As Volodya continued working on the air-defense system of the Soviet Union, his sense of his personal future began to be increasingly somber. He was aware that Jews could no longer enter the ministries of Foreign Trade and Foreign Affairs; that the upper echelons of the party and the secret police, where Jews had been so heavily represented from the time of the Revolution until the mid-thirties, were now closed to them; that there were proportionately increasingly fewer Jews in local soviets, in republic-level legislatures, in the Supreme Soviet. He knew too that from 1958 to 1961, for the first time in the history of the Soviet Union, not a single Jew was to be found among the numerous government ministers. Until mid-1957 many Soviet Jews had thought that some kind of cultural and religious rebirth might be at hand: A few Yiddish books had appeared; the authorities had even permitted amateur theatricals in some cities; synagogues were undisturbed; a theological seminary had been added to the synagogue in Moscow; and three thousand prayer books were published in Moscow. Indeed, during the first half of 1957 about thirty thousand Soviet Jews were repatriated to Poland as part of a Soviet-Polish agreement to allow the return to their homeland of pre-1939 Polish citizens and their families; many soon left Poland for Israel and elsewhere. There were the visits by Israeli athletes, and the Israeli participants in the 1957 international youth festival in Moscow, and the tourists from Israel and other countries, and the concerts given by Israeli performers. But abruptly, as if awakening to the fear that it might have opened its doors dangerously wide and that things might soon go spinning out of control, the Kremlin again reversed itself. An antireligion campaign began to sweep through much of the country in mid-1957, intensified in 1959, and continued in ferocity until 1964. It was directed against not only Judaism but all faiths. About fifty synagogues-“nests of speculators,” rose the cry from the local press-and thousands of churches were shut down. The last synagogue in the city of Minsk had its roof removed during a service and was turned into a club. Baking the traditional unleavened Passover flatbread, matzah, was forbidden. And a campaign against economic crimes netted an astonishing number of Jews, whose names were prominently announced in the press. More than 500 trials took place in the early 1960s for the crimes of embezzlement, speculation in foreign currency, bribery, and connections to foreigners; 117 individuals, of whom 91 were Jews, received the death penalty. That so many Jews were among those arrested is no surprise, as Jews were prominent in certain areas of the economy. But it is not unreasonable to wonder why the number of Jews executed was disproportionately so much higher and to regard with dismay the atmosphere of hatred generated by the anti-Semitism in the Soviet press, so starkly reminiscent of the late forties and early fifties under Stalin.

Back and forth went the Soviet Union in its relationship with the Jews, now warming to them, now freezing them out. As in tsarist times, a dizzying policy of peace and war, progress and retreat, acceptance and rejection, yawing this way and that: the classic, paralyzing Russian ambivalence. No pogroms anymore, nothing quite so crude as that, especially with the world always watching. Khrushchev was not a boorish anti-Semite; the butchery of pogroms, which he had witnessed during his early years in the Ukraine, was unseemly to him, unfit for a superpower attempting to influence the third world. Still, the Jews had to be dealt with. They were too easily attracted to Zionism and bourgeois nationalism, far too intellectual, too quick to avoid collective labor and group discipline, too exploitive of Gentiles, too eager to attend universities, too entangled with ancient superstitions, too individualistic. Deviants. Best to just barely tolerate them, to treat them as marginal, and as forever incapable of entering the Soviet mainstream.

That attitude toward the Jews was at times brought home to Volodya on the job. In 1963 the laboratory he headed had a staff of about twenty-five people, all working on improving the air-defense system of the Soviet Union. On occasion he informed the deputy director of the institute that some additional engineers were needed, and each time the response was: “Please find good engineers, and they will be accepted. But they must not be Tatars or Jews. I can do nothing for them.”

Masha never encountered anti-Semitism on the job, because most of the doctors in her hospital were Jews. But she knew of Volodya’sexperiences, was intensely aware of the poisoned air of the country. She and Volodya asked themselves often how they could raise a family in that atmosphere. Even those who wished to assimilate could never be certain that they would not be told one day, “You come from Jewish grandparents and parents, and therefore you cannot be fully Russian.” And those with excellent jobs today might be fired at any time in the future simply because they were Jews, and then arrested, exiled, shot. On the one hand, Jews were being deprived of their culture, their religion, their history; on the other hand, the authorities bluntly refused to acknowledge that they could ever become an integral element of the Soviet people. For all the foreseeable future, “Jew” would be the word on the fifth line under “nationality” on the passports of Soviet Jews, save in those instances when one parent was not Jewish and one chose to adopt that parent’s nationality upon turning sixteen. The identity of Jews was being defined for them by their enemies. Even Volodya’s father-who had helped to make the Revolution, who had metamorphosed the core of his being from village Jew to Bolshevik fighter-was regarded as a potentially menacing outsider by the very party to which he had always shown nothing but blind loyalty! What kind of a land was this in which to bring up children? What security could Volodya and Masha hope to have in a country where their lives might be destroyed one day by some cruel and violent upheaval? Were Jews so helpless everywhere in the world? Was there someplace where they were differently treated?

So Volodya and his friends turned to overseas voices in the forests. And in 1963 he and Masha began to listen to their shortwave radio inside their apartment, in which he had located certain areas where the metal construction within the walls screened more of the jamming signal than it did the signal from the radio station. Depending upon the earth’s atmosphere and the sun’s activity, it was often possible to hear the words through the jamming. When he was alone, Volodya used earphones. When he and Masha were together, they kept the volume low. The walls in their building were of good quality and thick; thus no one outside their apartment could hear the radio’s foreign voices. The children never listened with them.

Most of the time they listened in the evenings. They followed closely over the Voice of America the reporting of the assassination of President Kennedy and over the Voice of Israel, events in the Middle East. That was the period when the Kremlin had begun to court the Arab world, and Soviet relations with Israel were cooling. But connections between the two countries were still being maintained-the Soviets worried about the many millions of dollars’ worth of Russian property in Jerusalem, and the Israelis had awakened to the realization that vast numbers of Russian Jews might yet be saved for Zionism-and there were fully functioning embassies in both countries and diplomatic personnel traveling back and forth.

Volodya and Masha had no way of knowing about the covert operation then being run in the Soviet Union by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. In the judgment of those who conducted it, and others, that operation had a startling ripple effect on the destiny of Soviet Jewry-and on the future of the Soviet Union itself.