‘I’m the One to Decide’ : Shcharansky Wants to Do It His Way

Three days after Anatoly Shcharansky was freed in an East-West prisoner exchange and flown to Israel last February, political commentator Yoel Marcus wrote in the popular daily Haaretz that the Soviet dissident’s “fight for freedom may in fact just be beginning now.”

A leftist, Marcus was most upset by what he perceived as efforts by Israel’s religious and nationalistic right to “seize (Shcharansky’s) soul.”

Nearly three months later, the evidence shows that the Haaretz correspondent and anyone else who thought Shcharansky vulnerable to political, religious or some other kind of manipulation need not have worried.

Independence of Spirit

Indeed, Shcharansky has given Israelis, as well as their American Jewish supporters, a taste of the same independence of spirit that so frustrated the Soviet secret police for more than a decade.

He has politely but firmly resisted overtures from a range of Israeli political parties, turned down invitations from a variety of American Jewish groups in order to make his U.S. debut next week as a private citizen--and successfully traversed the potential mine field of Israel’s secular-religious split.

Despite having spent the last nine years in virtual isolation and emerging as a celebrity into a strange and difficult country, he has quickly taken charge in his private life, too.

“I have the feeling there is no need to teach him or to advise him,” said Alexander Luntz, an old friend who knew Shcharansky before emigrating from the Soviet Union in 1976 and who is in almost daily contact with him here.

Guards Are Gone

The guards from a nearby religious school who kept watch over Shcharansky and his wife, Avital, during the first days after his release are long gone. He personally returns phone calls, occasionally does his own shopping, and asks as many questions as he answers during meetings with politicians, diplomats, journalists, agents, petitioners, and ordinary people.

Avital Shcharansky, who emigrated a day after the couple’s marriage in Moscow and who devoted herself to a worldwide campaign on her husband’s behalf during a 12-year separation, has faded quietly and, according to friends, willingly into the background.

Despite being besieged with lucrative lecture-tour offers and concluding a generous book contract, Shcharansky’s only indulgence so far appears to be a new telephone-answering machine.

Through it all, Shcharansky has exhibited what Jerusalem Post columnist Abraham Rabinovich described as “the casual wit and internal balance of a man totally at peace with himself.” After years of isolation in which he had “little more than his own mind for company,” he emerged both unbroken and unhardened, Rabinovich wrote--”the man who proved larger than the myth.”

Since the first, frantic days after his release on Feb. 11, the 38-year-old Shcharansky has avoided all but a handful of public appearances and has deferred most requests for formal interviews.

Those closest to him have offered various explanations, ranging from a desire to shift public attention to those left behind in the Soviet Union to a fear of “media burnout.” He is clearly concerned about his elderly mother and brother, who have not yet received promised Soviet exit visas, even though he has pledged that their situation will not stop him from speaking out.

Sparked Verbal Attack

His reluctance sparked a rare verbal attack on Shcharansky at a “thank you” party in a Jerusalem hotel last month for those who had supported him during his years of imprisonment.

As guests started to leave, one woman grabbed the microphone and shouted at Shcharansky: “What have you done in the last two months for Yuli Edelstein? What are you going to do about him? He is dying!”

Edelstein is an activist still imprisoned in the Soviet Union.

Shcharansky did not respond, but a friend later described him as “offended” by what he saw as unfair criticism.

“You can’t ask a person who did so much why he didn’t do something more,” the friend commented.

“I’m torn,” said Lynn Singer, chairman of the advisory board of the New York-based Union of Councils for Soviet Jews, in a recent telephone interview. “There are two ‘mes’--the one that wants to be his mother and wants to understand, and the other that feels time is going by and he’s just sitting there in Jerusalem.”

Whatever the reason for his low profile to date, Shcharansky is scheduled to return to public view next week when he begins a 10-day trip to New York and Washington. Highlights of the visit are to be a meeting with President Reagan and an appearance at a Solidarity Day rally May 11 expected to attract up to half a million people in support of Soviet Jewry.

There was such competition among groups wanting to sponsor his U.S. trip that Shcharansky’s agent, Marvin Josephson, president of International Creative Management Inc., has reportedly referred to it as “the war of the Jews.”

And friends here confirm that some American Jewish leaders were “very, very upset” by Shcharansky’s decision to make it a private visit.

“What he stresses, which is also a sign of strength, is that he doesn’t do that to punish anyone,” said Luntz. “He wants to work with various groups, but not to be directed by them. I believe that step by step, people are starting to understand that.”

Luntz said Shcharansky plans a second U.S. trip this fall, during which he will devote most of his time to appearances before various Jewish communities. He reportedly also plans a trip to Europe around the same time.

According to David Bar Elan, a New York-based friend who is helping to arrange next week’s Shcharansky visit, most of the money from his book contract with Random House is to go into a foundation for aiding Soviet Jews. No details on the value of that contract have been released, although informed sources said that serialization rights alone are likely to bring more than $500,000.

Asked how the Shcharanskys have reacted to the prospect of all that wealth, Luntz said that after they were informed about the level of U.S. taxes, Israeli taxes and agents’ fees, Avital Shcharansky quipped: “Where can we borrow money?”

Early signs are that while Shcharansky will devote himself to the cause of Soviet Jewry, he will do so--as he did before his arrest in Moscow in March, 1977, on charges of spying for the United States--within a broad human rights context.

Yosef Mendelevitch, chairman of Jerusalem’s Soviet Jewry Information Center and himself a former “Prisoner of Zion,” noted that Shcharansky’s first public appeal since his release was on behalf of Andrei D. Sakharov, a non-Jew and spiritual father of the Soviet human rights movement, who has lived in internal exile for more than six years.

The appeal came in a recorded statement to last month’s “Parallel Helsinki Review Conference” in Bern, Switzerland.

Shcharansky has generally avoided comment on the Arab-Israeli conflict or on the status of Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, explaining that he feels he has no moral right to speak out until he studies the situation more thoroughly. However, he appears anxious to learn and reportedly seeks a variety of opinions on the issues from his many visitors.

Similarly, the former dissident has kept Israeli politicians at arms length, despite what Luntz described as continuing efforts “on a very high level” to enlist him.

Shcharansky visited the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) in late March, but he refused invitations to appear at the recent conventions of both of Israel’s biggest political parties-- Labor and Herut. He also declined an invitation from the right-wing Tehiya (Renaissance) party and, according to leftist Citizens Rights Movement leader Shulamit Aloni, has not responded to a letter from her.

“The link which I felt in my heart during my imprisonment was with the whole of the Jewish people, not with the (Labor) Alignment or the Likud (Herut) or the National Religious Party or anybody else,” Shcharansky said during his Knesset visit.

“He intends to (remain out of politics), maybe not forever, but at least for a long time,” said Luntz.

Right of Political Spectrum

Those closest to Shcharansky here, including secular Israelis like Luntz, are on the right of the political spectrum. That’s also true of Avital Shcharansky and her religious friends.

The relationship between the non-observant Shcharansky and his religious wife has prompted intense and occasionally insulting comment here. Referring to Avital Shcharansky and her friends, columnist Marcus wrote:

“They will not desist or rest until they see him wearing a kaputa (the long, black coat worn by some ultra-Orthodox Jews) and adorned with a thick beard and side locks.”

Shcharansky laughs off such talk. Referring to the tradition for religious Jews of both sexes to wear a head-covering, he frequently quips that “everyone is waiting either for me to put on a skullcap or her to take off her head-scarf.”

He told one visitor that he often reads in the press about problems between him and his wife, “but when I don’t read the newspapers, there are no more problems.”

Luntz described the Shcharanskys as “very tolerant” of each other and as relating to one another “as if they separated yesterday.”

He added: “With them, unlike with many others, there are no problems. He respects her; she respects him. That’s all.”

After appearing constantly at his side during the first days after his arrival, Avital Shcharansky has been even more out of the public view lately than her husband. Friends say it is doubtful whether she will join Shcharansky on his upcoming U.S. trip.

Luntz explained that she is exhausted after a recent bout with the flu. But also, he said, after 12 years of having virtually no private life while traveling the world on her husband’s behalf, “maybe step by step now she starts going out of that circle.”

If the Israeli left is concerned about him being overly influenced by his wife and her friends of the religious right, some religious Israelis are also unhappy.

“What does his Zionism, his Jewish identification, mean without the religious element?” a young woman asked after hearing him address a student group early last month. “In everything he said, beautiful as it was, the word ‘God’ never once passed his lips.”

Asked about religious pressure on him by the newspaper Yediot Aharonot the other day, Shcharansky made it clear that in this area, too, he intends to follow his own conscience.

“I’m in a democratic country, in a democratic family, and the religious laws that I feel I want to observe I already observe,” he said. “I’m the one to decide.”

Mendelevitch, who received a hero’s welcome here after he was released from 11 years in Soviet prisons in 1981, may be in a unique position to assess Shcharansky’s adjustment so far.

Mendelevitch admitted in an interview that he suffered “personal, psychological problems” for a long time after he arrived, stemming from a combination of publicity and a sense of responsibility for those left behind in the Soviet Union.

“I lost taste for life,” he said. “Many times I asked myself what will push me to get involved in normal life. I had no interest, no ambition, not even appetite.”

‘I Felt Very Sleepy’

He spoke to Jewish groups and met politicians on behalf of Soviet Jews, but somehow that wasn’t enough.

“I felt all the time very sleepy--for a year and a half I just wanted to go to sleep all the time,” he said. “I got exhausted just talking to people. Somehow I felt it is like a disease.”

In the end, he said, he realized “I can’t run away. I’m not going to die. So I have to play the game. . . . I felt I had an obligation.” Today he is married, a father, active in the cause of Soviet Jewry, and studying for the rabbinate.

And as far as Mendelevitch is concerned, “everything (Shcharansky) has done so far is excellent. My expectations were very big, and he has so far fulfilled all my expectations.”