Our Immigrant Voices: Anatoly Libgober

After hearing temple member Marisol Guzman’s heartbreaking refugee story, the Har Zion Social Action Committee decided to ask other congregants to share their stories.

 

Generations

 

Here is Anatoly Libgober’s story, inspired by two significant photographs.

 

Photos in the Family Archives

 

By Diane L. Redleaf

 

A sunny-faced young man reaches out his hand to an older, matronly-looking woman. They both appear filled with resolve and delight. His new life is beginning. Her power is at its fullest, its most confident.

 

The young man in the photograph is Anatoly Libgober. He is my husband, though the photo was taken 11 years before I met him.

 

The older woman in the photograph is Golda Meir, Prime Minister of the State of Israel.

 

Anatoly met Golda Meir in the summer of 1973. Just a few weeks before the photo was taken, Anatoly, then a 24-year-old aspiring mathematician, had been expelled from the Soviet Union. In the photo of his meeting with the Prime Minister, his energetic face shines out under his telltale mound of curly hair. He’s beaming rainbows. No wonder: Anatoly just became a lucky victor in a Superpower showdown. A part of the Refusnik movement, Anatoly was an early and unlikely winner in a geopolitical game of chess. And now, for a brief period of time, Anatoly was an international celebrity.

 

Anatoly’s epic release from the Soviet Union came after world historical tragedies mounted throughout his parents and grandparent’s lives. When Anatoly’s father was 9 years old, his 19-year-old brother was killed in a pogrom. His mother’s father as well as the uncle for whom Anatoly is named were murdered in Stalin’s Great Terror in around 1937 (the exact date is still not known precisely). His father’s parents were both slaughtered in a mass killing orchestrated by the Nazis, carried out by their Ukrainian minions, during World War II. Only one of Anatoly’s grandparents, his mother’s mother, was alive when Anatoly was born. She, too, suffered greatly, for she was labeled an “enemy of the people” and lived in internal exile, banished from Moscow.

 

Raised in the wake of such upheaval, violence, and fear, intellectual pursuits provided comfort, hope, and a path forward. From his earliest ages, Anatoly’s mother, a high school math teacher, instilled in Anatoly the love of mathematics, the same love that eventually would force his decision to leave the country into which he was born.

 

One day, when Anatoly was 11 years old, a group of his mother’s math colleagues got together, talking about a hard geometric proof. “Who knows the answer?” his mother queried the others. No one did. But Anatoly, listening in, found the proof. From that day on, Anatoly’s mathematical gifts were clear to everyone. So was his love of mathematics. At age 71, it is still one of his most infectious and joyful qualities.

 

Anatoly finished high school at age 15 and accelerated his college studies through night classes, completing a masters’ degree by the time he was 21. At Moscow State University, he gained recommendations from two of the country’s leading mathematicians— professors of international renown. Nevertheless, Anatoly was not accepted into graduate school under the rigid Jewish quota. Only Jews with Communist Party backing made it. The exclusion from his dream of pursuing a life in mathematics forced his way into the Refusnik movement.

 

Stymied, Anatoly decided to emigrate. It wasn’t an easy process. He lost his job. He started to study Hebrew and, because the State required all citizens to register their employment, Anatoly registered himself as a “Hebrew teacher.” He went to jail after one of the many protests he attended. His father, already in his 60s, did not want to leave Russia. He too suffered a public denunciation and demotion after Anatoly applied for an exit visa.

 

While studying Hebrew and attending protests, Anatoly was invited to join a circle of older, better-established, Jewish scientists who were trying to get permission to leave the Soviet Union for freedom as Jews in Israel.

These scientists decided to call attention to their plight by going on a hunger strike to protest the Soviets’ refusal to allow their emigration to the Jewish homeland. The strike coincided with Chairman Brezhnev’s visit to the United States, timed in order to create maximum pressure and attention to the strikers’ demands.

 

On day 8 of the hunger strike, the KGB gave notice singling out Anatoly, the youngest of the seven and the least prominent of the group. He was directed to come in for questioning. The strikers held a tense internal debate.

 

“Should Anatoly go?” “Might he be exiled and never seen again?” they all wondered. He went.

 

And within four more days, day 12, Anatoly was on a plane to Vienna, and then on to Tel Aviv. He was the only one of the seven to be released during the strike.

 

When the strike ended, one of the strikers was exiled to a Siberian prison camp, as all the strikers feared might be their common fate. But months after the strike, the rest of the strikers were allowed to emigrate. Anatoly, however, left in a hurry all by himself, stripped of his Soviet citizenship.

 

He became a citizen of Israel, welcomed under Israel’s Law of Return. His mother, sister, and five-year-old niece followed him a month later. He entered the glorious and glistening free world in a time when leaving the Soviet Union was the dramatic stuff of movie thrillers.

 

Joining the hunger strike was risky, but not joining it could have been fatal to his future. Though never one to take avoidable risks, Anatoly staked his future on a life-or-death gamble that paid off.

 

When Anatoly arrived in Israel, the media attention he received was hardly familiar. Nor would he ever again experience such a display of public attention directed at him.

 

Though he soon would be embarking on a life of mathematical adventures all over the world, he would avoid media spotlights. He would save his public appearances for math conferences where talk of algebraic geometry, topology, and number theory would excite him even more than meeting a Prime Minister.

 

Indeed, Anatoly stayed shy about sharing both the story of his showdown with the Soviet authorities and the account of his reception in Israel. But one night after dinner at his apartment in Hyde Park, he asked me sweetly, “Did I tell you about this?” As if he had. And then he casually handed me a clipping from the Jerusalem Post with the photo of his meeting with Prime Minister Meir.

 

By then, he may have already been calling me “Dianushka,” a name that still sticks. Like others who know little of the Russian history that smoldered inside this shy, cerebral mathematician, I had no idea that Anatoly had been an international celebrity at the age of 24.

 

To this day, friends will ask Anatoly about his departure from Russia. Most of them aren’t too interested in hearing the full story, or are too shy themselves to ask much. Nor is Anatoly interested in notoriety. If friends ask him, “How did you get to leave Russia?” he’ll usually demur and mumble a platitude. “It was complicated.” They usually let the question drop. It was polite interest anyway, not a request for a Soviet history and politics lesson.

 

Closer friends often will try to talk to him about many things Russian. Bits of his expulsion story will come out. He doesn’t keep it secret, though he remains reticent and guarded about saying too much.

 

But one thing he is never shy about answering are the questions: “Do you want to go back to Russia?” “Have you gone back?” “Would you go?”

 

The answers are “No,” “No,” and “No!”

And when those questions are asked, the longer story will often come out.

 

✡✡✡✡✡✡✡

 

We met someone, once though, who knew Anatoly’s story immediately. One night in 1986, Anatoly and I were on a long vacation on the West Coast. It was the summer before we got married. After an international math conference in Berkeley, we headed for Los Angeles. We visited one of my good friends from law school who had settled there.

My friend, in turn, thought it would be nice if we met his friend Beth. But as soon as we came to my friend’s home and met Beth, she did a double-take as she stood face-to-face with Anatoly.

 

“I have a poster with your picture on the wall of my office,” Beth said. She was sure of it. “I have been looking at your face every day.”

 

I could not imagine how that could be true.

 

But it was true. It turned out that Beth worked for the Jewish Federation in Los Angeles. A poster of the 1973 hunger strikers was part of the ongoing “Let My People Go” campaign that Beth tirelessly staffed. So Beth had gotten to know the faces of each of the strikers, peering at her every day at work on the poster on her wall.

 

As it turned out, Anatoly and I owe just about everything to people like Beth. Without the organized Jewish community—all the Beths and the communities supporting them—Anatoly might never have been released from the Soviet Union. Without them, he might never have gotten to live his life pursuing non- Euclidean projective space, curves and manifolds, braid groups, and knots. He might instead be sitting in a Siberian labor camp.

 

And without the thousands of Jews around the world, organized by people like Beth, who pressed for the release of Soviet Jews, I might never have met my husband, formed my own family, or pieced together its Russian and American Jewish history from diverging strands of tragedy and good fortune.

 

And without people like Beth, neither of the photographs of my husband during or after the hunger strike would have made their way into my collection of personal memories, melding my own personal history with the world’s and its mysterious ways.

 

This essay was written for the writing group sponsored by Temple Har Zion during the pandemic, led by Elizabeth Liwazer. The prompt for the essay was to write about a photograph. The photo of Anatoly with Golda Meir was discussed in my first draft essay. But then the second photo was recalled and the revised essay grew to include the photo of the seven Refusniks that Beth had in her office.

For more information about the hunger strike, see:

“7 Soviet Jews Appeal for Worldwide Support,” The New York Times: http://nyti.ms/2LpugG7

“Six in Soviet Reject Plea to End Fast,” The New York Times: https://nyti.ms/2XezpDq

Refusenik: Trapped in the Soviet Union: http://amzn.to/2Xg1dHJ

“Soviet Scientists End Hunger Strike”: http://bit.ly/38kVSoT