st. petersburg, russia | Yana Slobodova sits limply in her borrowed, dark flat. Toys and dust balls litter the floor. A single tear trickles down the 30-year-old’s cheek.
“It’s like a bad dream,” she tells me, “a horrible dream.”
The ducts open wide.
“I’m crying most of the time,” she explains.
Yana feels trapped, stranded in a native land that holds no allure. Although her 2-year-old son, Nikita, is with her, her husband, Alexander Makarchuk, 33, a naturalized U.S. citizen who needs spinal surgery, is not.
She has few adults to talk to, most of her old friends having scattered during her eight years in America.
“I’m staying in, not going out,” she adds. “I’m able only to eat a little, nibble cakes and cookies. Everything else comes up from the morning sickness.”
The Jewish piano teacher, about 10 weeks pregnant, was deported from San Francisco on Feb. 29 for having false papers when she entered the United States. That action followed a three-week stint in jail. She was released only after signing a declaration saying she wouldn’t appeal in a federal court.
As Yana details her lament to me, Pnina Levermore, executive director of the Bay Area Council for Rescue and Renewal, pursues a humanitarian parole request in San Francisco.
That document, if approved, would allow the deportee to return to the United States for a year, on the basis of “extreme circumstances.” The time frame could then be extended while a deportation appeal was considered.
Linda Levy, a Berkeley immigration attorney, has been drafting the request pro bono. It includes a translated medical record, psychiatric evaluations of Yana and Alex, and a plea of hardship based on the deportee’s inability to work because she has no permanent residence.
The finished document may be handed within a few days to Kenneth Leutecker of the Department of Homeland Security, which will determine its fate.
Many of Yana’s supporters are uneasy, however, believing “the decision is up to the capriciousness of the department,” according to Levermore. “It may depend on behind-the-scene efforts.”
A formal decision would be expected in 60 to 90 days.
Apparently waiting in the wings to advocate for Yana are the offices of Reps. Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo) and Nancy Pelosi (D-S.F.), the House minority leader.
What are the parole request’s chances of success? “More than zero,” says Levermore somewhat glumly. “But it’s a crapshoot.”
Meanwhile, Yana weeps in the heart of Russia’s second-largest city. Her son tugs at my pants leg and pokes his finger into my camera lens. Every now and then he smiles, but mostly he, too, seems unhappy.
“Nikita is watching me cry, so he’s getting upset, too,” she declares. Speaking the words makes new tears cascade. “I must have hope for the parole,” she says, “or I’d probably go insane. I can’t take the idea that this is a permanent situation.
“I can’t believe I might not see my friends in the U.S. again.”
But what if the parole bid does fail? “We’ll try another step, any step — I just don’t know what.”
Her loneliness spills over. “My husband calls every day, but that isn’t enough. My son is already forgetting him. He’s only 2. And the separation is breaking Alex’s heart; he was like a second mother for Nikita.
“When we got married, we said we’d never be apart, and we never were. But now …”
A new flood of tears buries her words. She swipes at the wetness with the back of one hand, then another.
“We don’t discuss it but Alex said he couldn’t live without me. I feel the same. We can’t be apart. We can’t be.”
San Francisco, she continues, “has become like my home town. I’d always dreamed of living there. But now, now I’m just afraid I’ll never see my friends there again.
“I cry sometimes because I didn’t spend enough time with them. I appreciate them more now. Everything bad happened so quickly. I recognize now that there’s no tomorrow.”
Rabbi Shaul Brook, 25-year-old general director of the Chabad-run St. Petersburg Jewish Community who helped me locate Yana’s temporary digs, talks to her in Russian. He says he’ll see if the Lubavitcher community can help in some unspecified way.
She expresses her gratitude, apologizes to him for “barely remembering” her native tongue — and, in the next breath, asks me to thank all those in San Francisco who had rallied in her behalf.
As we leave, she apologizes for greeting us in jeans, for the disarray of the apartment, for the elevator that isn’t working, for the crumbling walls encasing the staircase, for forgetting to offer us a glass of water or a piece of fruit.
She waves goodbye, lifelessly.
Tears run down my cheeks. They are not caused by the stinging smell of urine in the hallway.
Woody Weingarten visited Russia this month on a trip sponsored by Chabad and coordinated by the American Jewish Press Association.