The gates of November (40 page)

In December 1989 Volodya flew to Moscow to speak at a meeting of representatives of all the Jewish organizations in the former USSR. He arrived on the day Andrei Sakharov was laid to rest but too late to attend the funeral.

In Moscow’s Cinema Center, rented for the conference, he addressed a crowd of about four hundred participants: young people, refuseniks, rabbis, Americans, Israelis. He told them how good it felt to be free, wished the refuseniks good luck, related some anecdotes about his life in Israel, and announced that in his opinion, the Jewish Agency, the body responsible for the settlement of immigrants in Israel, was not doing a proper job. Distrustful as ever of bureaucrats, ministers, and governments, Volodya rarely wasted an opportunity to make his views on that subject known. The head of the Jewish Agency, Simcha Dinitz, was present. There was a row.

The following day Volodya visited Andrei Sakharov’s widow, Elena Bonner, and afterward went with members of the Israeli delegation to Sakharov’s grave in the Vostriakovskoe Cemetery. They placed flowers on the grave and stood in silence in the gathering darkness.

One day that week Volodya traveled alone to his old apartment on Gorky Street, bearing a bouquet of flowers. A cold winter day, the streets of Moscow dirty with snow. He went past the bookstore and beneath the archway and through the courtyard and the entrance door and into the small foyer and climbed the half-flight of stairs to the narrow elevator. Then the rickety ride up. Apartment 77. The brown wooden door.

They were still there, the family with whom he and Masha had exchanged apartments back in March 1986: a married couple in their thirties, with a little girl; the woman’s, maternal grandmother, and her paternal grandmother’s sister—that is, her father’s aunt. Only the paternal grandmother’s sister was Jewish. The other two women, the maternal grandmother and the young wife, were Russian; the young husband, half Russian, one-quarter Uzbek, one-quarter Ukrainian.

They were delighted to see Volodya. The man opened a bottle of cognac. They asked about life in Israel. Were Volodya and Masha happy there? And how were the boys? Volodya remained for two hours, talking.

Afterward he walked down one flight to the apartment of his old friends, a man and woman in their sixties. The man, Leonid, was an architect and the son of the Russian composer Reinhold Moritzovich Glière. His wife, Tamara, was an editor in a major children’s publishing house; her father, once a member of the Moscow City Council. Their daughter had been in Sanya’s class all through high school.

The woman hugged Volodya. She asked about Masha and the boys. They sat there talking. She was a large woman, the same height as Volodya but wider in build, her eyes deep blue, her blond hair going gray. An emotional person, she gave voice easily to her heart. She asked, “Why did you leave? You were born here; you have good friends here.”

Volodya said, “You know, it was because of the anti-Semitism. We wanted a good future.”

“But now the anti-Semitism is going down.”

“It’s like waves. Soon it will go up.”

“But it’s difficult to leave the place where one is born. How could you tear up your roots?” she asked.

To which Volodya responded, “Sometimes that’s necessary.”

He stayed two hours. The next day, he returned to Israel.

Two and a half years later, in June 1991, he was back in Moscow to deliver a talk at another conference. He found the city dirtier than ever, but otherwise the same, save for the foreign stores in its center: boutiques, French perfume shops, and a McDonald’s in Pushkin Square, where, in December 1965, some two hundred people had assembled near the statue of the poet and unfurled placards with the words
RESPECT THE SOVIET CONSTITUTION
—the first human rights action with placards in Soviet history.

Masha did not accompany him on either trip. She refused to return to the scenes of her bitter memories in that sorrowful land.

He sensed the freedom in the city, the openness of talk and action. His father’s Russia no longer existed. He asked himself: Where would he be now, my father, if he were still alive? And he answered: On the streets, demonstrating with the old Communists, trying for yet another chance at his old dream.

For the Jews in Moscow there were more schools, more synagogues. And summer camps and seminaries. Volodya met with old friends, told them that he saw no future for Jews in Russia. First get them out, he insisted; then strengthen their identity.

On the final day of the conference, he addressed the crowd—about three hundred delegates from Europe, Canada, Israel—at the Sabbath morning service in the Moscow synagogue across the street from the school he had attended as a child.

He had no opportunity on that trip to visit the apartment, but he telephoned the family to give them his good wishes. The young woman answered. How good it was to hear from him! Yes, they were all well. Except for her paternal grandmother’s sister, the Jewish sister: She had died.

Volodya expressed his sorrow, offered his condolences. They talked for a while longer, and Volodya said good-bye and hung up. It was not lost on him that there were no more Jews left in the apartment on Gorky Street.

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Anyone familiar with this subject will recognize the debt I owe to those listed here. I want to acknowledge with special appreciation the work of Richard Pipes, Leonard Schapiro, Zvi Gitelman, Nora Levin, Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, Alan Bullock, Robert Conquest, Walter Laqueur, Arkady Vaks berg, and James H. Billington. Their writings were both loran and theodolite to my stumblings and constructions.

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