Emigres Savor Sights, Sounds of Freedom in L.A

Ilya Levin awoke shortly after dawn Thursday, too excited to sleep.

He and his wife, Yelena, two Soviet refuseniks, were savoring their first hours in America--in Los Angeles--a new world of sights, sounds and smells. He could sleep some other time.

Only a few hours earlier, Levin, 42, and his wife, 41, had arrived here on a plane from New York, completing a 13-year struggle to leave their homeland.

“It was a feeling of excitement,” Levin said through an interpreter. “It was hard for me to believe I was really here.”

Even Overcast Looks Good

Looking out the window of her parents’ West Hollywood apartment, even the morning overcast looked good, Yelena Levin said.

That first impression, she said, “was euphoric.”

With them was their daughter, Alexandra, 20, who had been allowed to leave the Soviet Union about nine months ago and who now works in a law office.

It had been a traumatic experience. When Alexandra left, the couple said, they were not sure if they would ever be reunited.

Yelena Levin vividly remembered the declaration of a Soviet immigration officer: “You may never see her again.”

“We cried inside; we never allowed them to see our tears,” she said. “Sometimes, it takes more love to let go of your child than to hang on.”

Nonstop Hugging

But now, they could not stop hugging each other, even while answering a reporter’s questions.

Their black poodle, Vegin, who was also experiencing his first day in Los Angeles, was jumping excitedly from lap to lap.

Until 1975, Levin had been an engineer, working on Soviet civil defense systems, he said. That year, he and his wife made their epochal decision to leave their home in Leningrad and attempt to emigrate to the United States.

To do so, he had to resign from his prestigious position and take a menial job repairing machinery in a flour processing facility. As a Soviet engineer, he explained, his chances of emigrating would have been remote.

From that point, it was a long struggle.

Always Turned Down

Twice a year, he said, they would apply to leave and were always turned down.

Meanwhile, Yelena Levin’s parents, Margarita and Natan Feldman, also former Leningrad residents who had emigrated to Los Angeles in 1979, mounted a letter-writing campaign to anyone who would listen--from President Reagan to New York Gov. Mario Cuomo--in an effort to bring their daughter’s family here.

Finally, last June, the Soviet bureaucracy relented--to a point. The Levins got word that Alexandra and Yelena could leave, but not Ilya.

“They were trying to split up our family,” Yelena Levin said. “This was for us a huge tragedy.”

After an agonizing decision, the parents decided to let their daughter emigrate alone. They would stay behind and take their chances.

Their calculated risk paid off. About three months ago, they were given the green light to leave. Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, or openness, they believe, played a large role in the decision. Since his rise to power, emigration policies for Soviet Jews such as the Levins had been relaxed.

Their first taste of the Western world, Yelena Levin said, was in Vienna, Austria. There, she said, they visited a food market, stocked with items that boggled the minds of a Soviet family used to food shortages.

But really, she added with a smile, “we came here for the freedom, not for the food.”