The Gates of November

by Chaim Potok

  Thus ended the first human rights action with placards and slogans in the history of the Soviet Union.

  In the years that followed, demonstrators assembled in Pushkin Square on the night of December 5 to commemorate that first peaceful public protest. One of those present in 1966 was Andrei Sakharov, the physicist who had helped the Soviet Union develop its hydrogen bomb. He came each year for the next decade.

  Volodya and Masha heard of the demonstration immediately after it took place. One day in Volodya’s institute, during a lunch break in the cafeteria, two engineers from the design bureau sat talking about the demonstration and books written by Sinyavsky and Daniel that had been published illegally in the Soviet Union or overseas: This Is Moscow Speaking, Hands, Ice-Covered Earth, The Town of Lyubimov. Someone must have overheard the conversation and informed on them. Their desks were searched; the books found. Two days later the engineers were fired.

  The trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel—the first of many show trials that were soon to extend across the country—took place during four days of arctic cold in February 1966. Sinyavsky received seven years, Daniel five, both at hard labor—for “anti-Soviet propaganda,” a charge taken from the criminal code and used for the first time against intellectuals. The sentences suddenly made real the vision of a return to Stalinist repression. True, neither writer had been subjected to beatings, and there had been no allegations of terrorism against the state, but the price imposed for their dissent was inordinately cruel.

  The arrests and trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel are regarded as a watershed moment. With that event was born, in the eyes of most historians, the human rights movement in the Soviet Union. Letters began to be written, petitions signed and sent: to deputies of the Supreme Council, to the procurator general, to Brezhnev. Letters and petitions had been sent often to Stalin, who at times responded with arrest, years in a labor camp, a bullet in the brain. But in the post-Stalin Soviet Union of 1966, the Kremlin seemed uncertain at first about how to respond.

  Then many of the letters were published in a samizdat edition of a work titled The White Book, which also carried newspaper accounts and an abbreviated, unofficial transcript of the trial. That brought the patience of the authorities to an abrupt end, and in 1968 four young samizdat activists, all part-time students—Yuri Galanskov, Alexander Ginzburg, Vera Laskova, and Alexei Dobrovolsky—were arrested and accused of having smuggled the book out to the West. Their trial, which came to be known as the Trial of the Four, and the lengthy prison terms they received evoked still more letters and petitions. Protest, arrest, trial, further protest and arrest: A self-perpetuating escalation toward the doom of one side or the other, or both, had begun.

  A few who signed petitions in the years 1966-1968 soon found themselves in labor camps; many signers who were party members were dismissed from the party and their jobs; nonparty people lost their positions or were transferred to minor posts; students were expelled from their institutes, artists and writers from their unions; scientists could not complete their dissertations. Those with their names on letters and petitions, once full and thriving participants in official Soviet society, were suddenly shunned, excommunicated. Still, the letters went on being written, signed, sent.

  And in 1968, Larisa Bogoraz, the wife of Yuli Daniel, and Pavel Litvinov, the grandson of Maxim Litvinov, former foreign minister of the Soviet Union, wrote a letter protesting the Trial of the Four, addressing it not only to the world inside the Soviet Union but, in a sudden departure from past practice, to the West as well. A typed draft was handed to the Reuters correspondent in Moscow and soon appeared in the foreign press. Overseas radio stations repeatedly broadcast the entire text of the letter into Soviet homes.

  A cycle of communication had been established: wronged Soviet citizen to foreign press and back to ever-wider circles of Soviet citizens.

  At about that same time, the mid-1960s, the civil rights movement had begun to grow in the United States. Strangely, simultaneously, in both countries, from radically opposite poles of the political spectrum, people of limited power had begun to protest against their pariah status: Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Chechens, among others, in the Soviet Union; African Americans, Native Americans, women, homosexuals, among others, in the United States. Restless, disillusioned youth in both cultures embarked upon the creation of angry countercultures. Volodya and Masha listened to the Voice of America describe riots and demonstrations; news of the escalating war in Vietnam penetrated the forest and the apartment. There were times when Volodya and Masha felt better informed about the tides of protest in the United States than about those in their own country.

  Thus it was that, in September 1964, they knew nothing of a man named Iosif Chornobilsky, a locksmith from Kiev, who handed a woman visitor from Detroit a statement claiming that the Soviet Union hated Jews “with a wild anti-Semitic hatred” and was crushing “the rights of Jews in their education and work.” The statement, translated, was published in the Detroit Jewish News. After obtaining a number of signatures, in 1966, on a petition requesting a Jewish national theater in Kiev—rejected by the Ukrainian Communist Party—Chornobilsky was arrested. In the file the KGB had on him were copies of his statement in the Detroit Jewish News, letters to his sister in Israel, accounts of his meetings with tourists, and a list of books he had received about Israel.

  Nor were Volodya and Masha Slepak aware of the few Jews in the Soviet Union who were attempting to revive the study of Hebrew: Rachel Margolina-Ratner, Felix Shapiro, Michael Zand, Hillel Butman, Zev Mogilever, and others. Nor did they know that American Jewish organizations, at the urging of the activist theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel and a few others, had begun to waken to the reality of Soviet Jewry’s suffering. Moshe Decter, an advocate for Soviet Jewry since the 1950s, organized a Conference on the Status of Soviet Jewry, which was held in October 1963. In the years that followed, the issue of Soviet Jewry began to appear with increasing frequency on the agendas of Jewish and non-Jewish American organizations, institutions, newspapers, the halls of Congress. Rallies were held at which U.S. senators spoke: Robert Kennedy and Jacob Javits urged the Soviet government to abide by its own constitution and grant the Jews their lawful rights. Catholic clergymen, labor leaders, and others joined in the protest. The Soviet government, mindful of world opinion, reacted in 1965 by ending its economic persecution of the Jews, rescinding its prohibition against the baking of unleavened bread for the Passover festival, and permitting some Jews to emigrate.

  In the meantime a bridge of tourists was slowly being built between Western Jewry and the Soviet Union. American rabbis journeyed to Moscow. In 1965 Rabbi Israel Miller of New York City headed a delegation of Orthodox Rabbis and addressed the aged congregants of the Moscow synagogue in Yiddish, an event without precedent. In the summer of 1966 a group of American Reform rabbis visited that same synagogue, and the young son of one of the rabbis was called to the Torah to recite the blessing. Astonishment and tears filled the eyes of the old worshippers; it was the first time in forty years a youth had taken part in a service.

  A vague, confused reawakening of identity seemed to be taking place among Jews in the Soviet Union; so some tourists reported when they returned home. They reported, too, on vague and distant stirrings: the unusually frequent borrowing of certain books, like Hebrew-Russian Conversation, often found in the reading rooms of institutes for Oriental literature; the constant perusal, with the help of a Hebrew-Russian dictionary (ferreted out of an old pre-Revolution private library? or left behind by a Mossad agent?), of the official Communist Party Hebrew newspaper Kol Ha-Am (“Voice of the People”), published daily in Israel and available in Moscow’s Lenin Library; the use of those books and newspapers by pensioners to learn Hebrew so they could then teach the language to the young. But in truth, only a few old and young Soviet Jews were part of that reawakening in the early and mid-sixties. A very few.

  Volodya and Masha Slepak knew nothing of those embryonic cultural stirrings. Though liste
ning frequently to foreign radio broadcasts and made uneasy by anti-Semitism and the apparent re-Stalinizing policies of the Brezhnev government, they were still to all appearances exemplary Soviet citizens—Masha a highly respected radiologist in an urban hospital; Volodya a skilled, prominent engineer in highly secret defense work that at times took him to strategic air bases and radar installations; their two sons in a superior special English school.

  Less than a year later the shortwave radio was to bring into the apartment and the forest news of distant events that ultimately caused Masha and Volodya Slepak to transform their lives.

  6

  Journeys

  The change in Masha and Volodya began slowly. That it began at all was in part a consequence of experiences private and personal: Masha’s terrifying arrest by the KGB; Volodya’s distressing encounters with anti-Semitism on the job; their gnawing awareness of the ruthless deeds of Solomon Slepak in China. And in part on account of events public and political: the demythologizing of Stalin; the candor of the Khrushchev years and the sudden poisoning of the air with the arrest and trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel; the possibilities, borne by radio voices, of alternative lives for themselves and their children. The change came reluctantly at first, with considerable anxiety and hesitation. Until the final visceral change, caused by the overwhelming terror and triumph of a distant war.

  The family chronicles tell of summer boat trips that Masha and Volodya often took during those Khrushchev-Brezhnev years. They went on one such trip in the summer of 1966—the year Sinyavsky and Daniel were tried and sent to labor camps for “anti-Soviet propaganda”; the year the locksmith Iosif Chornobilsky unsuccessfully petitioned the Ukrainian Communist Party for a Jewish theater in Kiev and was arrested; the same summer American Reform rabbis visited the Moscow synagogue and a youngster accompanying them became the first youth called to the Torah in forty years.

  The boat they sailed on that summer was named Dolphin. Built in East Germany, it was 16.5 feet long and 5.5 feet wide and had two sails and an engine. Its wooden frame was covered with rubberized textile, and it could be easily disassembled and packed into several bags.

  They sailed for two weeks along the Neringa Spit, a 75-mile length of sandbar—its width from half a mile to 2.5 miles—that separates the Kursh Gulf from the Baltic Sea. Also aboard were their friends Victor and Elena Polsky and Leonid Lipkovsky, all engineers whom Volodya had met while working in the Electro-Vacuum Factory in Moscow.

  The boat took them from Klaipeda, a Lithuanian city on the Baltic, to the city of Königsberg, which the Soviets had renamed Kaliningrad, in the former state of East Prussia. They would sail for a day on the gulf side of the spit and then go ashore and make camp and put up tents and remain for one or two days, swimming, lying in the sun, fishing, picking berries. At night they built a campfire and Leonid Lipkovsky played the guitar and they sat around singing comical ditties and old Russian songs about love, the sea, nature, and long journeys, and listening to the various voices over the radio, and then quietly talking. They were a close, intimate circle of friends. In those Brezhnev days, the smaller the friendship group, the safer you were: fewer chances of running afoul of informants. No conspirators in this band of intimate friends sailing along the Neringa Spit that summer of 1966 and camping on its white dunes away from civilization, save for the three times they went into the towns on the spit for supplies, where they bought bread, sugar, pasta, and other staples.

  On the gulf side nearly the entire shoreline was of white clean sand, some of it rising to a height of one hundred feet. It was exciting to slide down a high dune into the shallow water of the gulf, which was fed by the freshwaters of the Neman River. There were many fish, and they caught and fried bream and bought eels from the fishermen and cured them in smoke.

  In the places where the spit widened there were forests beyond the beaches. Exploring one of the forests, they came upon the hunting lodge once used by Nazi Field Marshal Hermann Göring. Its walls had long been removed and used as firewood by people who lived nearby. Only the inlaid floor remained. All around the ruined lodge ran a wild garden with deserted stables and henhouses. Berries grew from bushes in the garden, and the Slepaks and their friends picked many and enjoyed them.

  For two weeks they were connected to civilization only by radio. The men let their beards grow. On their last day of sailing the skies darkened and the wind rose, and there was a storm with waves six feet high. Arriving in the town of Zelenogradsk, they disassembled the boat and packed it away. Then they rented a small truck and drove to Kaliningrad, where they visited a barbershop. After his haircut Volodya gazed at himself in the barber’s mirror. Thirty-nine years old. Rugged, handsome, unshaven features. Grayish-green eyes; full lips; prominent, slightly curving nose. A Muscovite, urbane, intellectual, a bit too masculine, too attractive, the way Masha’s father had been. He turned to Masha and said in his throaty voice, “Maybe I will leave the beard?” Masha said, “You can try.”

  The abrupt decision to let one’s beard grow. An assertion of identity, of self, to counteract growing inner uncertainty? Or an attempt to hide behind a dawning hurtful truth?

  They spent the rest of the day touring the city and out of a sense of homage visited the grave of the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant, one of the legendary figures of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. That night Volodya and his friends boarded a train back to Moscow, and Masha, who had one more week of vacation, took a train to Klaipeda and rode from there by bus to Palanga, the Baltic Sea resort town where her mother was staying with the children.

  That was the last summer of the Soviet paradise for the Slepaks, the last year of servile imprisonment for many Jews in the Soviet Union.

  In 1926 there were more than one thousand synagogues in the Soviet Union; in 1966, sixty-two. Each synagogue now functioned separately, fighting its own battle for survival; there was no central religious Jewish organization. Thirty of the synagogues were located in non-European regions of the Soviet Union, in which lived less than 10 percent of the country’s total Jewish population. The Oriental Jews of those regions would have fought to the death against any attempt to close their synagogues, and the authorities mostly left them alone. More important, Oriental Jews did not have the sense of Jewish nationalist consciousness that existed among Western Jews, for whom religious ideas invariably ignited the fires of nationalism. Thus the Soviet authorities fought hard against overt manifestations of religion in the ranks of Western Jews. And those Jews, largely assimilated and yielding to government harassment, had witnessed over the years the regime’s anti-Semitic propaganda campaigns, the closing of synagogues, the uprooting of institutions that might afford opportunities for assembly and separateness; had witnessed, silently until now, the gradual collapse of Judaism all around them: the absence of academies of higher Jewish learning; the suppression of the religious education of children; the gradual rise in the average age—now above seventy—of rabbis, ritual slaughterers, and circumcisers; and the expunging of all public references to explicitly Jewish contributions to Soviet life past and present. Synagogue life, controlled; a Yiddish press, dead, save for showpiece publications. Clearly, it was the intention of the government to throttle the living organism of Judaism until such time as it would indeed cease to exist, thereby demonstrating the truth of the announcement of its demise.

  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.