The Gates of November

by Chaim Potok

  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.

  The office of the Trust Geophysica was near the Povarovka Railway Station on the Moscow-Leningrad railway, a half hour train ride from the Leningradsky Railway Station. The work paid considerably less than what he had been earning at the institute.

  About six months later, while walking along a street in Moscow, Volodya met one of his former colleagues from the institute and was told that one month after he had left the job, there had been a meeting in the institute of all the party members and heads of departments and laboratories. The sole topic of the meeting was Volodya Slepak and his plans to emigrate to Israel. In the course of a furious speech against Volodya, the party
secretary had said, “How blind we were not to see that among us was a traitor, an enemy of the people!”

  Masha retained her job as a radiologist because her chief received no instructions to dismiss her. He was an upright man and would not fire her on his own even though he knew that she intended to emigrate. Besides, there was a dire need in Moscow for radiologists.

  David and Noya Drapkin submitted the necessary documents to OVIR, requesting permission to emigrate. In April 1969, about the time that Volodya gave up his job at the institute, David Drapkin received a call from OVIR and was told that his request had been refused.

  “There are too many of you Jews,” the OVIR official said over the telephone. “We will not let you leave; we will finish you off here.”

  Volodya’s new job at the Trust Geophysica began in June. Because he had no vacation coming to him, he and Masha and Sanya remained in Moscow that summer. The weather was hot; the air dusty, brown. Some weekends the Slepaks went with friends into the forests. And listened to the news over the radio. That was the summer two American astronauts walked on the moon. In Moscow the political atmosphere was portentous with neo-Stalinist resonances after a year of increasing repression and the surprise overpowering of Czechoslovakia the previous summer. Leonid Slepak, then ten years old, spent his vacation in a Young Pioneers camp.

  A man from Leningrad, Sasha Blank, an old friend of the Slepaks’, emigrated to Israel that August, carrying with him the data for a second invitation. Many were being refused visas at that time because according to the OVIR officials, those sending the invitations were not “close” relatives; hence Masha’s mother had asked Sasha Blank to find an Israeli woman about fifty years of age, who was to claim in the invitation that she was her daughter. Masha’s mother had contrived a lengthy story to tell the emigration officials about how during the Civil War she had suddenly fallen ill with typhus and fainted on a train; after having been removed from the car, she woke in a station to find her daughter gone. The amulet the daughter had worn around her neck all through the years had finally led to her mother.

  The same August that Sasha Blank left for Israel carrying with him Volodya and Masha’s data and the story of Masha’s mother’s “daughter,” eighteen Jewish families from the Soviet region of Georgia took the astonishing step of sending a petition directly to Prime Minister of Israel Golda Meir, with the request that it be forwarded to U Thant. The petition solicited his backing for their constantly thwarted attempts to emigrate to Israel. “It is incomprehensible that in the twentieth century people can be prohibited from living where they wish to live,” read the petition. “We will wait months and years, we will wait all our lives, if necessary, but we will not renounce our faith or our hopes.”

  The petition, which seemed to signal the start of a mass movement, was read to the Israeli Knesset and presented by the government of Israel to the United Nations as an official document. News of the petition filtered into the major cities of the Soviet Union: Moscow, Leningrad, Minsk, Riga, Vilna, Odessa, Kiev. More petitions and letters followed, from individuals and groups, addressed to the United Nations, to Soviet Premier Kosygin, to the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to President Zalman Shazar of Israel. For years we have suffered humiliation, the letters and petitions said; we have the right to request a new home in a land of our choice.

  Volodya and Masha, barely aware of those letters, had no notion that they were becoming part of an expanding horizon of opposition to tyranny. But with his job at the institute now lost, Volodya knew that he no longer needed to be concerned about his security clearance. And so that fall, for the first time in their lives, he and Masha and their sons walked from the apartment on Gorky Street to the Moscow synagogue on Arkhipova Street, where they became part of a multitude of Jews celebrating Simchat Torah.

  They would not enter the synagogue, avoided contact with the rabbi and state-hired officials of the Jewish community, all of whom, they had been told, were under the control of the KGB. One of their friends, David Chavkin, had brought along a self-made amplifier with two powerful speakers, a tape recorder, and cassettes. Jewish music resounded through the street. Volodya and Masha were caught up in the tumult and enthusiasm of the huge crowd, thousands of people. Militia stood along the rim of the crowd, and everyone there knew that KGB agents in civilian garb were among the crowd—some may even have been participating in the singing and dancing—but no one seemed to care. The celebration lasted until midnight.

  The Slepaks went often to that synagogue from then on, on Sabbaths and festivals. They never entered but stood on the street with friends and other dissidents, watching the crowds grow from year to year.

  In late 1969 dissidents from Moscow, Leningrad, and Riga met and decided it was now time to initiate collective letters of protest to the authorities and make them public. That was the first clear move toward organized open confrontation with the regime. In early 1970 Jewish dissidents in Riga issued the Jewish samizdat bulletins Iton Aleph (“Newspaper A”), and Iton Bet (“Newspaper B”), a few copies on poor paper in Russian, the first independent public voice of the embryonic movement: an interview with Golda Meir; an article about the Israeli Army; a passage from a book about the 1943 uprising of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto against the Nazis; the texts of letters to government officials by Soviet Jews voicing their right to emigrate; the words of Israel’s Declaration of Independence.

  The second invitation to Israel arrived in the Slepak mailbox on a day in January 1970—from a different “relative.” This time the names were correctly spelled. Volodya and Masha went to the OVIR office for the necessary application forms and to learn from instructions posted on the walls how to complete the forms and what accompanying documents they were required to submit.

  It took them nearly three months to assemble all the necessary documents. The application form alone was six pages in length. It asked for your name, address, date and place of birth, place or places of work for the past five years, were you a member of the Communist Party or Komsomol, had you ever lost your membership and why, your nationality, names of your closest relatives, had you ever been abroad, where when why, who among your relatives had been abroad with you, had you ever before applied to leave the USSR, when, were you refused, why, who in your family was now applying with you, what country did you intend to enter, who in that country was your relative, why and from where did the relative leave the USSR, list all your communications with that relative, when did you receive the most recent communication, how did you discover where that relative was living, explain why you wanted to emigrate from the Soviet Union.

  Together with the application, you needed to submit to OVIR: your autobiography; the invitation from the relative in Israel, certified by the Foreign Ministry of Israel; the kharakteristika from your job, stating that it was addressed to OVIR specifically for a visa application and signed by the director of your place of employment, the party secretary, and the chairman of the trade union committee; a certificate, also specifically directed to OVIR, from the office running your apartment building regarding your status as a resident of Moscow and the condition of your domicile; a signed statement from your parents, if alive, about how they looked upon your desire to leave the country and whether they had any financial or other claims upon you, with their signatures certified either at their places of work or by the office of their apartment building; certificates of birth and, wherever applicable, of marriage, divorce, parents’ death; copies of diplomas; four photographs; two blank postcards with your home address; receipt from the bank certifying your payment of the special tax for the exit visa application; internal passport, military record, trade union card, work book, pension card.

  Sometime in March 1970 Volodya telephoned his father and asked if he would write and sign a statement about how he felt concerning his son’s wish to leave the country. He explained that he needed the statement to complete his visa application documents.

  “I will never write or sign such a statement!”
shouted his father. “Do not call me again! I will have nothing to do with an enemy of the people!” And he hung up the telephone.

  After repeated failed attempts to obtain the statement, Volodya decided to include with the documents an affidavit written and signed by him and certified by a notary to the effect that his father had refused to take part in the visa application process.

  That same month Volodya requested from his chiefs at the Trust Geophysica the kharakteristika he needed for OVIR. They agreed, on condition that he resign from his position. It was three months before he found another job.

  By the time Masha and Volodya completed gathering all the documents, everyone at Masha’s place of work and in their apartment house knew that they were applying to emigrate from the country.

  On April 13, 1970, Volodya and Masha boarded a dark blue city minibus on Alexander Pushkin Square, one block from their apartment, rode to Pokrovskiye Vorota, and then walked a block and a half to the OVIR office on Kolpachny Pereulok, where they submitted their visa application for emigration to Israel.

  An official from the Ministry of the Interior checked the documents attached to the application form for proper stamps, signatures, and answers. Pausing over Volodya’s statement regarding his father’s refusal, the official insisted on the need for a statement from his father.

  Volodya said it was impossible. His father was an Old Bolshevik; he would never write and sign such a statement. Why wasn’t Volodya’s own statement to that effect sufficient?

  After a moment the official yielded. Gathering up the application form and the documents, he said tersely, “You will be informed about the decision.”