Chaim Potok: The Gates of November

The woman hugged Volodya. She asked about Masha and the boys. They sat there talking. She was a large woman, the same height as Volodya but wider in build, her eyes deep blue, her blond hair going gray. An emotional person, she gave voice easily to her heart. She asked, “Why did you leave? You were born here; you have good friends here.”

Volodya said, “You know, it was because of the anti-Semitism. We wanted a good future.”

“But now the anti-Semitism is going down.”

“It’s like waves. Soon it will go up.”

“But it’s difficult to leave the place where one is born. How could you tear up your roots?” she asked.

To which Volodya responded, “Sometimes that’s necessary.”

He stayed two hours. The next day, he returned to Israel.

Two and a half years later, in June 1991, he was back in Moscow to deliver a talk at another conference. He found the city dirtier than ever, but otherwise the same, save for the foreign stores in its center: boutiques, French perfume shops, and a McDonald’s in Pushkin Square, where, in December 1965, some two hundred people had assembled near the statue of the poet and unfurled placards with the words RESPECT THE SOVIET CONSTITUTION -the first human rights action with placards in Soviet history.

Masha did not accompany him on either trip. She refused to return to the scenes of her bitter memories in that sorrowful land.

He sensed the freedom in the city, the openness of talk and action. His father’s Russia no longer existed. He asked himself: Where would he be now, my father, if he were still alive? And he answered: On the streets, demonstrating with the old Communists, trying for yet another chance at his old dream.

For the Jews in Moscow there were more schools, more synagogues. And summer camps and seminaries. Volodya met with old friends, told them that he saw no future for Jews in Russia. First get them out, he insisted; then strengthen their identity.

On the final day of the conference, he addressed the crowd-about three hundred delegates from Europe, Canada, Israel-at the Sabbath morning service in the Moscow synagogue across the street from the school he had attended as a child.

He had no opportunity on that trip to visit the apartment, but he telephoned the family to give them his good wishes. The young woman answered. How good it was to hear from him! Yes, they were all well. Except for her paternal grandmother’s sister, the Jewish sister: She had died.

Volodya expressed his sorrow, offered his condolences. They talked for a while longer, and Volodya said good-bye and hung up. It was not lost on him that there were no more Jews left in the apartment on Gorky Street.

Anyone familiar with this subject will recognize the debt I owe to those listed here. I want to acknowledge with special appreciation the work of Richard Pipes, Leonard Schapiro, Zvi Gitelman, Nora Levin, Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, Alan Bullock, Robert Conquest, Walter Laqueur, Arkady Vaks berg, and James H. Billington. Their writings were both loran and theodolite to my stumblings and constructions.

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