The gates of November (24 page)

That summer the Slepaks and their friends vacationed on a large island in the Dnieper River about one hundred miles southeast of Kiev. The island was unpopulated; the nearest habitation was the village of Prokhorivka across the river. Once again they talked among themselves, without inhibitions. Around the campfire they listened to news over the shortwave radio: Volodya, Masha, and Sanya Slepak; Leonid and Fanya Lipkovsky; Mara Abramovich; Volodya and Lyalya Prestin and their son, Minya; David, Noya, and Vika Drapkin; Victor and Lena Polsky and their daughter, Marina. They had with them the sailboat
Dolphin.
In a camp about three hundred feet away was another circle of friends, dissidents who had no wish to leave the Soviet Union; the excitable David Drapkin referred to them scornfully as
assimiliants.
The two camps sat together around the campfire, listening to unfriendly voices over the radio, talking quietly, singing to the strains of Leonid Lipkovsky’s guitar.

From those unfriendly voices they learned, in the third week of August, that the Soviet Union and four of its Warsaw Pact allies had invaded Czechoslovakia. Communist tanks and troops had quickly and with little bloodshed shut off the hum of democratic possibilities emanating from that sovereign socialist country: an end to censorship; a candid critique of Soviet-style communism; a liberal socialism.

The small circle of friends was enraged, sobered, frightened by that news, and confirmed in their conviction that they should leave their country. Surely the death of liberal Czechoslovakia meant the end of liberal hopes in the heart of the Soviet Union as well.

Volodya and Masha and their friends returned to Moscow some days after the invasion.

On August 25 seven men and women staged a demonstration in Red Square, raising banners that read
LONG LIVE FREE AND INDEPENDENT CZECHOSLOVAKIA
and to
YOUR FREEDOM AND OURS
. They were arrested by the KGB.

Volodya did not attend the Simchat Torah celebration in the Moscow synagogue that fall of 1968. Again, the reason he gave was concern over his security clearance.

In the course of a press conference in Paris on December 3, 1966, Premier Alexei Kosygin had remarked that “as far as the reunification of families is concerned, if some families wish to meet or if they wish to leave the Soviet Union, the road is open to them….”

There is a spring 1967 photograph of Jews on a crowded platform in the rail station in Riga, men and women in their thirties and forties, with some children, starting out on the first leg of their journey to Israel. Jews were being let out, about one thousand people every year, from the southern and western Ukraine, the Baltic states, Hungary.

One day in the fall of 1968—around the time when Richard Nixon was elected president of the United States—the Drapkins informed the Slepaks and their circle of friends that a group of Jews from Riga had been granted exit visas and would soon be leaving for Israel from Moscow. Did the Moscow circle want to meet some of the people from the Riga circle when they arrived in Moscow to pick up their visas? That was how it was done: You went to Moscow from Riga, visited the Dutch Embassy for your Israel visa and the Austrian Embassy for your transit visa, had all the required documents photographed, returned to your city to collect your family, traveled back by train to Moscow with the family, then boarded a flight to Vienna. Yes, the Moscow circle did indeed want to meet with some of the people from the Riga circle.

The meeting occurred on December 25, 1968, in the Moscow apartment of the Drapkins. Over the past months the Drapkins had introduced the group to a number of former prisoners who had been in labor camps for Zionist activities. One had served a sentence of six years. The circle had listened to accounts of the camps and to plans for the reorganization of Zionist groups. Other visitors had told of meetings that were dealing with the possible beginnings of a nationwide movement of Soviet Jews and the start of a Jewish samizdat press. David Drapkin and his wife had already decided that they and their daughter would one day emigrate from the Soviet Union. In the meantime, to sever himself entirely from assimilation, he had stopped eating Russian food and reading Russian authors.

Now, in the Drapkins’ apartment, the circle talked with six people from Riga, among them a man named Mark Blum, in his late twenties, who was not returning to Riga because he was unmarried and had no family there. Instead he was to leave for Israel shortly via Vienna. Did anyone in the group wish to give him the personal data needed by the Israelis in order for them to send the official invitations that were necessary for Soviet visa applications? Names, addresses, children, dates of birth, names of parents, relatives in Israel. He would give the information to the Israelis, who would then search for the relatives. In cases of the total absence of relatives, the Israeli authorities would look into the possibility of other arrangements.

Members of the group began to write down the information.

Volodya and Masha sat looking at each other. It was late evening. The curtains were drawn against the winter gloom outside. Masha got to her feet and took Volodya’s hand, and they moved to a dark corner near a window and a desk and stood with their backs to the others.

Masha said quietly, “This is a special opportunity. Who knows when it might happen again? Are you ready to do it?”

Volodya, lost in fearful hesitation, did not respond.

Fighting back her apprehension about the consequences of their act upon their children, Masha said, “We must use this opportunity.”

And Volodya, after a brief silence, said, “Let’s do it,” and felt they had suddenly fallen into deep and icy waters.

The family chronicles record Masha’s uncertainty about what she might have done had Volodya refused. Made a further effort to persuade him, she maintains. There is a vague hint of divorce, but sober reality put that out of mind: Under Soviet law, she might have gained her visa to Israel and lost her young children to Volodya.

That evening Volodya and Masha transmitted to Mark Blum the necessary data on their family. That was the day, December 25, 1968, when three American astronauts flew around the moon, seventy miles from its forbidding surface, and one of them recited, for all the world to hear, the opening verses in the Book of Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.…”

The Slepaks had informed their older son, Sanya, then sixteen, that they intended to emigrate; but the younger son, Leonya, nine years old, knew nothing, and they would have to talk with him. Masha’s mother knew; she had given them her blessing, said she wanted to leave with them; indeed there was a remote possibility that she had cousins in Israel. Volodya’s father was unaware of his son’s and daughter-in-law’s intentions; he, too, would have to be told. But not immediately. First, they wanted to see what would come of the information they had given Mark Blum—who, in Israel, changed his name to Mordechai Lapid, became very devout, and in 1993 was killed by an Arab terrorist.

Now they waited. And lived their lives on the surface as if that evening meeting had never taken place. No one shadowed them; all appeared normal in the apartment building and in the workplace. But they had moved out of the ranks of the people and were now disloyal citizens, indeed would have been regarded as near criminals in the eyes of their Russian colleagues and coworkers had their plans become known.

During the time of their waiting, the dissident movement began to grow. Individuals of extraordinary stature, honored by the Soviet government and central to Soviet life, citizens of high privilege and national pride, such as the celebrated physicist Andrei Sakharov and the noted scholar Roy Medvedev, moved into the ranks of the human rights movement. Their works entered the illicit world of samizdat publications: Sakharov’s
Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom,
a critique of the Soviet Union’s social structure; Medvedev’s
Let History Judge,
an exhaustive and chilling study of the Stalinist era.

The samizdat journal
Khronika
was established in April 1968 by the poet and editor Natalya Gorbanevskaya: a bulletin containing only basic information, without commentary; one copy typed with several carbons, the copies handed to others for retyping, the tissue-thin sheets stapled together and passed from hand to hand. No one seems to know how many that journal reached. Volodya and Masha were among those who read it. Reports of secret trials and the persecution of Lithuanian and Ukrainian Catholics, Seventh-Day Adventists, Buddhists, Jehovah’s Witnesses; stories of prisoners in psychiatric hospitals, of hunger strikes, protest letters, sudden loss of jobs, searches of apartments, arrests, visa requests, prison camps. One knew nothing of the fetid corners of the Soviet house from the official media; those stories were to be found only in publications like
Khronika
and, later, in others, including the clandestine Jewish publications that began to appear in the 1970s.

Early in 1969, soon after Mark Blum had left for Israel with the information the Slepaks and their friends had given him, Volodya asked his father to come to the apartment for a visit. Solomon Slepak was then seventy-six years old, silver-haired, stocky, a rugged, robust-looking man, with smooth pink features and clear brown eyes that effectively concealed the difficulties he was having with his heart.

The three of them, Masha, Volodya, and Solomon, sat in the large room of the apartment. Solomon looked uncomfortable and kept glancing at his wristwatch.

Volodya told him in a quiet voice that they had decided to apply for an exit visa to Israel.

Solomon Slepak stared at his son.

Volodya said they had asked for an official invitation from Israel, and as soon as it arrived, they would send in their visa application.

Solomon jumped to his feet. “You are crazy!”

“We’ve made our decision,” said Volodya.

“You are enemies of the people!”

Masha sat silent, observing the tempest of father and son.

“Israel!” Solomon Slepak said with contempt. “I could understand if you had decided to go to America or Canada for a better life. I was in both countries, I know how people live there. But to go to Israel, to a fascist state!”

Volodya said, “We’ve made our decision.”

“I lived among Jews. I know what it is like.”

“We won’t change our minds.”

“I warn you,” Solomon raged, “we’ll be on opposite sides of the barricades!”

“We are going,” said Volodya.

“I am telling you now, I will do everything in my power to stop you!” shouted Solomon, and stormed out of the apartment, slamming the door.

Volodya remembers the reverberating air in the suddenly silent room and the fury and dread he felt as he wondered how much influence his father still had in the post-Stalin Communist Party.

The official invitation from Israel arrived in the mail in March 1969. It consisted of two sheets of paper fastened together. The first, directed to the Soviet authorities, was from the woman who claimed to be a Slepak “relative”; the Slepaks, official inquiry had revealed, were without true relatives in Israel. It stated the names, addresses, and dates of birth of the Soviet citizens who were her “relatives,” the precise nature of the “family relationship,” and an assurance of providing for them. The second sheet of paper was a statement from the Foreign Ministry of Israel, certifying the signature of the inviting “relative,” joining in her request, and guaranteeing that those invited would be given citizenship after their arrival.

The invitation was the core element in the tortuous visa application process they were about to undertake: the key to the exit door of the Soviet Union and the entrance door to Israel. Looking at it closely, Volodya saw that his and Masha’s names were replete with egregious spelling errors that could not be corrected. He was dismayed. They would now have to wait for a second invitation.

Volodya knew that all letters from abroad, before being delivered, were opened and read by the authorities. It was only a matter of days until the KGB informed the head of the institute that engineer Slepak was planning to emigrate. He would be fired immediately. He now needed to find someone else who was emigrating to Israel. More months would pass before the second invitation arrived. To apply for the visa, he needed
kharakteristika,
references from his place of work. He would have to tell people with whom he had worked for years that the references were to be directed to OVIR, the Department of Visas and Permissions, for an emigration visa. How mortifying it would be to have to ask for
kharakteristika
from his current place of work after being fired because of the KGB report. The institute chiefs would subject him to a barrage of meetings filled with derisive talk, humiliating questions, degrading accusations.

He decided to leave his work at the institute, find a simpler job, and ask for
kharakteristika
from there.

A day or so after he had received the invitation from Israel, he handed the deputy director of the institute a statement to the effect that he wished to leave his job and, according to the rights granted him by law, would no longer come to work after two weeks.

The astonished deputy director asked, “Why?”

Volodya said he had found a new job.

The deputy director asked, “What job? Where?”

Volodya said he preferred to keep that information to himself.

The deputy director asked, “Would you stay if you were made head of the department and given a higher salary?” The head of a department was normally in charge of three to five laboratories.

Volodya said, “No.”

Two weeks later he gave up his job.

He asked his friends to find him a new job, and after a short while obtained work in one of the offices of the Trust Geophysica, which was involved in oil prospecting and was mapping the strata of the earths crust in certain regions of the Soviet Union. Small explosive charges would be set off at a depth of five to eight feet. Located around the charges at distances of two or three miles were devices that would record onto magnetic tapes the oscillating waves that rolled through the earth. By comparing the frequencies of those waves, one could obtain a picture of the earths crust in the area of the charges. Such comparisons could be made only by a computer, but the signals on the tapes were in analog form, which a computer could not read. Volodya’s job was to design an electronic instrument that could transform analog signals into digital ones, which computers could read and analyze.