Back From the U.S.S.R., 60 Years Later

It has been 60 years since the teen-aged Abe Stolar reluctantly left Chicago because his Russian-born Jewish parents wanted to go home. Stolar, an American citizen, thought he would return in a year or two.

Now at age 77, he has finally made it back.

In Los Angeles this week on a 15-city tour to thank Americans for helping get him out of the Soviet Union (he emigrated to Israel in March), Stolar tells a roller-coaster tale of his two worlds: inside and outside of the Soviet Union.

Arriving inside, he was stripped of his U.S. passport and realized he would have a tough time getting out. But life there wasn’t so bad, he says. His family had two rooms in a communal apartment. His father worked for an English-language newspaper. Stolar himself became a translator after going to school for four years.

Family Hardships

But in 1937, his father disappeared in one of Stalin’s anti-Jewish purges. His sister’s husband died in a labor camp. Stolar was fired from his prestigious job and given factory work. He served in the Red Army in World War II.

And all the while, he dreamed of “outside.”

Fortune smiled again when Stalin died in 1953. Stolar became a translator for Radio Moscow, married Russian-Jewish chemist Gita Rozovskaya, and had a son.

“We lived better than most,” he recalls, because translators were considered an upper class. “They have more classes in that ‘classless society’ than do most countries in the outside world.”

But when his son, Michael, started school, Stolar started thinking seriously of getting out. “They were distorting my son’s mind,” he explains. And what was worse, “Jewish children could not get into any school of higher learning. My son had no future inside,” because without a higher education, he would be relegated permanently to what might be called the lower class.

By this time, however, Stolar admits, he had become a bit afraid of the “outside” world. “I half believed the lies I was translating every day. I asked my friends who emigrated to Israel to tell me what it was really like.”

Their reports were positive, and Stolar applied for his family’s exit visas in 1975, when his son was 15.

Becoming a Nonperson

The visas arrived--”and what follows is very important for you to know,” Stolar says, leaning forward in his chair: “You can’t get an exit visa to Israel unless you relinquish your Soviet citizenship. And once you do that, you are branded automatically as a traitor to your country. You become undesirable and lose all your Soviet rights. You can’t get mail, you can’t work, you can’t study, you can’t marry, you can’t travel. You have no documents in a country where every person is registered and documented.”

In other words, you don’t exist.

This would have been unimportant to the Stolars, except that they were snatched off the plane to Israel before it left Soviet soil. Their emigration papers were rescinded on the pretext that his wife, had done secret work. And the three Stolars lived as nonpersons for the next 14 years.

They had shipped all their belongings to Israel. They had no money, no possessions and only the clothes on their backs. At first, they existed on the charity of friends, who brought food and clothes to the communal apartment to which the KGB had returned them.

Then individuals and American Jewish groups, like The Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles, which hosted the Stolars’ trip to Los Angeles this week, heard about the family’s plight. Gifts started arriving, Stolar says, proudly pointing to his leather sandals, his plaid shirt and his Seiko watch. “Everything we own, everything we wear, we owe to those generous people.”

Because the Stolars were not allowed to work, tourists began arriving with merchandise they could sell to earn money. “Cameras, shoes, watches, tape recorders, ballpoint pens, art books, blue jeans,” Stolar chants, recalling his undercover salesman days. They are all things that Soviets desperately want but can’t buy “inside.”

Ballpoint pens? Yes, he explains, Soviet-made versions “just don’t work” and American pens are “highly prized.” Boots? “Soviet women love them, but the ones made in Russia are no good. They cost a few months’ salary and they look like rags in five or six days.”

Education for Son

The higher education Stolar so desperately wanted for his son was, of course, not allowed. But “he is a good boy, a smart boy and he found a way to learn on his own, with the help of friends,” Stolar says. Michael was not permitted to marry in the Soviet Union, so the Stolars managed to secretly import an American rabbi when he fell in love, “just so we could legitimize it in some way.” Teaching religion to minor is against the law in the Soviet Union, Stolar says.

Not an easy life. But neither Stolar nor his wife show signs of wear and tear. In fact, they seem cherubic, innocent, joyful. “I just saw my first computer last week,” Stolar says with glee. Most Soviets have never seen one, even in a shop window, he adds. “Oh, perhaps some of the higher-up scientists have them,” but not ordinary folks.

Nor did Stolar know that Americans had shot for the moon more than once. And he was surprised to learn that Americans take pictures with color film. “In Russia, it’s all black-and-white. Color is hard to find, too expensive and takes weeks to process,” he says.

The Stolars seem to have lived whole lifetimes since they, their son and his family came “outside” in March, after appeals from former President Reagan and Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.). When asked what the biggest difference is between inside the Soviet Union and outside, Stolar says it’s certainly nothing material. “Outside you can think for yourself. In there, you can’t think for yourself because you have no access to information. There is always something they are keeping from the people. They have thrown a curtain over the mind.”