When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT
2010
BOSTON NEW YORK

Copyright © 2010 by Gal Beckerman

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Beckerman, Gal.
When they come for us we'll be gone : the epic struggle to save Soviet Jewry /
Gal Beckerman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
978-0-618-57309-7
1. Jews—Soviet Union—History—20th century. 2. Jews—Soviet Union—
Social conditions—20th century. 3. Jews—Soviet Union—Persecutions—History—
20th century. 4. Jews—Soviet Union—Politics and government—20th century.
5. Refuseniks. 6. Soviet Union—Emigration and immigration—Government
policy. 7. Soviet Union—Ethnic relations. I. Title.
DS
134.85.
B
43 2010
305.892'404709045—dc22 2010005735

Book design by Brian Moore

Printed in the United States of America

DOC
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

The author is grateful for permission to quote from the following:
Anna Akhmatova, excerpt from "Epilogue II" from "Requiem," in
Complete Poems of Anna
Akhmatova,
translated by Judith Hemschemeyer. Reprinted with the permission of Zephyr
Press,
www.zephyrpress.org
.
"There's a Fire Burning," from
Songs of Hope for Russian Jews,
music by Moshe Denberg,
words by George Weisz. Reprinted by permission of the Archives of Jacob Birnbaum.
Excerpt from "I'm not asking death for immortality..." by Joseph Brodsky, from
An
Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Jewish Identity in Prose and Poetry,
1801–2001,
edited by Maxim D. Shrayer, vol. 2 (Armonk, NY, and London: M. E. Sharpe, 2007),
p. 672. Translated from the Russian by Joanna Trzeciak. Translation copyright © by Joanna
Trzeciak. Reproduced by permission of the translator, publisher, and editor.
"Leaving Mother Russia," words and music by Robbie Solomon, © 1978.
Excerpts from
The Jews of Silence
by Elie Wiesel. Copyright © 1973, 1987 by Elie Wiesel.
Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author.
"Babii Yar," translated by George Reavey, copyright © 1960, 1967 by George Reavey, "Bombs
for Balalaikas," translated by Stanley Kunitz with Albert Todd, copyright © 1962, 1963, 1965,
1967, 1972 by E. P. Dutton, from
Yevtushenko's Reader
by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Used by permis-
sion of Dutton, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

FOR MY PARENTS,
Ami and Batia

Prologue
•
[>]

Part I: After the Thaw,
1963–1970

1. Beneath the Earth, 1963–1966 •
[>]

2. "Failure May Have Become Our Habit," 1963–1964 •
[>]

3. A Circumcision at the Dacha, 1966–1969 •
[>]

4. The Overall Orchestra, 1965–1969 •
[>]

5. "Escape, Daughter of Zion Dwelling in Babylon," 1969–1970 •
[>]

Part II: Their Own Détente,
1970–1980

6. Outrageous Things, 1970–1972 •
[>]

7. Birth of the Refusenik, 1970–1972 •
[>]

8. Linkage, 1972–1975 •
[>]

9. 
Politiki
and
Kulturniki,
1975–1977 •
[>]

10. The Shaming, 1977–1978 •
[>]

11. Trial and Exile, 1977–1980 •
[>]

Part III: Slouching Towards Glasnost,
1981–1987

12. Hopelessness, 1981–1984 •
[>]

13. Pawns Again, 1985–1986 •
[>]

14. "Mr. Gorbachev, Let These People Go!" 1986–1987 •
[>]

Afterword: Hundreds of Thousands, 1988–1991
•
[>]

Acknowledgments
•
[>]

Notes
•
[>]

Sources and Further Reading
•
[>]

Index
•
[>]

And if ever in this country
They decide to erect a monument to me,

I consent to that honor
Under these conditions—that it stand

Neither by the sea, where I was born:
My last tie with the sea is broken,

Nor in the tsar's garden, near the cherished pine stump,
Where an inconsolable shade looks for me.

But here, where I stood for three hundred hours,
And where they never unbolted the doors for me.

ANNA AKHMATOVA,
"Requiem"

If we blow into the narrow end of the shofar, we will be heard
far. But if we choose to be Mankind rather than Jewish and
blow into the wider part, we will not be heard at all; for us
America will have been in vain.

CYNTHIA OZICK,
Art and Ardor

L
IKE MOST AMERICAN
Jews of my generation, I had a twin in the Soviet Union. Maxim Yankelevich. I doubt I'll ever forget that name. I repeated it incessantly in the nervous weeks leading up to my bar mitzvah. Some organization of which I was barely aware had handed down Maxim's information, and my job was to invoke him and what I was told was his "plight" after I read from the Torah—a rite of passage that filled me with such dread I wasn't sure I'd remember my own name, let alone this other boy's. So I compulsively chanted to myself "Maxim Yankelevich." It calmed me down.

The only real information I had about Maxim was on a sheet of mimeographed paper that the rabbi had given me. Maxim's father, Zelman, was a construction engineer. His mother, Elena, was a cosmetician. The family had first applied for permission to leave the Soviet Union in 1980, when Maxim was five. Now it was 1989 and they were still living in Leningrad. His bar mitzvah was supposed to have taken place the year before but hadn't, or couldn't, for reasons unexplained (my imagination, populated by KGB agents in khaki trench coats shooting bullets from their shoes, filled in many of the particulars). By mentioning him, I was told, I was symbolically allowing him to share my bar mitzvah. What I fixated on most was the small photo of Maxim's father. It was a grainy black-and-white, but one could see the silhouetted outline of a man wearing a cap, scarf, and thick-framed glasses. He looked like a father from another century, a shtetl father, and I pictured him, the construction engineer, carefully laying bricks day after day. Besides the photo there were only a few lines of text and just one sentence to give me a sense of the plight that necessitated my intervention. Maxim had grown up, I was informed, in "an atmosphere of tension and uncertainty."

My rabbi was a sensitive and thoughtful man but he must have matched young boys and girls with thousands of these Soviet twins by the late 1980s and he didn't take the time to explain further. In the days leading up to my Torah reading, while I tried on my new gray suit and red clip-on tie a dozen times in front of the mirror, Maxim Yankelevich took up residence in my overactive brain. I imagined what he looked like: taller than me, blond, without braces, carrying his schoolbooks with an old-fashioned book strap. The fact of his existence though, somewhere far off to the east, thoroughly confused me. These were the last years of the Cold War. I was aware of the "evil empire," if only through the detritus of pop culture, which seemed obsessed with the Soviet-American relationship. For some reason, I was fascinated by the truly awful 1985 film
White Nights.
It starred Mikhail Baryshnikov as a Russian ballet dancer who had defected from the Soviet Union but found himself—through the deus ex machina of a plane crash—trapped once again in the country he had fled. In one scene, the Baryshnikov character lustily dances to the music of the banned raspy-voiced folksinger Vladimir Vysotsky on the stage of the empty Mariinsky Theater while his old girlfriend watches and weeps, knowing that if he had stayed in the Soviet Union he would never have been permitted to express himself with such abandon. Some variety of repression was hidden there behind the constantly invoked iron curtain. Of that, I couldn't help being at least somewhat aware. But still, when I read about Maxim, the notion that he or any other Jew lived in "an atmosphere of tension and uncertainty" was hard to fathom.

On the face of it, the concept shouldn't have been shocking to a grandchild of Holocaust survivors and a son of Israelis. I had grown up with the stories of my maternal grandmother, who had lived hidden in a hole under the Polish earth for a year; with the stories of my paternal grandparents, who had survived the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto only to eventually find themselves sleeping next to gas chambers in the death camp Majdanek, where they lost their entire families. Then there was my other grandfather—who, we always joked, had had it easy—who'd spent three years in a Siberian work camp. The fact of Jewish suffering was not a foreign concept to me. Throw in my parents' anxieties for Israel, its very existence constantly threatened, and "tension and uncertainty" should have been well embedded in my psychology by the time I encountered Maxim.

The problem, I think, was that through my eyes then, the history of the world was split into a neat and distinct before and after. As I saw it at thirteen, the horrors of the war had been the terrible price paid for this new era in which Jews had not only physical safety but also a peace of mind that they had never experienced over the two thousand years of Diaspora—Israel, despite my parents' worries, didn't seem to me like it was going anywhere. The little that I knew about Maxim and other Soviet Jews escaped these mental categories of before and after. The fear of death was not hanging over him like it had for my grandparents—that much I knew—but at the same time, he was clearly trapped, denied something as basic and schmaltzy as a bar mitzvah. All I could do was file him away as a historical anomaly, a bit of unfinished postwar Jewish business that I didn't really understand.

My bar mitzvah was on September 1, 1989. I stood in front of the congregation and gave a short speech, trying desperately not to shake. I reminded everyone that it was the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland, a significant historical marker for me, the day my grandparents' journey through hell began. But here I was, I said with a flourish, decades after the camps were liberated, having my bar mitzvah in America, a country where I was free to be a Jew.

I did mention Maxim's name. But I didn't give much more thought to the gray space his story occupied. The paradox at the center of the Soviet Jewish experience—a people not allowed to fully assimilate but also not allowed to develop a separate national identity or to leave—was too confounding.

Two months after Maxim and I had our bar mitzvah, the course of history seemed to change in a day. The Berlin Wall fell. Over the next decade, as the Soviet Union crumbled, more than a million Jews fled, joining the approximately three hundred thousand that had trickled out since the end of the 1960s. I don't know if Maxim Yankelevich was among them. I forgot about him for a long time. Only years later, visiting Israel, did I scan the faces of new immigrants and wonder if he had gotten out. It was impossible not to think about Soviet Jews then. They had fundamentally altered Israeli society, from the now ubiquitous line of Russian subtitles on Israeli television to the electoral power the new immigrants wielded as a major conservative voting bloc, not to mention the influx of doctors, physicists, engineers, and musicians. (Israelis joked that if a Soviet Jew didn't get off the airplane with a violin case, he was probably a pianist.) In America too, where hundreds of thousands had arrived and settled, predominantly in New York, their presence was felt, changing the face of large swathes of Brooklyn. The children of these immigrants have already made an impressive impact on American society, becoming influential novelists, entrepreneurs, and computer engineers.