Wife Waits in San Jose : Soviet Jew Permitted to Leave Leningrad for U.S.

Susana Kreymerman got a midnight phone call this week from her husband in Leningrad with the news that he at last has received permission to leave the Soviet Union, thus ending their eight-year separation.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Susana Kreymerman said. “I wanted to cry. Then I wanted to call my friends, but I realized it was the middle of the night. I couldn’t sleep all night.”

Her ailing husband, Lebya Kreymerman, 55, telephoned late Wednesday night to tell her that he can leave Leningrad by April 15. He is the latest among Soviet Jews to be allowed to join their families in the West.

The Kreymermans, who were married in 1959, last saw each other in 1979, when she was permitted to leave with their son, Vadim, 17, now a student at Purdue University. The couple had obtained a divorce because it was easier for single people to leave the country, she said.

“I’m waiting for him. I want to get married again immediately, right now,” she said.

Their daughter, Irena, 27, has not been given permission to leave.

“He wants to wait for her, but I told him I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Susana Kreymerman said. “I don’t think they will let him stay anyway.”

Lebya Kreymerman has asked twice a year for the papers required to leave Russia and had been denied every time until now, she said.

Susana Kreymerman lives in San Jose, where she works for American Telephone & Telegraph Corp. as a computer programmer.