A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka: A Memoir

by Lev Golinkin

  Rita looked at me. I was getting too big to hide in my customary spot behind Dad’s leg.

  “Would you mind if my husband and I prayed for him?”

  Dad hesitated. “Technically everyone’s an atheist around here, but we’re not even secretly Christian.”

  “We pray for everyone,” said Rita. “You don’t have to be Christian—that’s not the point.”

  Dad glanced down at me, and I nodded. I wanted to be alone. Rita walked me over to Ben, her large skirt trailing in the wind. Darkness had fallen, and the sea wind whipped tree branches against the streetlamps, causing them to flicker. The Americans rested their hands on my head, Ben on my left, Rita on the right, and Ben started speaking with the air of someone who had an important, urgent request. Rita added her voice, and their disjointed murmurs blended together with the wind and the glimmer of the streetlamps.

  And then it was over. The adults shook hands, Rita and Ben gave Mom and Dad their phone number in case we ever made it to America, and we returned to our rental apartment.

  “Is that what religion is?” I asked Dad that evening as I munched on my nightly helping of blueberries.

  “I think so,” he replied. “It was my first time, too.”

  * * *

  Arkasha was easy to spot—he was tall and lanky, and sported a fishing hat with big glasses poking out from underneath. He was fifteen and he knew how to read and write in Hebrew, a dangerous and dying skill pursued mostly by old people, the ones who had nothing to lose, as a widowed family friend once put it. But Arkasha knew more than a language. He knew stories, legends of Moses, and David, and Joshua, and other tales from mysterious Jewish sources. He quickly learned that I loved all kinds of myths and fairy tales and was eager to share those he knew with me.

  We met Arkasha and his mother a couple of weeks before Rita and Ben blessed me. They were vacationing from Moscow, and every evening our two families met on the beach, a short walk from Pärnu’s downtown. Giant sand dunes dotted the seascape. Most were covered with a scruff of reeds, as if the dunes themselves were on vacation and had decided to stop shaving. Every few kilometers an errant jetty waded into the sea, wet black rocks oddly stacked upon one another. Arkasha and I circled around the dunes, clambered over the boulders, or ventured out onto the jetties as he told me tales I’d never heard before, accounts of Jewish kings and prophets. Once in a while he would pick up a stick and draw on the ground to clarify a particular episode, and the Bible would emerge from the sand, just as it had done in the beginning, in Palestine, many centuries ago.

  I journeyed with Abraham to the Promised Land, camped in the desert alongside the Twelve Tribes of Israel, waited for Moses as he ascended Mount Sinai. I would squat down to get a better look at the pictures in the twilight, and when I was crouched, watched over by Arkasha, I could hear the wind rustle through the dunes and taste the salty brine of the Baltic, and I felt both small and protected. Before we moved on, Arkasha would carefully scuff his foot over the ground, and the tale would vanish into the sand and a new one would begin.

  “A man died once and the angels gathered to weigh his actions, to determine where he should end up. But when all his deeds were weighed, it turned out the man had done as much good as he had done evil, and the scales hung in perfect balance.”

  “So what happened to him? Did he go to heaven or hell? How did they decide?”

  “The angels waited and then God sent him back down to Earth. God told him that if he witnessed one act of pure selflessness, he would be allowed to enter heaven.”

  “He came down? Like a ghost?”

  “Not like a ghost. Like a soul—there’s a difference. His soul went down and roamed the Earth, and after a while he came upon a Jewish man who lay chained in a dungeon. The man had been imprisoned there by people who wanted him to confess that Judaism was the work of the Devil. The man was brave, but he knew that if he was tortured there was a chance he would say something he would regret.”

  We reached the end of the jetty and stopped, listening to the tide gurgle through the black rocks. Everything, sea and land, was muffled by the twilight. The green of the wrack melted to olive; the blue sky dissolved into charcoal; the tan of the dunes faded to an indescribable ghostly hue. Off in the distance, I saw our families sitting on a bench. They were discussing their own issues and monitoring us to make sure we didn’t get too loud.

  “What did the captured man do?”

  “He told the soul of his plight, and the soul flew around the prison until he found a sharp pin lying on the ground. He brought it to the man, and the man killed himself. He knew that he was going to die regardless, but he wanted to die on his own terms, to die as a Jew.”

  “What did the soul do then?”

  “The soul picked up the bloody pin and soared with it to the gate of heaven. He told the angels what had happened and they agreed that he had fulfilled his task.”

  “And?”

  “And he went to heaven. He went to heaven, and he was proud of helping a fellow Jew.”*2

  During his last day in Estonia, Arkasha told me that his mother and he were moving to America in September. He promised to send me a package from Moscow with some of his old toy soldiers. I said goodbye, and we went home.

  In Kharkov I eagerly waited. School began, fall began, I got sick again, I kept to myself in the apartment and waited. I didn’t put much trust in people, but was sure Arkasha would come through. I wasn’t the only optimist. My parents were delighted with my summer friendship. They’d talk to each other, with me well within earshot:

  “Arkasha is so smart. Wouldn’t it be great if Lev took after him?”

  After a couple of weeks, the package arrived. Inside were twenty soldiers, medieval Slavic warriors made out of red plastic. The leader bore a large shield with a rampant lion on it. Two knights were mounted on horseback. They were the finest soldiers I’d ever seen. I examined the package, even turning it inside out to make sure I got everything. Arkasha knew me well: tucked under a crease, for me to find, were faintly penciled Hebrew letters along with the corresponding Russian ones. Next to them was written “Practice These.” A spasm ran across my face. The entire experience in Estonia—the sea air, the freedom, the safety of darkness, and the thrill of exotic tales under the twilight—all of it vanished and all I could think was He’s training me. He’s training me to be a zhid. I was furious for not recognizing Arkasha’s trickery. Mom and Dad hadn’t seen the secret note. I ripped it into fine pieces, then went to play with the soldiers.

  * * *

  I remember that September evening vividly, because while I was busy staging battles with my new red recruits, the old black rotary in Moskovskyi Prospekt 90, Apt. 5, rang, rang, rang, and rang like the Last Judgment was coming. Every caller had the same frantic news: “Did you hear? America is closing the border. The U.S. Congress will stop accepting Soviet Jews: anyone who’s not registered in Vienna by December 31 won’t be able to go to America. America is closing the border.”

  America is closing the border.

  The rumor flashed through the city like a thunderbolt. “Go to Austria,” the whispers rustled through the phone lines. “Go to Moscow, renew your summonses, get your exit visas, and head for Vienna. There’s help in Vienna.” Long after the soldiers and I had concluded the Siege of the China Closet, long into the night the calls continued.

  “We’re leaving,” declared Mom; “we’re leaving now!”

  The next morning my father was on a train to Moscow.

  * * *

  *1 “The things kids say,” remarked Anna Konstantinovna when Mom confronted her. “I have no idea where Lev would get this from.”

  *2 Arkasha’s story (or at least the way I remember him telling it) is an altered version of “The Three Gifts” by I. L. Peretz.

  $130, TWO SUITCASES, ONE PIECE OF JEWELRY, NOTHING OF VALUE

  Kharkov, Ukraine, USSR, Fall of 1989

  Mid-September, 3½ months to the December 31 deadline to be in Vienn
a.

  Dad’s just returned from Moscow, where he spent the better part of a week standing in line to renew the summons—the looming deadline has every Jew in the USSR rushing to the capital to do the exact same thing. The next step is to obtain official permissions from Mom’s clinic, Dad’s engineering bureau, and Lina’s Kharkov Polytechnic Institute to leave the USSR. All three institutions must sign off that my family knows no valuable state secrets that could harm the Soviet Union.

  Running a totalitarian regime is simple: tell the people what they’re going to do, shoot the first one to object, and repeat until everyone is on the same page. There’s no need to bother with platforms, debates, and that inconvenient din of opinions that forms the heart of democracy. The Soviet behemoth sprawled across eleven time zones, swallowing up one-sixth of the world’s landmass and scores of ethnicities, from dark-haired Chechens to blue-eyed Latvians. Holding this bloated cultural Frankenstein together was one rule: no one leaves. Moving to a town five kilometers over required governmental permission; expressing a desire to leave the country altogether was akin to a criminal act. The possibility of Jewish emigration cut to the source of the Party’s power—denying its citizens options—which is why Washington kept raising the topic. The West realized that in its own symbolic way, the battle over Soviet Jewry was more dangerous to Moscow than that of nuclear weapons; self-determination is anathema to Communism.

  And it had to be the Jews. America couldn’t wrangle for Uzbek freedom, for example, for the same reason the USSR couldn’t lobby Congress to let Texas secede: national sovereignty’s a bitch. But the Jews were different. Until 1948, the Jews were one of a handful of people to not have a nation. But the creation of the State of Israel gave the Semitic citizens of the USSR a homeland to return to. This formed the lynchpin of Washington’s argument, and that’s what the West pushed for, meeting after meeting, summit after summit.

  By the early 1970s, this relentless pressure made evading the Jewish issue unfeasible, and the Kremlin altered its course from flat denial to a more subtle strategy. Moscow conceded that there was in fact a Jewish homeland, and even established an official avenue by which Soviet Jews could apply for emigration to Israel. Built into this very process, however, were numerous hurdles designed to minimize (and preferably stem entirely) the flow of Jews out of the country. The goal was to exert indirect influence by turning emigration into a costly and often perilous gamble. As America soon learned, Moscow’s da was just the beginning of a prolonged, at times outright bizarre cat-and-mouse game between the USSR and the West, with Soviet families caught in between.

  The game commenced with a catch: the USSR would release only those Jews aspiring to reunite with family members living in Israel. In other words, one could not begin the process of emigration without first having received a summons for reunification from a living Israeli relative. This was where the Kremlin drew the line, forcing the West to deal with the classic catch-22. Pyotr couldn’t emigrate because his brother Pavel was also stuck in Russia, while Pavel couldn’t emigrate because Pyotr was in the USSR.

  Israel was thus presented with a dilemma: How does one get Jews out of Russia if there are no Russian Jews in Israel to summon them? It was an unusual problem, which forced the Israeli government to resort to an unusual solution. Jerusalem began by establishing an obscure little office known as the Family Reunification Department. On the surface it was a family-tree service, designed to help Jews, the perpetual wanderers, reconnect with long-lost family members scattered across the globe by migration and war. Its true mission, however, wasn’t so much to locate people as to create them. That isn’t as difficult as it sounds: as any good kindergarten teacher will tell you, anything is possible with a little imagination. So take a family such as the Golinkins, who want to leave Russia but have no known relatives in Israel. The Family Reunification Department pores over their history and discovers that the family matriarch, Faina Pevzner, lived in the Ukraine when the Germans invaded in 1941. Here’s where the reunification workers put on their imagination caps and start asking questions: What if Faina had a brother (let’s call him Isaak) who was separated from her during the invasion, evaded the Nazis, snuck across the border to Poland, and, after many trials and tribulations, found his way to the Promised Land? What if Isaak had an address, a driver’s license, even a photograph? (Any old Jew playing chess in a Tel Aviv park will suffice.) What if Isaak took some time to locate Faina? And finally, what if he, now old and lonely, missed his sister dearly and wanted nothing more than to spend his golden years with her … and with the rest of her family stuck in the Soviet Union?

  World War II left Eastern Europe a devastated, smoldering wasteland. Entire populations had been obliterated, to say nothing of the personal records of one insignificant Jew. The truth is, once he was created, there was no real way to prove that my great-uncle Isaak Pevzner didn’t exist.

  Late September, 3 months to deadline.

  Mom’s clinic signs off on her leaving with no issues. Dad’s supervisor signs off, shakes his hand, and demands his bottle of cognac. Dad brings him two bottles the next day, just in case he isn’t joking. Then Lina, a promising student at Kharkov Polytechnic, receives a letter from the dean. It states that the school (and by extension the Ukrainian SSR, and therefore the entire Soviet Union) has invested too much time and training in Lina to allow that precious knowledge to fall into the hands of our foreign adversaries. The irony is not lost on my sister. She never even wanted to become an engineer and now she shows so much potential that she won’t be able to leave the USSR. Grandma starts cooking Lina’s favorite meals. Mom does her best to shelter me from the stress of the entire autumn but even I can’t help noticing and tone down Lina’s prank regimen. Mom and Dad scramble for a solution. The family’s not leaving without her.

  The USSR quickly sensed it was about to lose a sizable chunk of its Jewish population, thanks to the thousands of Isaak Pevzners pouring out of the woodwork. It immediately clamped down on all outgoing communication with Israel. The Family Reunification Department in Jerusalem couldn’t just concoct a person out of thin air; it required basic demographics, such as names, birthdays, birthplaces, parents’ names, parents’ birthdays, parents’ birthplaces. Smuggling such a list out of Russia was tricky: phone lines and the mail were heavily monitored, and the few people permitted to leave the country were searched for any kind of documentation. People counteracted that policy by keeping the information concealed and encrypted.

  Further measures were applied. All incoming mail from Israel was screened carefully for the large, bulky summonses. Thus, even if a relative was created and a summons mailed out, there was no way for the Israeli government to know that it reached its destination. This taught Israel to send summonses during Soviet holidays, when the postal system was inundated with mail, making thorough screening impossible. In 1974, Mom asked a trusted friend moving to Israel to smuggle out our list. For a few years my family heard nothing, until one autumn evening in 1977 when Grandma received a large, gaudy greeting card congratulating her on the “60th Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution.” Tucked inside was a thick sheet of paper covered with Hebrew. At long last, after forty years of separation, the prodigal great-uncle Isaak had returned.

  Early October, 10 weeks to deadline.

  One of Mom’s old patients puts her in touch with a high-ranking administrator at Kharkov Polytechnic. A sizable package of rubles, cognac, and vodka (the Holy Trinity of Soviet bribery) is delivered to the administrator’s apartment. Two days later, Lina’s dean concludes that the faculty may have overreacted and that the loss of my sister probably shouldn’t derail the dreams of workers and peasants across the globe. Lina stops sulking. The pranks escalate accordingly.

  Back in the pre-Gorbachev era, receiving a summons was no guarantee of exit. On the contrary: it was where the process got terrifying. Once the precious summons was received and proper permissions were obtained, the candidate had to undergo a KGB backgroun
d check. The Kremlin, which was engaged in a constant state of aggression with the West, asserted its right to deny an exit visa to any applicant who had been “exposed to information vital to the national security of the Soviet Union.” What defined exposure to information vital to the national security of the Soviet Union? Pretty much anything. Living near a power plant (give or take a few hundred kilometers). Carrying a subscription to a scientific magazine. Having an aunt who lived near a power plant, or a cousin with a subscription to a scientific magazine. Reasons for refusal, which was irreversible, were rarely given, and it was impossible to predict who would be branded as un-exitable. Some people everyone thought were going to be detained had been released, while many bewildered applicants had been refused. The process was random, arbitrary, devoid of reason and logic, which, of course, was the whole point, and shortly after the first Jews had braved the application process, a new group of citizens emerged into being. They were called otkazniki, “the refused ones,” or, as it was anglicized in the West, refuseniks.

  The refuseniks couldn’t leave the country, naturally, but that was only the beginning. They had attempted to emigrate with the assumed intent of disclosing “sensitive knowledge” to the West, thereby undermining the safety and security of the Soviet Union. Under that interpretation, the refusenik’s decision to submit an exit visa application was a treasonous act that deserved punishment. And punished it was.