Глаза зеленые весны.
Seeming to be the chimes of freedom flashin’
Three years later, in November of 1982 the bottom fell out of the USSR. The only Soviet leader I ever knew, Leonid Brezhnev, died in office, leaving the country in an economic crisis and with a public consciousness badly injured by the continued quagmire in Afghanistan. In the next three years, two more next-in-line geriatrics ascended to the Soviet throne to croak on it only a few months later, before Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet dictator, took the reins in March of 1985. I was then in my last year of university. In just a matter of two years, Gorbachev’s perestroika thoroughly imbued our daily lives. The iron clasp of totalitarianism eased; foreign radio broadcasts were no longer jammed, political jokes we used to whisper in confidence were now cracked on the state TV, the first Russian translation of Orwell’s 1984 was published in 1989, the same year the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was brought to an ignominious end.
At the time, my parents compared this new state of hushed hope to the social detox of the late 50s and early 1960s, following the death of Stalin and known as the thaw. (The word in English does not reflect the original meaning of the Russian oттепель—not a mere change of physical state from solid to liquid, but a welcome, but temporary warming of weather to just above freezing.) They lived through it at the same age as I was during Gorbachev’s perestroika. I hope that history will be charitable to him even in his own country, where at the time of this writing he is commonly decried as the squanderer of the Russian Empire, which took 400 years to conquer.
Sometime in 1987, authorities began allowing, for the first time, the emigrants from the 1970s to visit. In the winter of that year, in a taxi cab, I overheard a conversation between the driver and another passenger, seated next to him. It was not uncommon to pick up an additional passenger, but it was odd that the lone passenger sat in the front. They made no effort to tone down their babble, and the driver threw occasional conspiratorial glances at me in the rear view mirror. Soon, it became clear that the two men knew each other. The passenger was visiting from New York where he drove a cab, as, I’d inferred, he did before he emigrated.
The experience felt providential. By then, the rumor in the street was that the authorities began accepting applications for exit visas from Jews and other groups covered by Jackson-Vanik, based on old invitations from 10 years ago. I filed mine, asking to be reunited with my site-unseen relative Rivka in Israel in the spring of 1988 and, in two months, received my exit visa, affixed to a temporary identification in lieu of passport, which I had to surrender along with my Soviet citizenship. No one asked me how I was related to Rivka or why I was leaving my parents and my brother to be reunited with her. Everyone understood that the family reunification clause was a sham, as, likely, was Rivka. I boarded my plane for Vienna, Austria on October 4th 1998 at the Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow.
All Soviet Jews leaving for Israel flew to Vienna because there wasn’t a direct flight — or, in fact, diplomatic relations — between the USSR and Israel. After being the first country to recognize the Jewish State in 1948, Soviet Union broke off diplomatic relations in 1967 in a conniption over Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War. Austria served as a diplomatic intermediary between the two countries, thanks to its Jewish Chancellor Bruno Kreisky. In Viena, the arriving passengers were greeted by Israeli representatives, who culled out those interested in continuing on to Israel. They were put on the next flight to Ben Gurion, where, immediately upon arrival, they would be conferred citizenship of the Promised Land. The would-be Americans were handed over to the representatives of Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS)—an organization originally founded in the late 1800s to help repatriate European Jews to America—for shepherding us through the process of applying for political asylum in the Land of Promise.
From the airport, we were bussed to a cheap residence hotel in Vienna, where we spent the next month in a hyperventilated haze of emancipation, wandering about town, mostly on foot, eating pasta and Wiener dogs, and marveling at courteous Austrian children. At random, we’d stumble upon a Synagogue, sentinelled with heavily armed police. The history of Arab terrorism in Europe had been familiar so the sight didn’t seem forbidding, but few of us would have predicted that in only a matter of a generation synagogues in North America would be similarly guarded, and not only from Arabs.
In November a group of about a hundred of us, who’d arrived in Vienna around the same time, were transferred to Italy, where HIAS had a shop set up since the 1970s to counsel Soviet immigrants through the asylum application process. Thanks to the low season, six of us, after getting acquainted in Vienna, managed to rent a waterfront villa in the small resort town of Santa Marinella. We spent most of our time filing the asylum paperwork and listening to the English language cassette tapes. We learned enough Italian to buy food and cheap Chianti at the local farmer’s market and a daily cappuccino at a scrubby cafe at Marina di Santa Marinella. There, in the early December twilight, I first heard the chime of steel rigging gently brushing against the hollow masts of berthed sailboats.