Outliving the Soviet Union

You don’t stop living, Ikhel would say years later, because of war and bloodshed and tragedy. During the Second World War, when they were soldiers who fell in love at first sight, he and Riva never thought about what was going to happen tomorrow. They just lived.

And after the fighting was over, when they learned whom the Nazis had murdered, what could they do but keep on living? The dead were gone: Yankel and Reizl Vodonos, Ikhel’s

parents, along with 18 other relatives, and Riva’s parents, Tsilya and Benzion Kooperschmidt, and her 3-year-old nephew rested uneasily in the ditches where the Nazis had left their bodies.

Ikhel sold his only civilian suit and used the proceeds, along with what was left of his army salary, to buy a one-room apartment in Moscow where he and Riva could live. It was small, and the ceiling was low enough for Ikhel to reach up and touch it with his hand.

The couple were expecting their first child, and Ikhel took a job teaching math. He went to work every day for three years in his army uniform because he could not afford to replace the clothes he had sold.

He was reared to be a religious Jew, but Ikhel did not think about going to the synagogue. As a teacher, he was employed by the state, and although religion was not expressly outlawed by the Soviet regime, it was discouraged. Clergy were not allowed to vote, and people like Ikhel who held government jobs risked losing their positions if they were openly religious.

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But he remembered everything his father and his pious brother Leib, who died of starvation while fleeing the Nazis, had taught him.

Years later, after he had retired and he figured there was no longer anything they could do to him, Ikhel went to the last remaining synagogue in Moscow on the holy day of Yom Kippur. He stood outside and listened to the strains of Kol Nidre, the prayer that begs forgiveness for promises long forgotten, and cried.

Across the sea in America, Ikhel’s brother Joseph did not know who among his parents and 12 siblings had survived the Nazis and the battlefields. He had come to the U.S. from the Ukrainian town of Belogorodka in 1913, part of a great wave of immigration that saw one-third of Europe’s Jews flee to the United States, Palestine and South America in just 30 years.

Joseph had lost contact with his family after the Soviets restricted communication with the West, and had been living with the new last name of Saltsman--acquired partly by accident when he emigrated--for 32 years.

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His own son, Sam, came home from the war full of plans to move the family out to California, a place he had seen several times on his way to the Pacific.

Sam married Helen Glagovsky. Her father, Bernard, had a business in Haverhill, Mass., making straps and bows and other leather parts for shoes. Haverhill was the next town over from Lowell, the cotton mill town to which Joseph had emigrated, and the specialty there was shoes.

Bernard Glagovsky thought there would be room for a business like his on the West Coast.

He decided to teach Sam and Sam’s older brother, Louis, what he knew, and on May 31, 1947, the two young men found themselves pacing off space in a Culver City warehouse, drawing lines with chalk on the floor where the machines would go. Their company, California Stay, opened that spring, making piping and straps and bows.

Glagovsky had come out earlier to check on business opportunities, and visited a strange and wonderful restaurant in the San Fernando Valley called the Sportsmen’s Lodge. There, a guest could fish for trout in the hotel stream and have it cooked in the restaurant.

He told his daughter about the place, and when Helen and Sam moved out, they made a point of trying the place.

The couple bought a house nearby, in Studio City. One time, Helen took a visiting relative to the lodge for dinner. The woman commented that while in San Francisco, she had seen Joan Crawford’s dog outside of a hotel.

“My dog is outside here tonight, too,” said the woman in the next booth. It was Joan Crawford.

Joseph and his wife, Minnie, moved out in 1950 with their youngest son, Gerald, who was still in high school. They bought a house in West Los Angeles.

In 1960, Minnie was diagnosed with cancer. She died soon after, at 65. About a year after Minnie’s death, her younger sister, Pearlie, came out to California for her annual visit. Pearlie was an independent woman who had lived on her own in Washington, D.C., since 1929, working as a secretary in the Department of Justice.

Pearlie was in her 50s and had never married. When Joseph, who turned 67 that year, proposed, she was stunned.

“It took me three days to say yes,” she said later, as if three days was a long time.

“I felt,” she said, “that the privilege of being wanted was the greatest privilege in the world.”

Decades passed, and a new generation grew up.

Yakov, the son of Ikhel and Riva, became a plasma physicist. Sam and Helen’s children married and had children of their own.

And then it happened.

In September 1991, a month after the Soviet Union splintered into separate republics, one of Joseph and Ikhel’s brothers, Isaak, got out. He left behind a country racked with internal dissent and brimming with renewed hatreds.

“Jews,” wrote a reactionary on the wall of Ikhel and Yakov’s apartment building, “we will not forget you.”

Isaak emigrated to Israel, where his son already lived, and had a glorious meeting with a nephew he had never met, the child of his brother Shuki. And this nephew, Zvi Vardi, told him something so wonderful, so miraculous, he could not believe it.

He could hardly believe it still, when Sam and Helen came to see him there a few weeks later, bearing pictures and love and stories of those in California. Joseph, they said, would celebrate his 97th birthday in two months.

Isaak held Sam’s face in his hands and looked for his brother in Sam’s eyes. He spoke to Sam in Yiddish. He said that Joseph had given him a cap when he left Russia, and that he loved Joseph so much he’d worn it until it fell apart.

He told Sam about Ikhel. There is one more brother, he said. In Moscow. He needs to get out.

And when Sam and Helen left to return to America, Isaak sent a letter to Ikhel.

Your brother Joseph, he wrote, is still alive.

To be continued Friday