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217 8 Last Autumn St il l in t he c a r riding back from Chashnikovo to Moscow, one of the first things I learned from my parents was that the Soviet chess magazine 64 had just printed an excerpt from Drugie berega (Other Shores), a Russian version of Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography, best known in the West as Speak, Memory. The excerpt, in which Nabokov discusses chess problems, was tiny. After two months on the expedition trail I was starved for information , and the news of Nabokov’s first official publication in the USSR was scintillating. Nabokov had died almost ten years earlier in Switzerland . An aristocrat, bilingual genius, and unrelenting anti-Bolshevik, Nabokov had been persona non grata in official Soviet culture, and now two pages of his mellifluous prose had been finally sanctioned to be read by millions. “Is this a signal of change?” I asked my parents as we sped along the empty Leningrad Highway. The times may have been “a-changing ,” yet the dawn of Gorbachev’s reforms still promised precious little to the refuseniks. Which is why my parents had used my absence from Moscow as a window of opportunity for renewed public protests. “Inaction is deadly,” my father explained. “Desperate times call for desperate actions.” And my mother added in her bashfully fearless voice, “Only open political protest can force them to let us go.” Still in the car I learned that while I had traveled and explored, my parents had gotten to know Wyatt Andrews, a rising star of American TV journalism who was then the Moscow bureau chief for CBS News. Andrews covered the Soviet Union in 1986–88, reporting on perestroika and glasnost, the Chernobyl catastrophe, and later on, the Reagan–Gorbachev summits. He didn’t know Russian, but he was an astute journalist 218 | The Sh or t Go odbye who wasn’t just walking the beat, in contrast to some of the reporters for the Western media we had met in Moscow over the years. After Moscow , Andrews would go on to cover the State Department and the White House, and seeing him on TV, silver-haired but with the same witty glint in his eyes, still brings back memories of our last year in Russia. While I was away on the expedition, Andrews arranged for my father to give a live interview. The occasion was the opening of the eighth Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers in Moscow on 24 June 1986. On 23 June 1986, as I rode on the dust-choked bus through the steppe toward the Sea of Proletarsk, my father sent an open letter to the Congress delegates. On the same day, my parents spoke to Andrews and his crew in the courtyard of the Union of Soviet Writers. My father read his open letter, my mother interpreting, and then answered Wyatt Andrews’s questions on camera. The monument to Leo Tolstoy, a symbol of a Russian writer’s consciousness , formed a visual backdrop as my father described his isolation as a writer and spoke of being punished for what the Soviet Constitution guaranteed . “With the CBS camera rolling, the bastards didn’t dare touch us this time,” mother said as we pulled into the front yard of our apartment building. “Perhaps there is hope, after all.” The other important event I had missed was a visit by Rabbi Harvey J. Fields and Sybil Fields in July 1986. Harvey Fields was then a senior rabbi of Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles and an activist of the Soviet Jewry movement. While visiting under the official auspices of Intourist, the Fieldses came to the Soviet Union on a mission to see refuseniks. With my parents, whom the Fieldses saw twice during the visit, they shared a special connection: Harvey and Sybil were close friends of David and Gila Sharir, our Tel-Aviv–based cousins. Rabbi Fields was a prominent figure of the Reform Judaism movement in North America, whose name adorns each copy of Gates of Prayer and Gates of Repentance, the two New Union prayerbook volumes. Harvey Fields was not only a congregational rabbi, but also held a Ph.D. in US diplomatic history and was a Torah commentator and a creative writer. Already in America, when I met the Fieldses for the first time, I immediately understood why my parents had characterized their July 1986 meetings in Moscow as “electrifying.” [3.16.81.94] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 06...

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