The gates of November (23 page)

Astonishingly, the brutal crushing of Jewish nationalism led some young secular Jews on journeys for other forms of expression, on quests into heretofore unexplored regions of religious worship, and they discovered the noisy, blatantly public territory of Simchat Torah, the exuberant festival when Jews mark the end and the new beginning of the annual Torah-reading cycle, its fervid enthusiasms only loosely codified by Jewish law. The passion, the openness, the frenzied exhilaration. They danced; they sang; they played their guitars.

And so in the fall of 1966, only a few weeks after the sailing trip of the Slepaks and their friends, hundreds of young people gathered inside and outside the Moscow synagogue, milling about, singing, dancing, marching with the Torah scrolls, brazenly celebrating the holiday in the presence of the KGB and the militia, which had set up two huge floodlights and were photographing everyone who entered the synagogue. Also present were Elie Wiesel and a number of tourists, who then journeyed home and reported what they had seen.

The style of the KGB was first to watch and follow and then to pounce and arrest. Much of the time they did the watching openly; part of their style of terror was to let you know that you were being stalked. The Slepaks felt certain that there were no informers in their small circle of friends because no one was watching them.

Among the members of that circle were Victor and Noya Drapkin. He was an engineer; she, a biologist. They had a daughter, Vika. Victor Drapkin, who later changed his first name to David, was a tall, gray-eyed, balding man in his mid-forties, with a slightly hoarse voice and a limp from a childhood fall beneath a tram that had shorn off part of one foot, leaving him only his heel. He was a noisy, argumentative, excitable man, who despised Jewish assimilationists; from his lips the term
assimiliant
issued forth as an epithet. Noya, or Noemi, Drapkin—in many ways the opposite of her husband: dark-haired, dark-eyed, short, restrained—had been born in Riga, where she received a good Jewish education, the Baltic states having been acquired by the Soviet Union as recently as the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact of 1939 and not subjected to radical religious cleansing because they lay along the rim of the empire. She knew Hebrew, had experienced traditional Jewish life, and each year visited her relatives and friends in Riga, where there was a vigorous Jewish community. She had convinced her husband of the virtues of Zionism, and the two of them lost no opportunity to talk about Israel as they sat with their close friends around camphres.

Those friends, skilled engineers and scientists trained in the finest institutes in the Soviet Union, had talked during the early years of their friendship about what they thought were the real reasons Khrushchev had delivered his secret speech; about their samizdat reading; and, in later years, about the arrests and trial of Daniel and Sinyavsky; about rumors of Jews leaving from border cities of the Soviet Union to be reunited with their families in Israel. At first it was only a few Russians talking about a few other Russians, all the discourse plainly illegal. The sole reason for their interest in those outside events: curiosity. They had no wish to join any movements, not the least inclination to enter the perilous arena of party politics. In the beginning there were no activists among those friends; they were merely a few young inquisitive people who only wanted to talk.

Then, gradually over the years, inside the ambience of intimacy and safety they created for themselves, they began to widen the landscape of their curiosity, tentatively extending it at times to take in Israel, where, they understood, there were collective farms known as kibbutzim. How did the kibbutz compare with the Soviet Unions kolkhoz? the friends wondered. And they listened to the Voice of Israel, drawn from the air by the radios they carried into the forests and on summer journeys.

In the early years they had no feeling that they were anything other than Russians, no connectedness to Israelis. Only David and Noya Drapkin kept insisting that they were all part of one people. The others maintained that if they were Jews at all, they were Russian Jews and had nothing to do with Israel; but yes, wasn’t it interesting what the Israelis were trying to build, their clearly thriving collective farms, their strong citizen army, their socialist government, their open society?

As the years went by, with no abatement of anti-Semitism, some among the friends ventured to wonder aloud from time to time if they were really part of the world of Russia. And soon others began to murmur to one another about the twilight land they inhabited. No real sense anymore of who they truly were: Russians, Jews, what?

It was clear by now that the chauvinistic Slavic groups would never accept them as part of the Russian people.

They said to one another, “Even if we tell them we’re Russian, they tell us we’re Jews.” “Are we ever invited to any of their parties? And even if we were invited, would we go?” “Maybe during and right after the war, yes, we would have gone. Then there was the feeling we were all one country, one people. That was the only time I ever felt like a whole person and not one part of me Russian, another part of me Jewish. But then, after the arrest of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, the shooting of the Yiddish writers, the ‘Doctors’ Plot,’ the endless articles condemning Jews—no, we wouldn’t go. The long history of anti-Semitism in this country has really turned us into a separate people.”

A friend once wondered aloud, “What if there had been no anti-Semitism at all?”

Volodya said, “Then we would have joined the country as another nationality and vanished, and my father’s dream would have come true.”

Masha agreed. There had been many intermarriages during and right after the war, when it seemed the dream was becoming real. Now, fewer and fewer.

“Why haven’t the Russians seen that?” someone murmured.

“Because they hate us too much,” said Masha.

And one day, in 1965, she suddenly and clearly saw herself and her family emigrating to Israel, an idea she had only vaguely conjured up before. She mentioned it to Volodya, who thought her impulsive, a woman, a dreamer.

And sometime during the final weeks of the summers of 1965 and 1966, one of the friends said he was going to the Simchat Torah celebration in the Moscow synagogue and did Volodya want to come along, and Volodya said it was not a good idea, the KGB and militia would be there, too, and he didn’t want to jeopardize his security clearance.

Only decades later did Volodya and Masha come to realize that their circle of friends was one of thousands like it in the Soviet Union, a society shriveled by terror and reduced to forming, by way of instinctive response, the smallest and safest communal units. Among those friendship circles were a minuscule number of the intelligentsia, which included a few of Russia’s finest writers. It was the initial battles fought by the friendship circles that prepared the ground for the later Jewish struggle, which in turn, when it gained force, helped shore up the democratic human rights movement of the dissident Russians. Those early circles were microcosms of small turbulences that would one day link up and play a major role in bringing about the sudden, reverberating implosion of one of the mightiest empires in human history.

Each of those circles, from Siberia in the east to the Baltics in the west, was detonated into action by diverse events: the horrific tales told by prisoners released from labor camps; the secret speech of Khrushchev in 1956; the show trial of Daniel and Sinyavsky in 1966; the Trial of the Four and the Soviet tanks that crushed the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968; the constant arrests, trials, physical violence, internal exile to provincial towns, sudden loss of jobs or expulsion from institutes, long sentences in the labor camps—indeed, the near-crushing of the dissident movement in the 1970s and early 1980s—that marked the re-Stalinization policies of Brezhnev and his successors, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, ailing men dedicated to the entrenched old order. But each repressive effort by the regime ignited additional fires among the dissidents. No one seemed aware of it then, but inexorable events had been set in motion, eerily reminiscent of those that, starting around the turn of the century, had climaxed in 1917 with the overthrow of the tsar.

For Jewish circles like those of the Slepaks and their friends, the quickening moment was the 1967 Six-Day War in the Middle East.

As the summer of 1967 approached, conflict in the Middle East appeared inevitable. Egypt had blockaded the Strait of Tiran; the United Nations, yielding to the demands of the Egyptians, had withdrawn its buffer troops from the Sinai Peninsula; Arab nations were calling for a holy war against Israel. It set the air shivering, the likelihood of another Holocaust befalling a large segment of the Jewish people as the world stood by, watching. But Israel was not the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Israelis, taking a page from Clausewitz’s classic work on war, struck first. Soviet foreign policy now favored the Arab cause, and the Soviet media condemned the preemptive strikes of the Israeli armed forces, told repeatedly of Arab victories, and then fell abruptly silent. Volodya and Masha and their friends tried to pick up the overseas voices on their radios and were able to catch the speech of Soviet Ambassador Fedorenko in the United Nations, a spewing forth of venomous hate against Israel and Moshe Dayan. Suddenly all the Soviet media erupted with invective toward Israel and Jews as, after the few days of fighting, the full dimensions of the Israeli victory began to become apparent. On June 15
Izvestia
announced that the Israelis were killing prisoners of war and executing women and children. Magazines and newspapers compared the Israelis to the Nazis. At factory meetings, workers passed unanimous resolutions condemning the “aggression” of Israel. The very air throbbed with official hysteria directed against Jews, who were accused of being Nazi collaborators, a genocidal people. Public celebration of the Israeli victory was, of course, out of the question; a number of private celebrations by Jewish students resulted in police harassment, searches, arrests.

There now occurred inside the circle of seven families of which the Slepaks were a part a sudden electrifying collective and exhilarating awareness of power over their enemies, of life-enhancing alternatives to the degradations of Soviet life, of a triumphant goal to be fought for: emigration. For some members of the group, those thoughts still lay far below consciousness; for others, they were full-blown but remained for the time being unspoken. For all, the possibility of emigration became a permanent condition of their lives. Unlike the Russian democratic dissidents, who sought to remain and reform the system, these Jewish dissidents, and the movement they were soon to be part of, abandoned all hope for themselves within the system, cut the cord of destiny that had until then bound them to Russia, and now, with a slowly growing sense of belonging to the Jewish people, began to cast about for ways to leave the Soviet Union.

Diplomatic relations between Israel and the Soviet Union came to an end that June. The Israeli Embassy in Moscow was directed to close down. A few days later, on June 13, a twenty-one-year-old man named Yasha Kazakov—he had been raised in an assimilated home, subjected to some anti-Semitism, and had begun on his own to read books on Jewish history—suddenly decided that if the Soviet Union was breaking off relations with the state of Israel, he would break off relations with the Soviet Union. He sent a letter from his parents’ apartment in Moscow to the Supreme Soviet renouncing his citizenship and demanding what he claimed was his right to emigrate to Israel. The letter went unanswered. He then wrote to U Thant, secretary-general of the United Nations, hand-delivered the letter to the American Embassy, and was then arrested by the KGB, and interrogated at length. “You will never receive an exit visa,” he was told upon his release. “You were born in Russia, and you will die in Russia.” He continued to write letters demanding that he be allowed to leave the country, and in early 1969 he received permission to emigrate to Israel. Yasha Kazakov was the first Jew in the post-Stalin era to challenge personally and openly the Soviet regime and succeed.

Around the same time another Jew, Boris Kochubievsky from Kiev, who had applied to leave the Soviet Union in 1967, was refused. He applied again, was arrested, placed on trial in May 1969, and given three years in a labor camp. The Soviet pattern of arbitrary and capricious handling of visa applicants had been set, a roulette wheel of justice. It was to characterize the twenty-year period of the visa war.

In July 1967, following the Six-Day War, the Slepaks and their older son, Sanya, spent two weeks on the shore of Lake Tzesarka near the Lithuanian city of Vilna. Together with them were David and Noya Drapkin and their daughter, Vika; Victor and Lena Polsky and their daughter, Marina; Volodya and Lyalya Prestin and their son, Minya. They had one motorcycle, one car, the boat
Dolphin,
and a kayak. Each couple shared a tent. There was one tent for the two girls, and one for the two boys. They sat around campfires every night listening to overseas radio broadcasts and talking about the Six-Day War. The sons and daughters understood that what was said around those campfires and inside their apartments was never to be repeated to anyone anywhere.

After the two weeks of sailing and camping, the Drapkins and Prestins returned to Moscow, and the Slepaks and Polskys drove to Vilna and Kovno, where they visited the ghetto areas of the Nazi occupation and the site where several thousand Jews from Kovno had been murdered. They motored through Latvia, Estonia, and northwest Russia, talking often of the recent war in the Middle East and listening to the radio.

Over the shortwave radio in the course of the next year came the shocking news from the United States of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in April 1968; of riots in the streets of Washington, Chicago, Detroit, Boston; of troops guarding the American capital. First, President Kennedy; now, Dr. King. And in June, exactly one year after the onset of the Six-Day War, came the news of the assassination, in Los Angeles, of Senator Robert Kennedy by a twenty-four-year-old Christian Arab who had been born in Jordanian Jerusalem. Volodya and Masha and their friends wondered about the nature of American society, its stability, its violence, its future.