HAPPY OUTCASTS
SUSAN WELCH
Special to The Jewish News
2
A Soviet-Jewish
family has
made a smooth
shift from
Moscow to
Michigan
Six years after arriving in Detroit,
Leonid and Olga Makar-Lirnanov are
unpacking again in a new home,
aghast that even a few Russians would
want to return to the Soviet Union.
At their pleasant, new Far-
mington Hills home, Olga and
Leonid Makar-Limanov are getting
ready for a house-warming party.
Outside, the snow has been falling all
day and the road is hazardous. In
Moscow," reflects Olga, "it would
have been cleared by now." But she is
not complaining.
Neither she nor her husband has
any desire to join the well-publicized
but small group of Russian emigres
who have applied to return to the
Soviet Union. They must be crazy!"
she declares. Experience of Soviet life
has made her skeptical about glas-
nost (Mikhail Gorbachev's "open"
policy) and doubtful of the returnees'
future prospects.
In the five-and-a-half years since
Leonid was interviewed by telephone
in Rome for his position as professor
of mathematics at Wayne State Uni-
versity, the Makar-Limanovs have
settled happily and successfully in
the West. "We have jobs we enjoy,
with people we like very much," says
Olga, who, speaking no English
when she arrived, acquired two mas-
ter's degrees and taught at WSU be-
fore moving to her present job with
Electronic Data Systems.
Life might have turned out quite
differently. The Makar-Limanovs,
with their then 13-year-old son
Sergei, left Russia in July 1981, 18
months after applying for a visa and
at a time when the number of permit-
ted emigrants had already declined
dramatically from its 1979 peak. "We
were really lucky to escape," says
Leonid.
Having seen other applicants
wait years without an answer, lose
all hope of promotion and often their
jobs, and be subjected to every kind of
harassment "to make life more mis-
erable," they knew that by applying
to leave, they were putting their fu-
ture on the line.
Says Olga: "People used to joke
that once you had made application,
you would go either west or east (to
the prison camps east of Moscow)."
The Makar-Limanovs had a lot
to lose. "Life in Russia is hard," says
Leonid, "but we were doing well by
Russian standards." For eight years
Olga had taught university math-
ematics. Leonid was an editor of
Quantum, a magazine for young
people interested in math and
physics. They were able to travel ex-
tensively inside the country and
their apartment in Moscow — "itself
an interesting city" — was in the
prestigious downtown area, near the
conservatory and the concerts they
enjoyed.
The_pleasures of city life and the
company of old friends (the two
things Olga misses most) enabled
them to lead a life which was, she
says, "fairly comfortable — until you
started to think. As soon as you start
thinking, you're in trouble. You
never feel comfortable again."
Thinkers themselves, and sur-
rounded by like-minded friends in-
cluding some Western foreign corre-
spondents, the Makar-Limonovs
used what influence they had to fight
the systeni "I never considered my-
self as a dissident," explains Leonid,
"but I have a lot of friends who were
active dissidents. I helped them when
I could."
They found themselves increas-
ingly unable to tolerate the restric-
tions and lack of freedom, which
ranged from petty hindrances — "It
took seven signatures to get permis-
sion to make one Xerox copy," says
Olga — to deep injustice and the in-
fringement on human rights.
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