Soviet Family Reunited, but Outlook Uncertain

For the family of Diana Sanders, starting the new year has meant starting a new life. It is a process that has been going on since Dec. 3 when Sanders’ daughter, Isabella Lifschitz, arrived here from Moscow with her husband, Igor; the Lifschitz’s daughter, Lucy; and mother-in-law, Elizazeta.

On that day this family of Soviet Jews was reunited with Sanders, herself Russian-born, who left her native land for the second and presumably final time six years ago.

Other than the reunion, about the only certainty they faced was that everything would change utterly. Just how is what they are now discovering.

After six frustrating and anxious years of applying to leave, of bureaucratic red tape and runarounds, of denials, postponements, explanations and stonewalling, the changes are welcome ones. During those years, the number of Soviet Jews permitted to emigrate went from a high of 51,330 in 1979 to a low of 922 in 1984.

The Lifschitz family were among 944 permitted to leave in 1986.

‘What Now?’

When the family stopped into Assemblyman Tom Hayden’s office recently, to thank him personally for the help his staff member, Havi Scheindlin, had given them, they told Hayden their saga. After listening to their story of the last six years, of Igor’s demotions at work, of Lucy’s expulsion from school, he asked, “What now?”

“Now?” Sanders answered for them, “More problems. Lots of problems.” And she itemized some. Finding a place to live so they would not have to share her small one-bedroom apartment in the Wilshire district. Getting Lucy, 24, accepted in a college. Finding jobs for Igor, 50, a mathematical engineer, and Isabella, 49, a computer programmer. Learning, or daring, to speak the English they understand well. Learning to drive, getting licenses, buying “at least one car.”

Igor, for all his newness, has read enough of the reality of life in Los Angeles to correct Sanders with a laugh, saying of the one car, “In fact, more.”

“These are good problems,” Hayden commented at the end of the recitation.

“Oh, yes!” Beaming and shaking their heads, they could not have agreed more.

Recently, at Diana Sanders’ apartment, the family told their story, and the entangled history of Sanders’ relationship with both countries. English is her first language and she speaks it fluently. The others, with the exception of Elizazeta, speak English with hesitation; Igor shows the most difficulty but manages to slowly construct flawless, if labored, sentences.

They spoke also of their consternation at the news that 50 Soviet emigres had returned to the Soviet Union, guessing at the circumstances.

Their own adjustments they were taking in stride. This family of refusedniks had arrived in the new country with their cat, Sascha--”I got the shock of my life: She’s brought the cat!” Sanders said, recalling her reaction at the airport.

However, they have overcome more difficult problems than that.

Diana Sanders, (Sanders is an anglicization of her family name) was born in the Ukraine in 1912. She was brought to this country by her parents in 1914, three years before the Russian revolution.

“Why? To get away from the army. It (Russia) was a terrible place for Jews--the pogroms, discrimination. Jewish kids couldn’t get an education.”

She lived all over the United States, at first with her parents and other relatives in Buffalo and Cleveland, where she graduated from high school. Then, on her own in New York and Los Angeles.

After her father died in 1933, her mother went back to the old country, to Leningrad, to what had become the Soviet Union. Her mother had never adjusted well to this country, Sanders said, had no trade and only found work in a beauty parlor after her husband died. And to some degree, Sanders said, her mother had been caught up in the romance of what changes the revolution might have brought to the hard, feudal country she had left.

In 1936, Sanders followed her to Leningrad. She did not leave the Soviet Union again until 1979.

In between she lived a whole life: married, gave birth to Isabella, was evacuated with her to Kazakhstan during the war, lost her husband--an army engineer--to the war, finished a university degree in education and taught English at a city on the Volga. She moved to Moscow in 1949, taught at the Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages, worked as a translator, lived in terrible conditions outside of Moscow in an old building with outdoor toilet and water pump and bought a cooperative apartment, thanks to a building spree during Nikita Khrushchev’s regime.

The moment that the Soviets began to allow emigration (“in the ‘70s when they started letting people out”), she began making plans to leave.

Why? Why uproot oneself so drastically yet again? What was it about life there that would make her, a woman then in her 60s, retired and on a pension, decide to take on such change?

“The general life style,” she said. “There was no personal freedom. You can’t say what you think. You don’t know who to trust. Physically, it became easier after a while. But there were always shortages of food and clothes. But being always afraid, never speaking out freely. . . .”

As a Jew, and as a former American, Sanders said, she was always suspect, always felt she was being watched at work and discriminated against. She said a woman like herself would normally never have been hired at the institute, but they did not want to pass up the rarity of one whose first language was English.

The discrimination she felt was never overt, Sanders said, offering as an example Lucy’s experience in applying to study mathematics at Moscow University. A Gentile friend who worked at Moscow University had warned them it was fruitless. Indeed, that turned out to be the case, they said.

Lucy was expelled from the Pedagogical Institute where she had been studying for two years because, she said, they told her she was not fit to be teaching children if she wanted to leave for America.

“That was considered traitorous,” Sanders said.

Igor was demoted. A professional, he was given menial jobs, and the lowest possible wage.

Computer programmers were in short supply, Isabella said, so she was not bothered. But, she received no promotions or raises.

While they went through the bewildering waits and explanations in Moscow, Diana Sanders kept up the pressure from here.

She had help, she said, mentioning San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein, Scheindlin, Congressman Mel Levine.

When permission finally was granted, and they were about to leave the land of their birth, they did not find it hard to leave, they said.

“About those 50 (Soviets who returned), I can’t understand,” Igor said long after the conversation had gone to other topics.

“I think that they have lived here for too long and they have forgotten everything. Or, they never knew why they wanted to leave the Soviet Union. They didn’t have to wait six to 10 years. And I think, it’s my impression, that things there are much worse than 10 years ago. In spite of (Soviet leader Mikhail) Gorbachev saying that everything is becoming better. Obviously, on the surface, they release (Andrei) Sakharov, (Anatoly) Shcharansky, a few very prominent people. But on the ground, underground, the small people suffer much more than 10 years ago.”

He is aware of the hopes many Americans have placed in Gorbachev and the new policy of glasnost , or openness, that is so widely publicized.

“I think Gorbachev wants to do better but after all, it doesn’t matter what he wants. It matters what he is doing.”

It was the start of a new year, a time to talk of wishes.

“To be healthy,” Diana Sanders said immediately, and began itemizing all that her family had been talking about--jobs, cars, apartments, before proceeding to a different level; “And no wars. Let’s try to live in peace with everybody.”

The rest listened approvingly, and then Igor was moved to struggle with the language again: “To let the people come, to let them leave,” he said. Then he extended his arms and held his hands out, palms up, letting his face risk some open-ended hopes:

His wish for the new year? “To see, to hear, to move.”