When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (28 page)

The words of Carlebach's popular song had become graffiti. Like the decade itself, which had seen a desire for integration and unity devolve into separatism and rage in a matter of just a few years, the phrase
Am Yisrael Chai
had morphed from a joyful expression of the Jewish people's enduring survival to an angry assertion that threatened violence should anyone choose to question its truth.

Out of jail the same day, Kahane rallied his troops for another protest, December 30 at the Soviet mission. But this time he wanted to do something unprecedented. Demonstrators had always been corralled between Lexington and Third Avenue, a half a block away from the narrow Upper East Side stretch of Sixty-seventh Street that contained the mission. The Soviets could easily ignore them. Kahane wanted to get in their faces, and he was willing to cause a riot to achieve his goal.

Gathered in the cold and the light rain of the New York winter evening, dressed in heavy coats and black hats, Kahane and a hundred of his flock—both the young, tough
chayas
and the older men, many of them Holocaust survivors and ancient Jabotinskyites—stood pressed against the barrier maintained by riot police. Directly across the street from the mission was the Orthodox Park East Synagogue, whose rabbi was sympathetic to the cause of Soviet Jewry, though presumably not to Kahane's rough tactics. Kahane told the riot police commanding officer that he wanted to go and pray in front of the synagogue. "Come on, Rabbi, you don't really want to pray," the police captain told him. Kahane then gave a speech about exercising his freedom of religion. A voice came over a megaphone asking the protesters to move back, and Kahane decided instead to push up against the barrier and the handful of police. The crowd surged, and a short scuffle ensued, the teenagers pushing toward the mission. The police started grabbing and arresting them, and within half an hour they had taken twenty-seven into custody, including Kahane.

For the second time in twenty-four hours, he was in jail. And he loved it. Kahane knew the cause would benefit. This was action with a clear goal. He knew how to get attention. The problem was finding the right focus. Sitting that night in an Upper East Side holding pen with his young followers sleeping on wooden benches next to him, he felt gleeful at his success.

The following day, the last of the tumultuous decade, Kahane sent out a menacing press release, an indication of where the movement was headed: "Our attacks upon the institutions of Soviet tyranny in America represent the first step in our campaign to bring the issue of oppressed Soviet Jews and other religious groups to the attention of an apathetic public and indifferent news media.... We have pleaded, implored, and tried in the traditional methods of diplomacy. They have failed to open the gates. There is little remaining for us to do but to heed the requests of the Russian Jews themselves who have commanded us to shake the world."

W
HEN YOSEF MENDELEVICH
met Eduard Kuznetsov for the first time, at a Hanukkah party in December of 1969, he thought Kuznetsov seemed like a Solzhenitsyn character come to life—one of the wise, rough men of the Gulag in
The First Circle,
or perhaps Ivan Denisovich himself. Kuznetsov fit every romantic stereotype of the political prisoner. He stood very straight, as if he were marching out of a forest carrying logs on his shoulders. His blue eyes were cool and hard; tattoos in green ink lined his muscular arms; and the words that came out of his mouth always stung with a kind of bitter wit, cynical yet brilliant. There was something unmistakably Russian about him, and not just his looks—which, with his blond hair and sharp jaw, were very Russian indeed; it was more his dark humor, the way he brandished his intellect. He couldn't have been more thoroughly out of place anywhere than at a Hanukkah party in Riga with earnest young yarmulke-wearing Jews singing songs in Hebrew. But after choosing to throw in his lot with the Jewish people, Kuznetsov was now experiencing his new tribe, watching them warily on this winter's night in a city on the edge of the empire as they held hands and prayed excitedly in a foreign language over the flames of the menorah.

Kuznetsov's decision to embrace his Jewish heritage had come less from the heart than from certain strategic considerations. In the late sixties, he was living on the extreme margins of Soviet society. His Jewish father had died during the war before he was old enough to know him. It was his Russian mother who had raised him and given him her own last name, making sure that the fifth line in his internal passport said
Russian.
He had never identified as a Jew, and his struggle, from a young age, was more about artistic freedom. As an impetuous and gifted student of philosophy at Moscow University in the late 1950s, he tested the temperature of the thaw by starting some of the first underground journals,
Syntax
and
Boomerang,
unauthorized collections of poetry and prose, including his own. Kuznetsov was part of the first real manifestation of the dissident movement, the open-air readings at Mayakovsky Square. What had started as students gathering under Mayakovsky's statue to honor the revered poet soon turned into weekly happenings at which various literary works, even the poems of forbidden masters like Pasternak, Mandelstam, and Tsvetaeva, were read. The meetings were a magnet for agitated young intellectuals, and students often milled around afterward openly discussing politics and their frustrations with the regime. The authorities managed to shut the meetings down in 1958, but they started up again in late 1960, and Kuznetsov was one of the main organizers. The content of the poems and speeches became increasingly radical, and the readings' suppression more extreme. KGB agents hovered around the square writing down students' names in their notebooks. Soon many of them were thrown out of school. In October of 1961, Kuznetsov, by then also the editor of
Phoenix-61,
the riskiest samizdat poetry compilation so far, was arrested at four in the morning and quickly tried and convicted for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda." At the age of twenty-two, he was sentenced to seven years in Vladimir Prison, located a hundred miles east of Moscow.

Those seven years were a harsh education for Kuznetsov. He read and talked with the other inmates about the nature of Communism. He saw great brutality and hunger in the camps. Men would tattoo anti-Soviet slogans on their faces and then be summarily shot by sadistic guards. Most talked only about how to escape the Soviet Union. A popular tattoo showed a cartoon man standing on the border between Russia and Turkey, one foot in the free world. Kuznetsov had vivid daydreams of living alone in a hut far from civilization with time to think and write. Like the rest of the inmates, he began to despair that there was any hope of changing the system. And like them, he began to see nationalism as the best solution. The Ukrainians saw the possibility of a better existence in a free Ukraine; the Tatars in the dream of getting back their Crimea. And for the first time in his life, Kuznetsov considered that his Jewish heritage might be his salvation. He saw this evolution in other Jewish prisoners as well. By the time he was released, in 1968, he was twenty-nine and a Zionist, not out of any great love for Israel but because Israel represented the possibility of freedom. Two months before leaving Vladimir Prison, he put in an application to the prison governor to change his nationality to Jewish. The request was refused.

There was no such thing as a completely freed political prisoner in the Soviet Union. Former convicts were not permitted to live within a hundred-kilometer radius of any major city. They had to report weekly to a KGB bureau and accept that their every move would be monitored. Kuznetsov felt especially burdened by this new life. After being isolated for so long, he wanted to reengage with the world. But he lived in a village called Strunino, outside Moscow, and needed written permission even to go see his mother in the city on Sundays. He had not been broken in the camps, he had never agreed to cooperate with the KGB, and that made him all the more threatening to the secret police. He was sure that he'd be arrested again. They'd find a reason. Kuznetsov was exhausted and lonely.

During this period, he made secret visits to Moscow and reacquainted himself with the dissident community. He was astounded at how much more open and combative it had become. He met many of the most active dissidents, at least those who weren't already in prison camps, including a middle-aged pediatrician with whom he became especially close, Elena Bonner. He searched out Zionists and got in touch with David Khavkin, the godfather of the scattered Moscow movement. Khavkin gave him a copy of
Exodus,
which Kuznetsov thought was awful as literature but which in one read introduced him to much of Jewish history. It was Khavkin who suggested that if Kuznetsov really wanted to leave, and leave as a Zionist for Israel, he might try moving to Riga.

Kuznetsov was not allowed to relocate unless he had a legitimate reason to do so; the easiest option was for him to marry a woman from Riga (his wife had left him while he was in prison). He asked a friend, a former campmate who had connections to the Zionist underground in Leningrad, if he knew anyone who might be interested. By chance, the first woman the friend suggested was Mendelevich's sister, Eva. In her midtwenties and deeply involved in the movement, she would make a good match for Kuznetsov. But Mendelevich's father refused. Eduard Kuznetsov was simply not Jewish enough.

Another suggestion was a woman who was quickly becoming one of Riga's most well-known activists. Sylva Zalmanson had signed her name to the first collective protest letter from Riga's Jews and had an exuberant, almost bubbly, personality. Girlishly small and curly-haired, she was extremely principled and emotionally connected to the cause. Even before she signed the protest letter, she was already engaging in risky activities. Early in 1969, she and Aron Shpilberg, whom she knew through his wife, Margarita, went looking for a suitcase filled with Jewish samizdat that had been buried in a forest outside Riga. Shpilberg had been shown the spot, between three trees, where an activist had buried it before leaving for Israel. Sylva and Shpilberg spent an entire afternoon poking into the black earth with a long wire trying to find it, but they couldn't. They went back again and eventually dug it out. The suitcase was covered in dirt, and they rode with it in a public streetcar to a beach, where they rinsed it off. Then Sylva took a train to Leningrad and delivered the materials to Soyma Dreizner's apartment without any zigzagging through courtyards. The Leningrad activists were astonished at her boldness.

When she was introduced to Kuznetsov, in the late fall of 1969, Sylva was twenty-five and working at a moped factory. Their first meeting was at a party in Leningrad for a departing Jew. At first she was put off by his toughness, but when she saw him smile a few times, she began to fall in love, romanticizing his prison experience. She had read Solzhenitsyn and loved the way life seemed purer in prison, the way men idealized women, talked about them like Petrarchs rhapsodizing about their Lauras. Within a few weeks Sylva and Kuznetsov were married and living in Sylva's father's house.

By the time Yosef Mendelevich was introduced to him at the Hanukkah party, Eduard Kuznetsov (whom everyone called Edik) had already gotten a job as a researcher in a psychiatric institute in Riga. He was amassing statistical data for a few university students who were writing doctoral dissertations about suicide. The newly married couple had begun the process of requesting an exit visa using an invitation from a real uncle of Sylva's who lived in Israel.

Kuznetsov was impressed with the community he found in Riga. They were disciplined and fully committed and they had significant numbers; three thousand people attended the Rumbuli ceremony in the fall of 1969. They were also productive: Mendelevich and a whole network of activists were busy developing the first issue of
Iton,
the samizdat journal of the Zionist movement.

But for all their activities, there was pervasive despair. Most had been refused exit visas and saw no point in reapplying. Sylva and Edik soon realized how hard it was just to get a
kharikteristika,
a simple character reference. The Riga psychiatric institute staff told Kuznetsov that their giving him one would ruin their reputation. Sylva was told she could lose her job. Even though the Riga KGB gave him more breathing space than the Moscow KGB had, Kuznetsov found that his circumstances had not changed much. He was still stuck in the Soviet Union without any prospect of leaving.

The situation was no different in Leningrad. By the end of 1969, the Zionist organization had become an institution; it had thirty-eight members who were represented by a central committee of five men. They were running a number of different
ulpanim
simultaneously and, pyramid-like, were churning out Jews knowledgeable enough to become teachers of future
ulpanim.
Though they too had all been denied exit visas, the authorities let their extensive activities continue unimpeded. The activists began to believe that as long as they stuck with teaching Hebrew and Jewish history to small groups of young people, they would never be bothered.

However, Hillel Butman, the impractical dreamer, still had visions of one overwhelming action that would bring world attention to their problem. The
ulpanim
were important, but the organization, he felt, was in a Catch-22. Success for them meant increasing their numbers, but that could only happen if they made themselves more visible and actively recruited Jews. And such moves would surely be suppressed, perhaps even lead to the end of the organization itself. The only thing that made sense to Butman, a man prone to dramatic gestures, was to find a single action that would somehow reconfigure their whole relationship with the state. It was around this time that Butman received a call from Mark Dymshits.