Coming to America : Thanks to an Anonymous Helper, Soviet Family Gets Its Wish to Live in U.S.

Since 1989, Naum Avner, a Santa Monica electrician, has spent many sleepless nights worrying about his sister, who was living in limbo in the Soviet Union, stripped of Soviet citizenship and her job.

But a year and a half and miles of red tape later, Avner and his sister finally have been reunited in Los Angeles.

They were aided by an anonymous Los Angeles businessman who offered to cover travel costs for Zina Sokolsky and her family after reading of their plight.

Last week, Avner sat in the sunny living room of a West Hollywood apartment with his sister, her husband, mother-in-law and two children as they recounted the complex circumstances that essentially made them personae non gratae in their native country for the past two years.

Avner said he urged them to join him in the United States when he visited them in Kiev in 1989. But for years, direct emigration from the Soviet Union to the United States was not permitted. So, like thousands of other Soviet Jews, the Sokolskys had intended to emigrate through the so-called third-country route.

Using Israeli visas, they had planned to travel to Austria and then Italy. But instead of continuing to Israel, they had intended to apply for an American visa at the U.S. Embassy in Rome.

Faced with a deluge of applicants eager to take advantage of the Soviet Union’s liberalized travel policies promulgated under perestroika, however, the United States set a cutoff date of Nov. 6, 1989, for entry under the third-country policy. After that date, immigrants would have to apply directly through the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, which would mean longer waits for Soviet emigrants at a time when the Soviet Union was allowing record numbers to leave.

The Sokolskys had obtained their Israeli visas two days before the deadline, Avner said, but were mistakenly told they were too late. Despite appeals to Soviet and American authorities that an error had been made, they were stuck in the immigration pipeline--without jobs, in danger of being kicked out of their government-controlled apartment in Kiev and rapidly using the money they had saved to pay for plane tickets out of the country.

“It was an incredible situation,” said Avner, 58, who works for Loyola Marymount University in Westchester.

Forced to start the process over, they submitted immigration applications to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Last month, they finally received approval to enter the United States.

On the condition of anonymity, a Los Angeles businessman offered to pay for their airplane travel, which was coordinated by the Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles. He explained in an interview that he wanted to help because he was touched by their story and reminded of a similar journey his grandparents made to this country 100 years ago.

“How can we thank this man?” Zina Sokolsky said last week. “It’s unbelievable what he did.”

In the wee hours of Jan. 13, after more than 20 hours in the air and a stopover in New York, she arrived in Los Angeles with her husband, Lev, 51, their children, Kira, 24, and Leny, 15, and her husband’s mother, Tuba Shenson, 79.

Now, the Sokolskys are busy starting new lives, looking into English lessons, job counseling and schools. Sokolsky was a bookkeeper in Kiev and her husband was a welding engineer. They said they hope to find similar work once they are settled. But they are still in shock at being in America, which Avner says seems “like a different planet” to them.

On their first visit to a supermarket in Los Angeles, for instance, Avner said his sister has moved to tears by the abundance of food and other goods.

In Kiev, they had grown accustomed to government rules that required having a ticket to enter a store, he explained. When they finally were allowed in to shop, they were confronted more often than not with empty shelves, the result of food shortages gripping the Soviet Union.

“It’s so hard to understand,” Avner said, explaining his sister’s emotional reaction. “There is so much here and so little there.”

Reminded of such stark differences, Sokolsky dabbed at her eyes again. “I am very happy--and lucky that I am in this country,” she said. “I have only one brother, and we are together now.”