These days Evgenii Koifman and his wife, Lidia, live in a three-room apartment in a quiet, residential section of West Rogers Park, thousands of miles from the homeland whose clutches he has not yet escaped. His health is frail. He has very little money, few friends, and no prospects for a job. “I am a Russian poet, but I will do anything,” says Koifman. “I go to synagogues and I beg for work. I can clean. I can wash. I can watch at night. But they have nothing. I am told, ‘Times are hard in this country.’”
The KGB released Koifman without filing formal charges, but he was expelled from the university, drafted into the navy, and assigned to a missile ship that patrolled the Norwegian coast. “I had a gun; I could have easily crossed into Norway,” says Koifman. “It didn’t occur to me. It was the Soviet mentality; I never thought against the regime.”
In 1973 he moved from Moscow to Dnepropetrovsk, a city in the Ukraine, where his mother lived. A year later he requested permission to emigrate to the U.S. He was refused. It became something of a little game. Every six months Koifman requested permission to emigrate, and every six months the regime said no. He was eking out a living, working temporary construction jobs, with no hope for the future, when in 1980 he had a religious awakening.
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But one day while walking past an old synagogue in Dnepropetrovsk, he had a burning urge to go in. “I went to the second floor, which I learned later was the women’s section,” says Koifman. “I saw some old men standing around [a] stove that didn’t give much heat but gave a lot of smoke. They were singing prayers in high voices. I decided then and there to give myself to that synagogue. I just made that decision; it’s very hard to explain.
Koifman’s religious awakening changed his status with the KGB. He was now a Jewish dissident, and his dream was to live in the Jewish state.
Lidia, five months pregnant, headed off for Moscow to alert the world to Koifman’s fate. “Jewish activists have this custom if a husband is abducted: the wife goes to Moscow and they hide her,” says Koifman. “She declares a hunger strike and it is announced to the entire world. The Voice of America gives daily reports, and there are demonstrations of support in cities of Europe. By this they are able to protect the wife. I don’t mean to minimize what refuseniks in any part of the Soviet Union went through. It was awful for all of us. But if you ask anyone they will tell you, it was worse for those of us in the provinces because we were so isolated. I know of only one case–my case–where they took both the husband and wife. The Jewish activists closed the door on her. One prominent refusenik wouldn’t even let her into his apartment. Later I asked him why he didn’t come to my aid. He said he had a family. He was frightened. You have to understand how tense things [were]. The KGB allowed political games in Moscow, within limits. But with dissidents from the provinces they were tougher.”
