The gates of November Read Online Free Page A

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 than 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.
    All the material in my possession—tapes, faxes, records of face-to-face conversations, and telephone calls—constituted the chronicles of a family that was in many ways an extreme example of the perennial Jewish plight in Russia, the plight of a deviant people against whom the Russians had unceasingly defined themselves. But as I went through those chronicles again and again, a very particular family drama began to surface, and I came slowly to realize that what I had in my possession was not only the classic tale of Russians and Jews at each other’s throats but also a tangled and singular human story about a father and a son—with a baffling mystery at its core.

THE FATHER

The Fire Bringer
    S hortly after the turn of the century, a thirteen-year-old boy in a small town in White Russia fled from the impoverished home of his mother, his father having died five years earlier. In the years that followed, he went on moving, across oceans and continents. By the time he reached the mainland of Asia nearly two decades later, he had been remarkably metamorphosed from a harmless small-town Russian Jewish boy into a cultured and dedicated Bolshevik killer.
    The small town was Kopys, about fifteen kilometers from the town of his birth, Dubrovno, on the Dnieper River.
    In 1766 there were 801 Jewish taxpayers in Dubrovno and its environs. One