For Tatiana: When Love Triumphed Over the Kremlin

Writing about tense, highly charged episodeshis six-year effort to obtain from the Kremlin exit visas for his wife and daughterLozansky fails to check his emotions and, unfortunately, ultimately becomes tiresome. One is sorry that he hasn't let his tale simply tell itself, for this is at once a political drama, a cultural exegesis and a domestic imbroglio about a provincial from a Kiev working-class background who becomes a physicist and marries the Moscow-bred daughter of a three-star general. That Lozansky is Jewish (his wife is not) also influenced events. Conveying the loneliness of the outsider he became when he applied to his government to emigrate to the U.S., and his frantic activities after arriving in this country in 1976 to publicize his and his wife's petitions to the Soviets to allow his family to join him, Lozansky has written a very human tale of mundane life affected by political tensions. Tatiana and teenage Tania made landfall here finally in 1982, and the reunited family now lives in Washington, D.C. Photos not seen by PW. (June 16)