The gates of November by Chaim Potok

Author:Chaim Potok
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mariya, Dissenters, Social Science, Jewish Studies, Jewish communists - Soviet Union - Biography, Communism & Socialism, Fiction, Religion, Political Science, Europe, Political Ideologies, Jewish, Soviet Union, History - General History, Historical - General, History Of Jews, Judaism, Vladimir, Russia & the Former Soviet Union, Holocaust, Solomon, Historical, Solomon - Family, Refuseniks - Biography, Jews - Soviet Union - Biography, History, Jews, Family, Jewish communists, 20th century, Refuseniks, General, Slepak family, Biography & Autobiography, Slepak
ISBN: 9780394588674
Publisher: New York : Knopf : 1996.
Published: 1996-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

6

Journeys

The change in Masha and Volodya began slowly. That it began at all was in part a consequence of experiences private and personal: Masha’s terrifying arrest by the KGB; Volodya’s distressing encounters with anti-Semitism on the job; their gnawing awareness of the ruthless deeds of Solomon Slepak in China. And in part on account of events public and political: the demythologizing of Stalin; the candor of the Khrushchev years and the sudden poisoning of the air with the arrest and trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel; the possibilities, borne by radio voices, of alternative lives for themselves and their children. The change came reluctantly at first, with considerable anxiety and hesitation. Until the final visceral change, caused by the overwhelming terror and triumph of a distant war.

The family chronicles tell of summer boat trips that Masha and Volodya often took during those Khrushchev-Brezhnev years. They went on one such trip in the summer of 1966—the year Sinyavsky and Daniel were tried and sent to labor camps for “anti-Soviet propaganda”; the year the locksmith Iosif Chornobilsky unsuccessfully petitioned the Ukrainian Communist Party for a Jewish theater in Kiev and was arrested; the same summer American Reform rabbis visited the Moscow synagogue and a youngster accompanying them became the first youth called to the Torah in forty years.

The boat they sailed on that summer was named Dolphin. Built in East Germany, it was 16.5 feet long and 5.5 feet wide and had two sails and an engine. Its wooden frame was covered with rubberized textile, and it could be easily disassembled and packed into several bags.

They sailed for two weeks along the Neringa Spit, a 75-mile length of sandbar—its width from half a mile to 2.5 miles—that separates the Kursh Gulf from the Baltic Sea. Also aboard were their friends Victor and Elena Polsky and Leonid Lipkovsky, all engineers whom Volodya had met while working in the Electro-Vacuum Factory in Moscow.

The boat took them from Klaipeda, a Lithuanian city on the Baltic, to the city of Königsberg, which the Soviets had renamed Kaliningrad, in the former state of East Prussia. They would sail for a day on the gulf side of the spit and then go ashore and make camp and put up tents and remain for one or two days, swimming, lying in the sun, fishing, picking berries. At night they built a campfire and Leonid Lipkovsky played the guitar and they sat around singing comical ditties and old Russian songs about love, the sea, nature, and long journeys, and listening to the various voices over the radio, and then quietly talking. They were a close, intimate circle of friends. In those Brezhnev days, the smaller the friendship group, the safer you were: fewer chances of running afoul of informants. No conspirators in this band of intimate friends sailing along the Neringa Spit that summer of 1966 and camping on its white dunes away from civilization, save for the three times they went into the towns on the spit for supplies, where they bought bread, sugar, pasta, and other staples.

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