A Woman Scorned: The Rita Gluzman Story

The Refusenik

His name was Vladimir Zelenin, and he was a 40-year-old Russian émigré. From what authorities in Bergen County could glean in their initial interview, he had been in the country less than a year, living in a low-rent section of Fair Lawn, a working-class community located in the low-rent side of Bergen County. It seemed that he had some difficulties with the law back in his native Russia, though neither the Bergen County police, nor the homicide investigators for the Bergen County prosecutor's office, could get a clear picture of exactly what that problem might have been. Apparently, his wife had been murdered and though he was never a suspect in the slaying, the tragedy prompted him to leave his native land and strike out for America.

Vladimir Zelenin (AP)

It wasn't that Zelenin didn't want to talk. In fact, as he sat there, playing with the bandage on his right hand, he seemed almost eager to help the authorities who had taken him in for questioning. It was just that the computer technician -- employed, authorities had quickly learned, by Yakov and Rita Gluzman's electronics firm, ECI Technology was barely able to cooperate. He spoke very little English.

The fact that he was, at that moment, the only suspect in a brutal murder and dismemberment case, was not lost on Zelinin. Nor was the fact that he was now surrounded by cops and detectives, guys who were obviously none too pleased that they had been yanked from their Easter lunches to investigate the murder and dismemberment. That made Zelenin more nervous still. As a result, what little command of the English language he might have had deserted him almost entirely. But even as the investigators waited for a Russian translator to be located Zelenin did manage to convey a few key ideas.

The victim, he explained in halting English, was in fact, Yakov Gluzman. He also managed to explain that Rita Gluzman was his cousin and that she had been instrumental in helping him immigrate to the United States 11 months earlier.

The cops, of course, had never heard of Gluzman or his wife, Rita.

But in some circles, the Gluzmans were celebrities of a sort. They were among the first of the so-called Refuseniks, Jews from the Soviet Union who had been caught in a trap between the communist government's refusal to allow them to openly study or practice their religion, and that same government's refusal to allow them to emigrate to the United States or Israel or anywhere else where they could openly worship.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Gluzman family was catapulted into the international spotlight and their cause became one of the sparks of the nascent movement to "Free Soviet Jewry," a movement that ultimately forced the Soviet government to rewrite its immigration policies for Soviet Jews. Some believe the campaign was responsible for one of the first significant cracks in the seemingly impenetrable foundation of the Soviet state, a regime that collapsed two decades later.

It was a forum in which Rita Gluzman excelled. Bright and articulate, and above all, beautiful, newspaper and television reporters gravitated to the stunning young chemical engineer. Her photograph was everywhere and she was one of the most sought-after speakers on the circuit of synagogues and Jewish community centers, where the campaign for Soviet Jews was becoming a major cause.

Rita Gluzman (AP)

By 1971, the Soviets had been persuaded to allow Rita to emigrate, and she used her freedom to push, on the streets and synagogues, and even in testimony before Congress, for her husband's release. Two years later, the family was reunited. They lived for a time in Israel, and then moved to the United States. As often happens, the Gluzmans became less and less involved in the campaign to free their co-religionists in the USSR Rita Gluzman had removed herself from the limelight, while Yakov Gluzman turned his attention back to his first real love, the arcane and mystifying world of microbiology.

Those first years in the United States were, by all accounts a happy time for the Gluzman family. Yakov had found what was, for a microbiologist, a dream job. He was hired by the prestigious laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island where he worked as senior scientist on a research team headed by Dr. James D. Watson, the Nobel-prize winning biologist who, together with Francis Crick, discovered the molecular structure of DNA.

In many respects, Yakov and Rita Gluzman and their infant son, Illan, lived a comparatively sheltered life in a small but comfortable bungalow on the sprawling campus of the laboratory. They spent their days and their evenings together, chatting about children and the mysteries of the microscopic world with other scientists and their families. Later, much later, Rita Gluzman would recall the days at Cold Spring Harbor as among the happiest in her life. In fact, later, much later, she would secretly return there, perhaps to hide, or perhaps, it was said, in a desperate effort to draw some solace from the place.

While working at the lab, Yakov Gluzman developed a technique: a method of doing research that later became standard practice for cancer researchers around the world. It was the sort of highly technical and obscure accomplishment that means nothing to the average person, but among fellow scientists, it brought Yakov Gluzman a measure of notoriety. It also put the young Russian immigrant on the road to the American Dream.

By 1989, Gluzman was, by every standard measure, a success. He had left the lab at Cold Spring Harbor for a better-paying job at Lederle Labs in suburban Rockland County, N.Y., and with the new $180,000-a-year job and the wealth he acquired while on Long Island, he could afford to buy a sprawling brick manse worth half-a-million dollars in the exclusive North Jersey community of Upper Saddle River. He and Rita had enough cash left over to invest in a small electronics business, ECI Technologies, which Rita headed. They estimated their net worth at $1.3 million, a staggering amount for a couple that only a few years earlier had lived a life of Soviet deprivation.

ECI Technologies, entrance

But success may have been a mixed blessing for the Gluzman family.

Yakov, a taciturn and generally modest man with tastes to match, was beginning to suspect that his wife was infected with that uniquely American virus: rampant consumerism. She spent thousands each month, he would later say, on cosmetics and to groom her small dog, and according to Gluzman, she wanted to spend even more.

Within a few months after they moved into the Upper Saddle River house, Rita Gluzman began to make it clear that she was not satisfied. Because he "refused to spend more lavishly," Gluzman would later say, Rita became condescending and abusive. She referred to their hilltop dream house on Peachtree Drive as a "shack."

"Herattitude was repulsive," Gluzman would later complain.

By 1994, things between Yakov and Rita Gluzman had deteriorated beyond repair. The couple,who in their Refusenik days had seemed to represent the power of love to overcome even the harshness of a totalitarian regime now bickered constantly.

What's more, they seemed to be on different trajectories. Professionally, Gluzman was continuing to climb the ladder of success. In the middle of 1994, he received a $360,000 windfall when American Home Products bought American Cyanamid, the parent company of Lederle Laboratories.

Rita, on the other hand, seemed to be on a downward spiral. Nowhere was that more apparent than in the declining fortunes of ECI Technology. Despite repeated infusions of cash, the company was faltering, and Yakov believed that Rita Gluzman's poor money management skills were the cause. Rita Gluzman's "technical skills are not matched by her business acumen," he was quoted as saying.

By the fall of 1994, Yakov Gluzman had made up his mind. In a telephone conversation with his father, who was by then living in Hadera, Israel, Gluzman confessed that his 25-year marriage to Rita was on the rocks. He said he was considering moving to Israel, in part to be near his family, but more to be near Raisa Korenblit, a young woman he had met during one of his frequent trips abroad. He was, he had told friends, in love with Korenblit.

A short time later, Yakov told Rita that he wanted a divorce.

She was, in her own words, "devastated."

"I tried valiantly to save my marriage," she would later say. But the efforts came to naught. For several painful months, Yakov and Rita Gluzman remained under the same roof. By February 1995, the anguished arrangement was more than Yakov Gluzman could bear. He moved out, taking a small, one-bedroom flat in a garden apartment complex just across the New York border in Pearl River, not far from Lederle Labs.

Ten months later, he filed for divorce, charging his wife with mental cruelty.