Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story

3. Becoming Refuseniks

30 3 Becoming Refuseniks In 1978, after several years of brooding, my parents decided to leave the Soviet Union for good. In early January of 1979, as the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan thickened, we formally requested permission to emigrate to Israel. My parents’ decision to uproot themselves had been a long and tortuous one. Despite the discrimination they encountered as Jews, my mother and father had both reached professional prominence. Neither one of them was a member of the Communist Party; both had attained their positions on merit. Two years prior to my parents’ initial application for exit visas, my mother had been promoted to senior lecturer at the Higher Courses for Foreign Languages at the Ministry of Foreign Trade. Her duties focused on teaching advanced English to Soviet foreign trade specialists and also included interpreting and translation. My mother had co-authored a textbook of English for business. (Her name would be purged from the textbook when it would come out in the early 1980s.) Most language lecturers and instructors at my mother’s institution would periodically be sent abroad, to the countries whose languages they taught, in order to perfect language skills. Not a single time was my mother allowed to go to England or to another English-speaking country. Off the record, the head of personnel openly told my mother: “You’re Jewish, Mila, we just can’t send you.” And thus my mother continued to teach Soviet foreign trade executives about English business etiquette and about London’s landmarks , including one Tavistock Hotel, a legendary establishment where Soviet commerce envoys would stay upon arriving in misty Albion. She was expected to command an in-depth knowledge of all sorts of things Becomin g Ref usen iks | 31 she had never experienced firsthand. In the fall of 1976, after fifteen years of teaching advanced English, my mother finally saw the “decaying world of capitalism” for the first time. Still not an English-speaking country it was, but Japan, where she interpreted, from English, for a delegation of Soviet engineers training at Mitsubishi. The trip to Japan lasted two months and catalyzed my mother. I was nine at the time and I remember her arrival from the airport at two in the morning; I stayed up, anxious to see my presents, colors markers and chewing gum, especially. There was something different about my mother, and not only in her new vogue-ish clothes and her haircut and perfume. It was as though in her mind she had crossed a boundary separating a Soviet past and a Western future. My mother couldn’t stop talking about life over there. I remember shreds of adult conversations, in which words such as “privacy,” “freedom of speech,” “respect for human dignity” were being tossed about. When my parents decided to leave Russia, my father was working as a senior research scientist at the Gamaleya Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology of the Soviet Academy of Medical Sciences. He had published some seventy scientific papers, many of them on staphylococcal infections and phage therapy, and had done pioneering work in the treatment of mixed bacterial infections. His work had saved lives both of people and of livestock. In fact, in 1970 he had risked his life for Russia and her people when he worked, as part of a small team of epidemiologists, at the outbreak of cholera in Yalta. He had experienced his own share of prejudice , especially by the officials of the Academy of Medical Sciences. In 1975 he defended and submitted for attestation his dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Science, the highest advanced degree generally required in the Soviet Union for elevation to the rank of full professor. The process of conferring the degree by the VAK (acronym of the Higher Attestation Commission), was expected to be a mere formality, but became mired in antisemitism masking itself as bureaucracy. My father was asked to rerevise and re-submit for re-attestation what had already been a publicly defended, voted for, and approved dissertation. The process was taking two years and amounted to unabashed nitpicking by some members of the VAK. Even though, by 1978, the difficulties with my father’s doctor’s dissertation had been nearly overcome, the prejudicial treatment had injured his 32 | The En d of Chil dh o od academic pride. It’s one thing to be aware of systemic antisemitism at most Soviet institutions...