In Conversation with Borya Penson

In Kfar Hogla, Israel, a cute farmhouse sits on a beautiful piece of land. No fence. Maybe not even a lock. This is where my friend Borya built his home. And one can understand why: after his youth in the Soviet Union and nine years in a labor camp for having attempted to emigrate, he needs this peace and freedom; a feeling that the cheaper apartment in which he used to live in Haifa could not provide. Fifty years ago, Boris Penson participated in Operation Wedding, the attempt by a handful of Zionists from Riga to flee the USSR. They were sixteen who shared this dream and acted upon, eleven men and five women, including two non-Jews. After their failure, four women were released, one man was tried separately in a military court, and the others were indicted and tried 15–24 December 1970, in the “First Leningrad Trial.” All were found guilty. All did time in Soviet prisons/camps. Borya was sentenced to ten years, and served nine: in 1979 he was freed and relocated to Israel. To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of East European Jewish Affairs (EEJA), the guesteditors, my friends Nick Underwood and David Shneer, who was also my advisor and editor-in-chief while I served as assistant-managing editor for EEJA, asked me to comment on Rene Beermann’s “The 1970–71 Soviet Trials of Zionists: Some legal aspects.” Beermann analyzed the legal frameworks of the First and Second Leningrad Trials, and of the Riga and Kishinev Trials. As a young scholar, I wondered how I could answer the editors’ call and contribute to the story without repeating what had been said time and again. I knew Borya through friends, so I reached out to him. He has been interviewed many times about the event. I wanted to ask him about what he feels has not been covered in those interviews. In response, Borya invited me to his home, this simple farmhouse he built with his wife (“slowly, after we bought the land, there was no money left!”), in a moshav fifty kilometers north of Tel Aviv. Our conversations were trilingual, mostly in Hebrew but with some English and Russian mixed in. The translations are mine. Borya was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, which was where his parents found shelter during World War II. At age four, his family returned to his mother’s hometown, Riga, Latvia. But, as he recalls, everywhere in the Soviet Union, it was populated by the same Homo Sovieticus as everywhere else in the country. I asked if this was what led him to become a Zionist. He replied: “I hated the regime. I couldn’t take the bullshit. Nothing is real, it’s impossible to get the truth. People don’t know the real history. And if you don’t know history...” He did not finish Edmond Burke’s quote. Borya studied at the Riga’s Academy of Arts and worked with painter Semion Gelberg. He knew that he would not be able to live in the USSR, though, he felt that he could not