by Grace Paley
“Another friend said to me, ‘Why do you write about the Jews in Russia?’
“I said, ‘We live in a strange time. Many of our friends leave their motherland. We are witnesses of this new exodus. How can we be silent?’
“He said, ‘Yes, but please, others must do it, not you.’
“I said, ‘Yes, you tell me I’m just a Russian poet, but why shouldn’t I write about it? I’m a Jew.’
“My friend was a little drunk. He said, ‘You Jews, you’re the ones who made the Revolution. During the periods of 1937, you Jews were not in the last row. You played your role as judges, prosecutors. And now suddenly it’s not your homeland. It’s not here but there, and you get emigration permission. And what will happen to us Russians … We did all this together, and now while you leave, we have to stay.’”
A Small Adventure
The Hotel Rossiya is near St. Basil, the main domed church the czars liked to see from the Kremlin for reasons of beauty and security. It squats like a four-sided Pentagon on the looping Moscow River. Its entranceways, north, east, south, and west, are bound by hallways, which are crossed by hallways, marked with lounges, coffeehouses on several floors where hard-boiled eggs and chicken and apples are sold to midnight starvers. There are innumerable dining rooms of varying class and formality, in which about a thousand American computer salesmen may be eating borscht right now. It was interesting to walk round and round, from entrance to entrance, past the gathering places of the Indians and Middle Eastern countries, where there were very few women; past the Africans, among whom there were many more.
We never had the time to do this for the plain pleasure of the walk, but on the first day we went looking for Jean Van Lierde, the Belgian delegate from War Resisters International. Another time we tried to find the inland lobby route to the foreigners’ shop to buy presents for the folks at home. Our speediest walk occurred one 2:00 a.m., after an 11:00 p.m. meeting with Palestinians. Paul and I decided to find the North Vietnamese and talk to them, to show them the statement Paul had made and the names signed to it. After going up and down, round and round, through and back, sorry not to have a compass, there they were suddenly before us in some north hall, saying good night to one another. They were to leave Moscow at 4:00 a.m. There was Mr. Mai, with whom I had traveled for ten days in 1969 through the devastated villages of his country. (Vietnam is another country of which I am a patriot, not only because my left hand worked hard and long for their sweet lives and my heavily taxed right hand, in the years I paid taxes, laid out the cash to end those lives. But because of that trip with Mr. Mai, six Americans, and a dozen Vietnamese from Hanoi south to the Ben Hai River, I saw the work of my country’s scientists and fliers, their brainy tantrums on the body of Vietnam.) “Ah,” said Mr. Mai, looking at the signatures and, I think, sighing, “we see! There are the names of our friends.” He took the mimeographed sheets and put them aside. “We will talk about this. Then we will let you know our views.” He went on to say they were now rebuilding roads, hospitals, whole villages. “No more school under the earth,” he said. “You must go home and tell our friends. There must not be war.”
About three or four hours earlier we had stood in the winter wind on some wide boulevard trying to get a cab to get home in time for our usual late consultations and meetings. Our young friend and translator flung herself at a passing cab that had to stop for a light. The driver said, “And when am I supposed to get home?” “But what will they do?” she asked. “They’re foreigners. Can they stand here all night?” “Girlie, please, I too have a family, am I never to see them?” She said, “Please, comrade, it’s so cold and they’re from the Congress of Peace Lovers.” “Ach, peace lovers,” he said. “Well, my dears, get in, let’s go.”
As we traveled along the broad boulevards of Moscow that night, we heard the maneuvering of iron and steel and caught glimpses of some rumbling tanks and enormous trucks. Paul and I thought the Mideast war had begun right there on Leningrad Prospekt. Then our cab was stopped, diverted, sent along a side street, stopped and diverted once more. We traveled through empty streets and squares. “The devil, there’s no way to get there,” said the driver. At the next stop point he explained to the policeman that he had to get to the other side of Red Square to the Hotel Rossiya, what was he to do with these people, foreigners. “Can’t be done,” said the authoritative citizen with the red armband. “Am I stuck with them, then, these peace lovers in the back?” “Oh, the congress, you should have said it. Go through. Say I said so.”
And so we did, driving up to our entranceway over the ramps which held a couple of little twelfth-century churches in their arms, red brick and blue and white. We learned that the empty streets and the moving armament were only a preparation for the next day’s celebration of the great October Revolution. All peace-loving nations celebrate in this fashion. So our anxieties rested.
More Conversation, Another Russian
The day before we left, my sense of the importance, or the propriety, of what is now called “full disclosure” to some official Russian became intense. There were a couple of these in charge of us, our comfort, our interpreter, our happiness, our views. It would not be right to leave, I thought, without speaking directly to Alexei N. Stepunin, Secretary General of the Institute of Soviet American Relations. I liked him anyway. He seemed at first something like the best of an old cop. That is, he was gray, handsome, he’d seen it all, bad behavior and no respect, suffered and absorbed corruption so that his hackles, fins, and hairs lay pretty flat when Americans did not sit at the tables assigned them, were brazen, rude. He was not surprised that some of us spent half the night dancing and the other half struggling like salmon upstream through the halls and stairwells of the Rossiya, past the rosy plump lady fuzz at the key desk, to private meetings in lounges and outdoor untapped balconies.
His office was actually two rooms, a bedroom and a sitting room. In the sitting room, four or five young men sat, our interpreters, smoking, gabbing happily in Russian, resting from that fierce all-day attentiveness which must be required for listening and responding to a foreign language, with the diverse accents and faddish idioms of our up-to-date country.
I showed him about half a dozen leaflets that had come our way, handed to us at the airport or delivered to us by different European delegates. Paul, Maris, and I had looked through them all, realized that we ourselves had to decide which was important and let the others be handled by the people who’d brought them.
We wanted to impress on him the fact that we had chosen one which supported the dissidents but did not ignore their political position.
Alexei Nikolaevich wondered why we had had to do that, say all that; he was surprised, particularly at Paul. He thought we understood that no one had said that the Soviet Union was a democracy. It was a dictatorship of the proletariat. They had no choice but to do what the proletariat wanted them to do. The proletariat did not want them to publish Solzhenitsyn; it was not interested in hearing from those second-rate poets with bourgeois longings. By this time, he looked more like one of my condescending but lovable uncles. I recognized his sentences as counters he had to use in an argument he had to make, but I didn’t want to be diverted into one of those gabby rivers that feed the ocean of Marxist abstraction. Anyway, Paul, Maris, and I are also very much against bourgeois longings, though I suppose we have shared some of the comforts conferred on our ambitious American immigrant families.
We went dead ahead and said the point was this: We could not demand the freedom of the imprisoned Vietnamese, the Brazilians or Chileans or South Africans, without including in those demands freedom for the thousands of political prisoners in Russian camps.
Alexei sighed and said, “But, my dear, do you know the difference, how much better it is now than in Stalin times?”
We said, “Yes, of course, it must be much better, it was so terrible then, we believe it is better.”
Paul and I nodded to each other—it certainly is better.<
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“Listen,” he said, “we honor Sakharov; he has three Legion of Honor medals. He is our hero in physics, in science, but does that mean he knows something else? And, Grace, about Solzhenitsyn, he calls up on the phone and immediately he has a press conference with the whole foreign press. So … who else can speak with the whole West and they all stop to listen to him? Who? What is he complaining? He is giving interviews day and night.” Alexei is disgusted with us, but he is used to Americans. They’re his job.
We say that we have only a few minutes, we know he’s busy, winding us all up in his books, reports, and meetings. We say we brought him all these because we wanted him to be clear about our position. We could not divide our concern, for Russian poets and generals in madhouses, Old Believers, and divergent Marxists in Mordavia camps, from our concern for political prisoners in all countries. “You have said that already,” he said.
In the end I had to be true to my American creed, which is to leave them laughing, and to my Russian Jewish creed, which is to leave them in a little pain at least. “Alexei,” I said, “Russia is powerful and rich like my country. It doesn’t have to worry about free speech, free assembly, free samizdat, free underground papers. It can have all that, we do at home. We have had nearly half a million people at one time in Washington shouting protests into the windows of the White House and the Houses of Congress, and still our government does exactly what it likes. It has managed to bomb and torment the Vietnamese people for ten years. You too can have freedom of speech at home and continue to strong-arm Czechoslovakia. You can eventually have as many automobiles and street-corner meetings as we do, and you can export terror instead of containing it. It’s a question of confidence. You have no confidence in your true strength, Alexei.” Alexei looked at me with a wondering expression; then he threw his head back and laughed a first-class Russian basso laugh.
Well, after I said all this to Alexei Stepunin, I believed it; then I had to continue the thought. What pigs we Americans are! Not only do we consume one-third of the natural resources of the earth, but with all that fat ease, at least one-third of the natural freedoms of man. Then we leave to the rest of the world awful struggles for food, warmth, and shelter, along with oppression and tyranny, their certain companions.
The Last Russian
We were home. Exhausted by the hour, which may have been 8:00 or 9:00 p.m. New York time, and about 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. Moscow time. We threw ourselves, our luggage full of gifts, bulletins, position papers, and final commission reports into a cab. We began to talk with the cabdriver, who was friendly, easygoing, bearded. Well! What an astonishment! He was our final Russian, an émigré Jew from Ukraine, here ten years. He asked us, “How is Moscow? Beautiful? What do the people talk about?”
We asked him about his life here, and he said he missed Russia, his country; he missed the people, the language. He would love to go back and visit—not to live, of course—still, in many ways life over there was easier. The medical care; the children are taken care of—there’s no question, you don’t have to worry about every dollar. But here, he said, he could live a different life if he wanted, any kind of life, it was up to him; he liked that, now he was used to it.
We had come to West Eleventh Street, my street, and I couldn’t speak to him anymore. It seemed certain, however, that we had fallen into his cab for a couple of reasons: the first, because Paul is a holy person whose life deserves an occasional selective revelation. The second, because I’m a storyteller; therefore, He probably moved in this unmysterious way (as He has many times) to offer to the beginning and middle of my experience an appropriate and moral end.
Postscript
I have just received the World Peace Council’s report on the congress. In describing the work of Commission 12, it says nothing about the conscientious objection, the right to refuse to kill, capital punishment.
Vladimir Maximov is in Paris.
Alexander Galich had applied for permission to emigrate. He was certain he would receive it. He did not. He must be stunned by the government refusal. I see him at his desk, his hand on his heart. Inside that heart, anger and despair are probably making fatal trouble.
Yelena Sakharov has been called in by the KGB, at least half a dozen times since we left Moscow. She and her husband have been harassed at home, threatened in these interrogations, her children threatened—that is: all has continued as before.
Andrei Sakharov has published a long essay, Why I Dissent. In it there are several paragraphs which are responsive, I believe, to the letter we brought to Russia from American peace activists, to our conversations in the Galich home, and to other communications the Russians have received from that large group on the American left which supports the dissidents but insists on another analysis of events, another look at who the wardens are in this world and who the prisoners. The essay seems to separate his views from the autocratic notions of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He says at one point: “A part of the Russian opposition intelligentsia is beginning to manifest a paradoxical closeness to the secret Party-state doctrine of nationalism.” I have excerpted a couple of paragraphs from the essay which address our concerns, the subject matters Paul, Maris, and I carried to Moscow and forced on the Russians—with the typical arrogance of safe persons:
I should like to talk about that part of the Western liberal intelligentsia (still a small part) which extends its activities to the socialist countries as well. These people look to the Soviet dissenters for a reciprocal, analogous international position with respect to other countries. But there are several important circumstances they do not take into account: the lack of information; the fact that a Soviet dissenter is not only unable to go to other countries but is deprived, within his own country, of the majority of sources of information; that the historical experience of our country has weaned us away from excessive “leftism,” so that we evaluate many facts differently from the “leftist” intelligentsia of the West; that we must avoid political pronouncements in the international arena, where we are so ignorant (after all, we do not engage in political activity in our own country); that we must avoid getting into the channel of Soviet propaganda, which so often deceives us.
We know that in the Western countries there are vigilant and influential forces which protest (better and more effectively than we do) against injustice and violence there. We do not justify injustice or violence, wherever they appear. We do not feel that there is necessarily more of both in our country than in other countries. But at the moment our strength cannot suffice for the whole world. We ask that all this be taken into account, and that we be forgiven the errors we sometimes make in the dust kicked up by polemics.
I read these words and they are absolutely true to the voice of the writer, Andrei Sakharov, and to his character, which is modest, humane, and brave, just because it is the only decent way a person can be on earth.
I have been lucky to know these people even for a few hours. And to be at such appreciative ease. That Russian home in Moscow, seventy years after my father and mother ran for their lives, was—in food, furniture, language, gesture—very like my own home in the East Bronx. Still, there is a difference in the people.
The Russian dissidents who come to the United States nowadays are all called émigrés (by themselves, the media, the U.S. government), a French word whose meaning includes the idea of class. Those tens of thousands of others thrown into steerage, stored and stacked in the tenements of Delancey Street and Rivington Street, were called immigrants, another class. Yet they, too, came here for the shining pleasures of the First Amendment. Under cover of that brightness, talking all the time, their children have paid taxes for death and silence in other parts of the world. The émigrés will have to know that.
—1974
Post-postscript
Time and the dissolution of the Soviet Union have in fact turned the Russians who have come in great numbers to the United States—and especially to Brooklyn—from émigrés into immigrants, like my parents.
—1976
Other People’s Children
Our national grief at the thought of Vietnamese children who would be homeless after the American war seemed somehow more bearable during the war, when all our know-how was being used in making orphans. There did exist a history of homeless children and their wars, which could have been helpful, but we paid little attention to it. It was indeed offered to the country during the “babylift” last April, in public newspaper statements by social workers, historians, educators, religious leaders, and doctors, and in political street demonstrations on both coasts.
According to Joseph Reid of the Child Welfare League of America, there were 50,000 homeless children after the Nigerian–Biafran war. The United States (and other countries) thought these children should be offered for adoption. The Nigerians and Biafrans would not permit it. With the help of the International Union for Child Welfare in Geneva, all but twenty-seven of the children were reunited with family or village communities within two years.
Here is another lesson from history: my friend Karen DiGia was a displaced child in Germany after the Second World War. That is, she was lost in one direction, and her parents, if alive, were lost in another direction, far from home. Here, the Red Cross helped. It took a year and a half before Karen DiGia’s living father was found and they were brought together. She was only one child among hundreds of thousands. Had she been adopted away into Italy or the United States or Japan in some well-meaning child-consumers project, her records filed and sealed, they would have never met; she would have become an orphan and he the father of a dead child.
