealand under the auspices of the World Jewish Congress. In Australia, at the request of Isi Liebler, then vice-president of the congress, they all were to meet and express their gratitude to Prime Minister Bob Hawke, one of the most noted figures in the struggle for Soviet Jewry.
During the night that Masha and Volodya stayed in Los Angeles, someone entered their second-floor hotel room through the balcony, whose doors they had neglected to lock, and stole every object of value that lay in view: their watches and camera, Volodya’s wallet and credit cards, and all of Masha’s jewelry, including the amulet. Fortunately they had placed their passports, traveler’s checks, and airline tickets in a suitcase. They flew on to Australia for appearances before admiring audiences and the meeting with the prime minister. The mission over, they returned to Israel.
A few months later Volodya and Masha found suitable jobs in Israel.
Their sons were by then permanently settled in the United States.
Here the chronicles come to an end.
Epilogue
Telephone Calls
T
oday, as Volodya approaches his seventieth birthday, his hair is entirely gray, his beard short and snowy white, growing in two roundish clumps from his smooth pink cheeks. He carries the same paunch, which he is still trying to lose, and his voice, somewhat huskier than before, remains deep and resonant and exuberant. And Masha is smooth-faced, plump, her intelligent eyes bright behind their thick glasses, her short, straight hair russet-colored, youthful, her voice lilting, musical. They seem to hide their scars well, though I am told that Masha has moments of dark moods, and that Volodya’s boisterousness will suddenly evaporate when certain people and experiences come up in conversation.
In the summer of 1995 my wife and I visited them in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. They were spending a month in a house rented by Leonid. Deep inside a dense green world of oaks and white birches and elms and maples and evergreens, beneath a glittering blue sky, and in air so clear it seemed an intoxicating miracle each time one breathed, there, on the front deck, reclining on a chaise, was Volodya, reading a Russian book Leonid had brought back from a recent business trip to Moscow:
Polygons of Satan: Crimes of the Communist Party
by Igor Bunich, published in 1994 in Rostov-on-Don. On the cover was a picture of the young, bearded, aggressive Trotsky.
Volodya and Masha, looking remarkably robust, were cheerful, relaxed, given easily to hearty laughter. But I knew he had suffered a mild heart attack some months before and she was losing vision in one eye. Leonid had once told me that his father referred lightly to their various illnesses as “telephone calls from the other world.”
Did their neighbors know who they were, these strangers in this Pennsylvania mountain village? To look at them—Volodya in a white polo shirt and baggy chinos and padding about in his bare feet; Masha in a dark blue linen skirt and a gauzy light pink sleeveless blouse and wearing clogs—who would think that once they had been among the leaders of a movement that had hurled itself against, and helped bring down, the Soviet colossus?
Masha prepared a green salad and cooked a pot of rice after a recipe taught her by an Israeli American visitor to their apartment in Israel. Outside, two deer emerged from the bluish green shadows of the woods and nibbled at the grass in front of the house.
We sat around a table, and they talked of their lives in apartment 7, Rivka Guber Street, Kfar Saba, the municipality near Tel Aviv where they now lived. Masha’s Hebrew is now quite good; Volodya is more comfortable with English. In Kfar Saba, they said, there were new lights in the park near the apartment house, and on warm nights one could hear the high-pitched voices of children playing on the grass. Yes, the elementary school and home for the aged were still there, and nothing had changed in the bus station on the boulevard; it was the same busy, dusty place. In the apartment building lived people from America, Russia, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Poland, Argentina, England, as well as native-born Israelis. A school principal, engineers, teachers, a retired professor of physiology, a fax machine technician, an IBM department head, an architect, a pharmacist, a physician, a tourist bus driver, the owner of a picture-framing shop, an accountant. The apartment house was a sprawl of connected tall white buildings with separate entrances; on warm days voices spilled from the open windows and mixed with the sounds of traffic on the boulevard and the voices of children in the park. Most of their family now lived in Israel—siblings, nieces, nephews, cousins—and the telephone in the apartment was often busy.
As the conversation ebbed and flowed around the subject of their family, one sensed in Volodya and Masha a subdued bewilderment and pain. They seemed unable to comprehend how it had happened: the separation between them and their sons. After all they had endured, now to be connected to their sons for most of the year only by telephone. And unable to call at a mere whim. Overseas telephone calls were costly. Their lives now brushed the borders of indigence, and they needed to be careful with their expenses. The Kremlin had robbed them of their most productive years. They came to Israel too late in life to have worked the minimum ten years necessary for a retirement pension. Nor could they have resumed their professions. Volodya had fallen behind nearly two decades in his field of engineering; when he tried to return to it in Israel, at the age of sixty, he found himself in a stupefying new world of technology, the disparity made even greater by the more rigorous requirements of Western engineering. Utterly futile to start training again at that age. The same was true of Masha. He obtained an engineering position in a laboratory at Tel Aviv University; she found work as a radiologist in the Kfar Saba hospital. Upon their retirement, neither will have worked the necessary ten years in Israel to qualify for a full Social Security pension, and Volodya will receive a small Prisoner of Zion pension. Not enough for them to live on, let alone make frequent telephone calls to their sons in America.
I asked: Did they regret having left the Soviet Union, seeing that the regime had collapsed?
Without hesitation, they answered: Not for a moment.
Volodya saw no immediate good future for the people of Russia; it would take forty years to create the beginnings of a worthwhile society there. And there was no hope at all for the Jews, who would ultimately vanish through assimilation. “The cultural buildup of Jews in Russia today is temporary and unnatural,” he said. “It will be good until the first pogrom.” And Masha added, “If we had not made the effort to leave, our children would have assimilated and disappeared as Jews.”
Back in the 1960s they had talked at some length about the possibility of leaving the Soviet Union, long before that fateful December night, in 1969, when Masha prevailed upon Volodya to choose with her the dangerous path of emigration. They knew what they wanted: to have the same possibilities as everyone else for a job and a place in society; to be able to speak freely; to educate their children in the best schools; not to be stopped in one’s tracks because one was a Jew. They did not want their sons to live in a society where a lifetime of achievement and gain could be destroyed in an instant by anti-Semitism. Why invest one’s energy and creativity in such a society? Yes, while in refusal they had looked upon Israel as a perfect society, as one single harmonious family. Now they saw it as flawed, unified only in times of extreme crisis. True, it was a democracy, an open society; and yes, the entire world entered their sunny apartment through their radio and cable television. But they were concerned about the peace process, the terrorist attacks, the divisive politics, were appalled by what seemed to them a prevailing prejudice among some Israelis against Russian immigrants, who were at times accused of bringing criminals and prostitutes into the country, causing an increase in the number of road accidents, engaging in child abuse and acts of incest. A nasty business, all that bigotry. And in Israel! But no, they did not want to live in America. They had family in Israel. And many friends. They loved the informality of the country, the intimacies, the way people dropped in on one another, met and talked in each other’s kitchens. They were suspicious of the government, the parliament, the authorities; they liked the people. Their dream? To live nine months of each year in Israel and three months in America, where they could be with their children and grandchildren. And, for a long time in the future, to receive no telephone calls from the other world.
They accompanied us to our car, Volodya still barefoot, walking easily on rough pebbles and grass. I warned him about deer ticks and Lyme disease, and he answered cheerfully in his loud and husky voice that he knew about it. They stood in the driveway, watching and waving, as we backed out onto the paved road and drove away.
Many things come to mind as I near the end of this work, things omitted and included. The long hesitation with which I approached it: How write it once the subject of the refuseniks dissolved? All the worthy people left out: impossible to include them all. Should I have written about Alexander Lavout, the mathematician in Moscow who monitored what he claimed were the Soviet psychiatric hospitals where dissidents were drugged and silenced? And Natasha Khassin of Moscow, who took it upon herself to care for prisoners in far-off regions of the Soviet Union? And Yuli Kosharovsky of Moscow, the clandestine teacher of Hebrew? And Arkady Mai of Moscow, the historian? And Elena Seidel of Moscow, teacher of English? And Misha Beizer of Leningrad, the historian? And Leonid Zeliger and Aba Taratuta, both of Leningrad, the former a teacher of Hebrew, the latter an engineer and a teacher of Hebrew? And Iosif Zisels, the physicist from Chernovtsy, who helped prisoners improve their tormented lives? And—well, in truth, the many omissions are painful to contemplate. But an end has to be made.
I consider the things included. The central mystery of Solomon Slepak’s life: his repeated escapes from the clutches of Stalin. There has been no success in obtaining his KGB files, though many attempts were made before and during the writing of this work.
Recently a letter arrived from the KGB addressed to the grandmother of Olga, Leonid’s wife. The grandmother, a woman in her eighties who resides in Moscow, was terrified by the return address and immediately telephoned Leonid in New York. It turned out he had forgotten to tell her that while in Moscow some weeks before, he had made out an application to see the KGB files on his father and grandfather and given her name as an in-care-of local address.
The letter, dated June 27, 1995, reads:
Your application regarding Slepak, Vladimir Semyonovich, was reviewed.
In accordance with Article No. 5 of the Legal Code of the Russian Federation, “On Search Activity in the Russian Federation,” materials in connection with Slepak, V. S., as an individual whose guilt in committing a crime was not proved in an established manner, were destroyed.
At the same time, we also inform you that, in accordance with the above-mentioned article, the right to demand from the authorities of the Federal Service of Security the data about the nature of the received information in regard to that person is available only to the person himself, whose guilt in committing a crime was not proved according to the procedures established by law.
A. V. Tsaren ko
Deputy Chief
It is not much of a consolation for Volodya and Masha to be told now by the KGB that Volodya’s sentence to five years of exile was illegal. Volodya has decided to pursue the matter of his KGB files and will address his request directly to President Boris Yeltsin.
There is no mention in the letter about Leonid’s request to see the KGB files on his grandfather, the Old Bolshevik, Solomon Slepak.
I consider, too, my fascination with Volodya’s story, the way it held me in its grasp for years after its proximate appeal evaporated. Why did interest linger? What was there about it that was so beguiling? Perhaps the writer as amanuensis, as one watching from the sidelines and recording in safety the savage struggles of the activist, and wishing he had that courage, that boldness, to plunge into the foulness of existence, engage its cruelties, chance the scars of flesh and mind, face the possibility of annihilation? The individual who crosses the boundary from bystander to activist and hazards his or her life to change the world—an eternal mystery how that choice is made, that moment of crossing, the wonder of that transfiguration. The writer gazes upon it with awe, is mesmerized by its large daring, its radiance.
I have thought often about the exile of the Slepaks compared with the years in prisons and labor camps meted out to so many others. Torture, we know, leaves permanent psychic scars. Refusal is a condition of torture, crueler perhaps than exile, for there is a terminus to exile, and none to refusal. And surely exile is torture. During their five years in Siberia, Volodya and Masha experienced physical and mental subjugation, torture of an explicit and violating sort, and an initiation into the indifferent cruelty of despotism. But it was not the horror experienced, for example, by Gregory Steshenko in a psychiatric hospital, or by Natan Shcharansky and Alexander Solzhenitsyn in prisons and camps. In this regard, Volodya and Masha appear to have been more fortunate than some. Still, what point can there be in comparing pain and punishment? Do we know what scars they bear, what dreams wake them, what echoes of that cruel corner of Siberia haunt their sleep?
And finally, I write with the sobering impression that there is a cautionary tale in the Slepak chronicles; it waves a flag of danger at us in the sullen atmosphere of the early third century of the American Republic. Are there American variations of Solomon Slepak, those rendered so rigid by ideas that all reason fails them? Prudence, a cautious awareness of nuances, of complexities, of consequences, a perception of the unity of the American experience, and a saving sense of irony and humor—pervasive in the Founding Fathers and lacking in contemporary ideologues. Can we learn something from these chronicles about iron righteousness and rigid doctrine, about the stony heart, the sealed mind, the capricious use of law, and the tragedies that often result when theories are not adjusted to realities? Do the chronicles seem to reveal a glaring and almost obvious truth: the larger the nation, the more tumultuous its demise? Are we approaching the finale now to the bright possibilities once inherent in this land? Is that old America forever gone? Indeed, did it ever exist? Were we seduced as schoolchildren into a vision of a land green and golden from sea to shining sea, a land as illusory for many Americans as the Motherland of Solomon Slepak was for Volodya and Masha? Perhaps the more sensible question is not about what we once were but about what we intend ourselves to be one day. Things are happening to us today that we don’t seem able to explain. Can we enter the uncertain future without the corrosive cynicism, the clutching greed, the divisive self-interests—the beasts that destroyed the world of Solomon Slepak and rendered it uninhabitable to his family?
