In the doorway stood a woman of early middle age. Without a sound, she beckoned us inside and as soon as we’d entered, closed and locked the door.
We were in a narrow hallway. Coat pegs protruded from the wall, a small mirror hung nearby, and close to the wall stood a bench around which were shoes and house slippers, all neatly arranged in pairs.
Volodya Slepak and the woman exchanged some words in Russian. I assumed she was Masha Slepak’s sister-in-law. She pointed silently to the house slippers and then went down the hallway and into a room.
We removed our coats and hats and hung them on the pegs. Everything we wore dripped melting snow. Puddles formed on the hallway linoleum floor. Adena and I proceeded to unlace and remove our wet boots, and put on the slippers we had brought with us. Mine I carried in my camera bag.
Standing in a gray woolen sweater and dark trousers and slippers, his thick graying hair uncombed, his beard still wet with snow, Volodya Slepak watched as we got into our house slippers, and flashed us an appealing smile.
“Ah, you come prepared. Very good. Now come with me, please. You will meet everyone.”
We followed him through the hallway into the main room of the apartment.
It was a fair-sized room that served as both a living room and a dining room, the air warm and stuffy, the floor covered by a rug, the slightly shabby genteel look not unlike that of the rooms in which I grew up in middle-class neighborhoods of New York. In front of the couch stood a table with seven place settings. Bookcases jammed with volumes and periodicals took up the entire wall to the right of the couch. The curtains had been drawn over the windows on the other side of the room. Near the windows stood a small desk on which were a telephone and a vase filled with flowers. During the day I had seen elderly women bundled against the cold, standing in the snow, peddling flowers from little stands.
A few feet from the couch stood the dark-haired woman who had opened the door for us and a middle-aged man I took to be Masha Slepak’s brother. Next to him was a stocky, pale-faced young man of about eighteen, no doubt their son, Masha’s nephew, about the same height as his father, with thick dark hair and a bit of a stoop, and wearing on his sallow features an expression of deep melancholy.
Masha Slepak sat on the couch. She was a small, plump, shy-looking woman, with pallid, roundish features and short reddish hair, her eyes brown and alert behind thick glasses. She gazed at us with a wan, myopic look and a distant smile.
Our formal introduction to the family was brief.
“Here are people from America come to visit us,” was all Volodya Slepak said. There were polite handshakes. No one asked our names.
The atmosphere in the room was disquieting; it seemed to quiver with barely suppressed apprehension. Someone once said that the only true question we ought to ask one another is: “What are you going through?” Probably in the course of this evening the question would be answered without ever being asked. It was a desperate way for people like these to sustain life and hope: through strangers dropping in from the sky.
Masha Slepak’s brother and sister-in-law went into the kitchen. Her nephew retreated into a room off the hallway near the door to the apartment.
Earlier that day Adena and I had purchased a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka. This Adena now removed from her bag and presented to Volodya, who broke into an exuberant smile.
“Aha, that’s good, that’s good,” he boomed, looking thoroughly delighted. “Thank you very much.”
The room was sultry with radiator heat. No doubt the windows were fogged over behind the heavy curtains.
Adena went to the telephone to arrange our meetings for the next day. Volodya and I sat on chairs near the table.
“So,” Volodya Slepak said, “you are from America.”
His eyes, I noticed, were grayish green, mischievous and shrewd. Beneath the folds of his loose-fitting woolen sweater was the clear outline of a paunch.
I said, “Yes, from Philadelphia.”
“Do you know many Jews in Philadelphia?”
“We bring greetings from lots of friends.”
I mentioned the names of some people who had asked us to convey their good wishes to the Slepaks. He acknowledged the names with a hearty “Yes, of course, we know them.”
The conversation, slowly warming, still carried a measure of awkwardness, the quality of a hospital or prison visit, where the knowledge that one of the parties will sooner or later get up and leave while the other must remain behind chills the air and brings to all the talk an undercurrent of melancholy. Volodya Slepak’s English, with its heavy Russian accents, was fluent. And there was something beguiling about his eyes and expressive mouth and deep-throated nasal voice, a compelling, robust force that radiated energy.
All the time we talked, Masha Slepak sat quietly, her eyes watchful behind her thick glasses.
Volodya Slepak rubbed his beard and said, “If you permit me, I must ask you something.”
“Please,” I said.
“There is a man who lives in Philadelphia. The writer Chaim Potok. Do you perhaps know him?”
I said, trying to conceal my surprise, “Well, yes …”
“You do?” His face lit up.
I said, “Im Chaim Potok.”
His eyes narrowed. He looked confused.
Masha Slepak said something to him in Russian, the first time she had entered the conversation, and he responded to her quietly in Russian while still looking at me.
Both of them gazed at me with some unease.
“No, excuse me,” Volodya Slepak said. “Perhaps you did not understand. My English is not always so good. I asked if you knew the American writer Chaim Potok.”
I glanced at Adena—she was still talking on the phone at the other end of the room—and said slowly, “Yes, I know Chaim Potok. I am Chaim Potok.” And I reached into a pocket and drew out one of the calling cards I had been advised to have printed for the trip. In a Russian home, I’d been told, they served as a kind of genteel announcement of one’s identity, a bourgeois emblem of individuality amid the ideological leveling of personality purportedly characteristic of the Soviet world.
Volodya Slepak took the card, lifted the bottom of his sweater, removed a pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket, slipped them on, raised the card to his eyes, and peered at it. I thought I could see the skin above the line of his beard and along his broad forehead turn crimson. He took off his glasses and stared at me in astonishment and then uttered a sudden loud “Whooo!” that resounded through the apartment.
Adena turned and looked at Volodya.
Masha Slepak, seeming confused, spoke rapidly in Russian, and Volodya replied. I heard my name in his cascade of words. She said, “Oh!” and put both her hands to her mouth and stared at me.
Her brother and sister-in-law came in from the kitchen, and a moment later the pale-looking nephew burst from his room and rushed to the side of his alarmed parents.
“You are Chaim Potok?” Volodya Slepak said, grasping my hand with both of his and pumping it. He got to his feet and I stood as well, and he embraced me. I felt entirely swallowed up by his hard, muscular frame and his ebullience, by the strength I sensed in his arms. And I experienced no small astonishment of my own at that moment and a sensation of profound pleasure that my work had somehow reached and touched this admirable man.
He boomed to those who had just entered the room, “This is the writer Chaim Potok!” and his voice rang in my ears.
The brother and sister-in-law nodded courteously, with no sign of recognition. The young man responded with a vacant stare. Adena hung up the telephone and joined us.
“What a surprise!” Volodya said. “We must make a toast!”
He said something in Russian, reached for the bottle of vodka we had brought, and began to open it, while Masha’s sister-in-law hurried into the kitchen and returned with a tray of small glasses. Volodya poured drinks. We raised our glasses.
“To our friends from Philadelphia,”
he said. “And to freedom.”
“To my first meeting with people I feel I’ve known for a long time,” I said.
“To new friends,” said Adena.
Masha Slepak held her glass, looking intently at Adena and at me. There was something about the way she was watching us, as if her eyes were categorizing, filing, storing things away. Her brother and sister-in-law, who apparently knew no more English than Masha, stood with their drinks, bewildered and somewhat apprehensive over Volodya’s exuberance. And the nephew seemed utterly confounded by the glass of vodka thrust into his hand.
The seven of us emptied our glasses to seal our moment of meeting, and returned them to the tray. The brother and sister-in-law returned to the kitchen, and the nephew started down the hallway to his room. Volodya Slepak watched him go and waited until he had closed the door to the room. “There is a big problem with him,” he said.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“He is of an age when he can be taken into the army. If they take him, Masha’s brother and sister-in-law will not leave even if they are given exit visas.”
“Have they applied for visas?”
“Oh, yes. And they have been refused. They will not apply again if their son is in the army.” “I understand.”
“And later the authorities will use his having been in the army as a reason not to give him an exit visa. They will say because he was a soldier, he knows state secrets.” He was silent a moment. “It is a big problem. They might send him to the war in Afghanistan.” He paused. “Maybe you or your wife know an American girl he might marry.”
His words were an appeal to save a life.
Adena and I exchanged glances and shook our heads.
The subject of this doleful solicitation was called back into the room by his mother a few minutes later, and we took our places around the table. It was Shabbat, but there were no candles, or wine, or braided bread. A consuming desolation lay upon the room. All sat very still looking down at the table, and I sensed that they were waiting for me to do something.
I poured some vodka into my water glass, indicated that they should do the same with their glasses, and rose to my feet. They stood. I chanted the Shabbat Kiddush blessing—normally performed with sacramental wine—over the vodka. Even in Korea, in the worst of times, there had always been wine for Kiddush. I chanted slowly, glancing at the faces of the Russians. No embarrassment there, and no apparent discomfort. Solemn and respectful. I finished the Kiddush, and we drank the vodka. Then, over a loaf of dark bread, I recited the blessing for bread and sliced the loaf and passed it around. We sat down.
The aura of sanctity given the table by the blessings left everyone wordless for a moment. A Shabbat meal was clearly not a commonplace occurrence in the lives of these Soviet Jews. The dinner, I remember, consisted of a salad of cooked beets, potatoes and onions, and steamed white fish with cabbage and carrots. And small poppyseed cinnamon cookies. And tea. And much conversation.
Adena and I talked about the origins of our families in Russia. Escape had been the theme of their lives: my great-grandfather and his flight to Poland to avoid conscription and twenty-five years of army service under Nicholas I; Adena’s father and his flight from Nicholas II to elude arrest for participating in Zionist activities. Breaking out, bribing ones way across closed borders, getting as far as possible from that oppressive land—that was the legacy they left us. We had come to the Soviet Union, Adena said, to meet with dissidents, to express solidarity with them, to tell them they were not forgotten. All the time we talked, Volodya quietly translated our words to Masha and the others.
A warm intimacy settled upon the room, a quality of familiarity and closeness brought on by a shared table. The conversation with Volodya meandered into tributaries: Stalin, the Second World War, Cold War politics, the present Soviet regime, the dissidents, and the petitions, letters, headlines, demonstrations. The talk grew animated, and even Masha began to join in, expressing herself in halting Yiddish and English. From time to time her brother and sister-in-law ventured a few words. Only the young man sat in silence, lost, it seemed to me, in a miasma of sadness.
Slipping from one subject to another, we arrived somehow at the matter of Volodya’s health, and Masha suddenly turned to me and, pointing to my midsection, said with a sober look, “Small.” For a moment, I didn’t understand. Then she directed a finger at Volodya’s prominent paunch and said, “Not small,” and I sensed the weight of her admonishment.
Volodya’s voice, normally loud, bellowed forth in laughter. His face beamed; his eyes flashed. He patted his belly, said, “Masha wishes me to lose weight,” and laughed again.
Masha said something in Russian. Volodya translated. “Masha wishes to know how you stay so thin.”
I explained in simple English the normal and healthful way I ate. Volodya listened and translated. Masha grew increasingly absorbed. Her face grew animated; her eyes brightened. Of all things to excite her so—a modest, studied style of eating. Perhaps her husband was in ill health and needed some rules to rein in his appetite.
When I was done, Masha spoke briefly in Russian to Volodya. He rose from the table, left the room, and returned a moment later with a pad and a pencil. “Say again how you eat, and I will write it down. We will make Masha happy.”
Later we all helped clear the table, and as we moved about, a perceptible tension returned to the air. I noticed that Masha’s brother-in-law was glancing repeatedly at the kitchen clock. Finally, they all went to the telephone.
Volodya explained to us that his in-laws were about to make their fortnightly call to their daughter and son-in-law, who had a newborn child and lived in Beersheba, Israel. The call, which had been prearranged, went through with no difficulty.
Mother and father and son took turns talking into the telephone. They talked loudly, as if they had little faith in the instrument’s mysterious power and thought they had to propel their voices through the hidden wires that stretched across land and sea. Responding voices crackled from the black receiver. Volodya translated quietly. The baby was well. His name was Daniel. The daughter was very happy. She sent her love to her parents and brother and aunt and uncle. She was eagerly awaiting the day when they all would be given permission to emigrate.
Masha spoke on the telephone. Then Volodya. The call came to an end.
Masha turned away from the telephone, her face ashen, her lips tight. All the early self-restraint seemed to have drained from her. She said to Adena in hesitant and broken English, “I never again to see my children. I never to see my new grandchild in America.” Suddenly impatient with the language, she lapsed into Russian, and Volodya translated. “Our two sons received their visas to Israel years ago, and now they live in the United States. The wife of the son who lives in Philadelphia is pregnant and will soon give birth. We will never again be a family. This is our bitter lot. We are doomed to live out our lives in the Soviet Union. At least we succeeded in getting the children out. Not for a moment do we regret what we did.”
She stopped, and Volodya added, “There is reason to hope that Masha’s brother and sister-in-law will be able to leave if we can keep their son out of the army.” The young man said something in Russian and returned to his room. His parents went into the kitchen. Masha and Adena sat for a while on the couch, talking quietly together.
Sometime later we said good-bye to Masha’s brother and sister-in-law and nephew and started back. The snow was still falling. Volodya and Masha said they would accompany us to the hotel.
The Metro was nearly deserted. Volodya and I sat on one side of the car, and opposite us were Masha and Adena. Adena told me later that Masha talked mostly about the years she and Volodya had spent in Siberia. Her legs, badly frostbitten, were not as painful now as they had once been, though she couldn’t stand for very long. Glancing at Masha from time to time, I caught an occasional flash of fire from the eyes behind the thick glasses. It occurred to me that there was probably a good deal more to her t
han she had revealed tonight, and it saddened me that I would never have the opportunity to know her better.
We emerged from the Metro station into the snow. It was quite late. I put my scarf over my face, a feeble defense against the wind. Near the steps outside the hotel we stood a few minutes longer, still talking.
“I have read two of your books in English,” Volodya said. “And now, here we are together, speaking as friends.”
We stood there some while longer, reluctant to part. Finally, we shook hands and embraced and said to one another, “Lehitraot,” which is Hebrew for “until we meet again,” though none of us really believed that was remotely probable. Adena and I watched them walk slowly away and vanish into the snow-shrouded Russian night.
In the months that followed, I would remember the Slepaks at odd moments: staring out a window at a snowstorm; reciting the blessing over a cup of wine before a Shabbat dinner; on a subway train; reading news from the Soviet Union. I followed with admiration and heartache their strife-filled lives. Then, in October 1987, with a suddenness that was stupefying, they received their exit visas and were out of the Soviet Union and on their way to Israel!
One winter evening not long afterward, in a restaurant in New York, my agent, Owen Laster, asked me and Adena if we knew the Slepaks. We said yes, we knew them. He told me that Volodya had made tapes in Russian of their story and the tapes had been translated into English by one of the sons. Would I be interested in listening to the tapes and writing about the Slepaks?
The Jewish dissident struggle was then at its height. I thought: Listen to the tapes, see if they’re worthwhile, and maybe join the effort to free the Russian Jews.
I agreed to listen to the tapes. In due course, book contracts were signed. I began the necessary research. Adena and I flew to Israel, met with the Slepaks, and returned with nearly forty hours of video and audiotapes, which were later augmented by more than twenty additional hours of audiotapes, many dozens of handwritten faxes, and countless telephone calls concerning details large and small.