In the summer of 1942 they returned to Moscow-after months of a nightmarish journey on slow trains teeming with refugees, after bouts of serious illness along the way, after Masha and her little brother had been separated from their mother and sister as their train pulled out and left them behind, and they spent a week hopping rides on freight trains and army trucks, making their way to Moscow without papers or money, and found their mother in the apartment, beside herself with grief over her two lost children and overwhelmed with joy at the sight of them.
Masha discovered to her dismay that much of her father’s precious library of leather-bound books had been stolen, some of it sold for food, some of it burned for warmth. The two elderly men who were their neighbors in the communal apartment stared at them icily when Masha’s mother asked about the books. What did she think was more important in wartime, her husbands books or Russian lives?
They had been away from the city a long time and needed a new residence permit in order to obtain ration cards for food. There was no certainty the permit would be given them. Masha’s mother said to her, “You have to come with me to the militia station; you will bring me luck. You have that luck; it’s within you.” Masha did not understand. They went to the local precinct and were given their residence permit and papers to fill out. Her mother took her everywhere she needed to go to get the papers approved. She began to call Masha “my little amulet.” Whenever she had to go somewhere on a serious errand, she would say to Masha, “Come with me; you 11 bring me luck.”
In 1943 they moved to another building because the walls of the old apartment, weakened by German bombing, began to crumble. The new apartment was enormous, with one sink, one toilet, nine rooms, nine families, about thirty people in all, among them ten children; nine tables in the kitchen, each with a kerosene burner; cooking, laundry, gossip, arguments in the kitchen, children running about; buckets, pails, clothes, a bicycle hanging from a wall, boxes filled with books. Quiet only when everyone slept.
In Uzbekistan, Masha had not attended school and missed her seventh and eighth grades. When they returned to Moscow, she studied on her own, took the examination for ninth grade, and passed. Along with other young people, she became a member of Komsomol. In their first apartment her parents had spoken to each other in Yiddish and with the children in Russian; her mother sang songs and told stories in Yiddish and Russian. Now, in this apartment and on the street, the Rashkovsky family spoke only Russian. In school and around the neighborhood Masha had Jewish and Gentile friends. She distanced herself from anyone known to be even remotely anti-Semitic; she avoided trouble; she never spoke to anyone about politics.
After high school she began to attend the Institute of Historical Archives because it was nearest her home, and at the end of her first semester she told her mother that she wanted to leave school, she was bored. Her mother said, “If that’s the case, then either you will study to become a doctor or you will go to work in a factory.” Her mother thought that the practice of medicine would be good for a woman.
That was in 1947, before the kindling of Stalinist-style anti-Semitism. To attend medical school then, you needed to have graduated from high school and passed examinations in chemistry, physics, and Russian language. During the summer of 1947 Masha did whatever preparatory study was necessary and had no difficulty gaining acceptance into medical school.
There followed two years of lectures and class work and memorization. And sessions in Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, political economy, history of the Communist Party, dialectical materialism, historical materialism, little of which, according to the family chronicles, the medical students took seriously. They brought their notes to the examinations and immediately afterward forgot what they had memorized.
Masha’s parents had observed no religious traditions; her mother did not light Sabbath candles. When Masha met Volodya, she was as indifferent to religion as he was. They considered themselves citizens of the Soviet Union, with the word “Jew” appearing routinely as a mark of identity after the word “nationality” on their internal passports.
Masha was able to leave the medical institute in Ryazan for Moscow only on weekends. The fifth time she and Volodya met, he brought her to the apartment on Gorky Street and introduced her to his parents. Volodya’s sister, Rosa, no longer lived there; she had received her master’s degree in philology from Moscow University in 1948 and was married that same year. To Volodya’s parents, Masha seemed bright, engaging, thoroughly Russian, and suitable for their son. That was in the early spring of 1951.
They went out together nine times in all before Volodya proposed marriage. Masha accepted. The marriage took place on the seventh of that June, a civil ceremony in the municipal registration office. Afterward there was a small party for them in the apartment of Masha’s family and another later in the Slepak apartment on Gorky Street.
The next day Masha left Moscow to begin her summer internship in a hospital in the small town of Lebedyan in Ryazanskaya Province, about 220 miles southeast of Moscow. She returned in late August, moved into Volodya’s room in the Slepak apartment, then went back to the medical institute in Ryazan to continue her studies and soon discovered that she was pregnant.
She did not want to have the baby in Ryazan and decided to apply to the Ministry of Health for a transfer to a medical institute in Moscow. She and Volodya proceeded, with much effort, to tread their way through the bureaucracy and the paperwork: numerous applications; documents that confirmed their marriage; papers from Masha’s physician verifying her pregnancy; an affidavit concerning Volodya’s workplace and position.
On weekends she traveled to Moscow to be with Volodya in his little room with a balcony facing Gorky Street.
Weeks passed while Masha’s request for transfer slowly wound its way through the bureaucracy. Finally, to her joy, the request was approved. At the end of the semester, after passing her exams, she was transferred to the Second Moscow Medical Institute. That May she entered the local maternity hospital on Stanislavsky Street to deliver her baby. Hours of difficult labor, during which she remained largely unattended, reduced her to utter exhaustion and an ominous silence. The medical staff then labored long and hard to save her and the baby. She gave birth to a son, who was given the name Alexander and the nickname Sanya, after her father. Some weeks later Masha Slepak returned to the medical institute.
All was tranquil in the Slepak household on Gorky Street during the summer and fall of 1952: Masha, in her final year of medical school; Volodya, working as a senior engineer in the Electro-Vacuum Factory in Moscow, a job he had obtained when the manager had chosen to ignore the fact that he was a Jew, because skilled specialists were now needed if the Soviet Union was to overtake the West in radar technology; and Solomon, the Old Bolshevik, approaching his sixtieth year and at peace with himself despite a recently diagnosed heart condition, his grandson embodying for him a sense of continuity and accomplishment, his lifelong dream of a new order to a great extent fulfilled. Adding to his feeling of personal achievement must have been the enormous satisfaction of having witnessed, in 1949, the termination of the Civil War in China and the creation of the Communist Chinese People’s Republic, under the leadership of Mao Tse-tung.
Then, suddenly, in November 1952, Stalin ordered the arrest of his personal physician, A. N. Vinogradov. Arrested, too, were others on the medical staff in the Kremlin hospital-clinic that serviced the ruling class of the Soviet Union. The stunning accusation: involvement in a plot to poison the entire leadership of the country.