The Gates of November

The next day Masha and Volodya and Sanya flew to Israel in a Lear-jet chartered by Senator Heinz, Elie Wiesel, and Patti and John Thompson, a Christian couple from Nashville. When the pilot a

The chronicles record that Masha was wearing her amulet.

Three days later they celebrated Volodya’s sixtieth birthday in the Jerusalem residence of Chaim Herzog, president of Israel. From the residence Volodya telephoned Moscow and talked with Alexander Lerner, who, some weeks later, received his exit visa and went to Israel. When the festivities at the residence of the president ended, Volodya and Masha made their way to a more private party arranged by some of their closest friends, immigrants from the Soviet Union, one of whom owned the Jerusalem discotheque where the second party went on and on until the very early hours of the morning.

The chronicles further record that Volodya and Masha flew to the United States that November and were greeted at Ke

Finally the chronicles tell us that in June 1988 Masha and Volodya set out with a number of other refuseniks on a goodwill and fund-raising mission to London, Los Angeles, Australia, and New Zealand under the auspices of the World Jewish Congress. In Australia, at the request of Isi Liebler, then vice-president of the congress, they all were to meet and express their gratitude to Prime Minister Bob Hawke, one of the most noted figures in the struggle for Soviet Jewry.

During the night that Masha and Volodya stayed in Los Angeles, someone entered their second-floor hotel room through the balcony, whose doors they had neglected to lock, and stole every object of value that lay in view: their watches and camera, Volodya’s wallet and credit cards, and all of Masha’s jewelry, including the amulet. Fortunately they had placed their passports, traveler’s checks, and airline tickets in a suitcase. They flew on to Australia for appearances before admiring audiences and the meeting with the prime minister. The mission over, they returned to Israel.

A few months later Volodya and Masha found suitable jobs in Israel.

Their sons were by then permanently settled in the United States.

Here the chronicles come to an end.

Epilogue Telephone Calls

Today, as Volodya approaches his seventieth birthday, his hair is entirely gray, his beard short and snowy white, growing in two roundish clumps from his smooth pink cheeks. He carries the same paunch, which he is still trying to lose, and his voice, somewhat huskier than before, remains deep and resonant and exuberant. And Masha is smooth-faced, plump, her intelligent eyes bright behind their thick glasses, her short, straight hair russet-colored, youthful, her voice lilting, musical. They seem to hide their scars well, though I am told that Masha has moments of dark moods, and that Volodya’s boisterousness will suddenly evaporate when certain people and experiences come up in conversation.

In the summer of 1995 my wife and I visited them in the Pocono Mountains of Pe

Volodya and Masha, looking remarkably robust, were cheerful, relaxed, given easily to hearty laughter. But I knew he had suffered a mild heart attack some months before and she was losing vision in one eye. Leonid had once told me that his father referred lightly to their various illnesses as “telephone calls from the other world.”

Did their neighbors know who they were, these strangers in this Pe

Masha prepared a green salad and cooked a pot of rice after a recipe taught her by an Israeli American visitor to their apartment in Israel. Outside, two deer emerged from the bluish green shadows of the woods and nibbled at the grass in front of the house.

We sat around a table, and they talked of their lives in apartment 7, Rivka Guber Street, Kfar Saba, the municipality near Tel Aviv where they now lived. Masha’s Hebrew is now quite good; Volodya is more comfortable with English. In Kfar Saba, they said, there were new lights in the park near the apartment house, and on warm nights one could hear the high-pitched voices of children playing on the grass. Yes, the elementary school and home for the aged were still there, and nothing had changed in the bus station on the boulevard; it was the same busy, dusty place. In the apartment building lived people from America, Russia, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Poland, Argentina, England, as well as native-born Israelis. A school principal, engineers, teachers, a retired professor of physiology, a fax machine technician, an IBM department head, an architect, a pharmacist, a physician, a tourist bus driver, the owner of a picture-framing shop, an accountant. The apartment house was a sprawl of co

As the conversation ebbed and flowed around the subject of their family, one sensed in Volodya and Masha a subdued bewilderment and pain. They seemed unable to comprehend how it had happened: the separation between them and their sons. After all they had endured, now to be co