After 51 Years in Soviet Union, He’s ‘Reborn’ in U.S.

Bernard Lamport returned to America, his boyhood home, on Thursday, 51 years after his parents went to Moscow in search of a workers’ paradise and five years after he began his own battle to emigrate.

“It’s a rebirth,” Lamport said as he and his family were welcomed at Kennedy International Airport by his cousin, Si Drabkin of Queens, and representatives of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

The 55-year-old Lamport, who holds a Soviet doctorate in medical science, went to the Soviet Union with his parents during the Great Depression, when he was 5 years old.

His father worked as a journalist on the English-language Moscow Daily News in the 1930s and as a translator for a publishing house after World War II.

In an interview with the Associated Press in Vienna, where he and his family spent the weekend en route from Moscow, Lamport said he believed that he faced job discrimination in the Soviet Union because of his Jewish heritage.

But the main reason for leaving Russia, he said, was for a “reunion with my family.”