HOW A MEETING IN 1970 WITH VOLODYA TURNED INTO A VERY CLOSE FRIENDSHIP

The close friendship between Volodya Gribov and myself dates back to the 1970 Rochester High Energy Conference, which took place in Kiev. At that time I was a young Visiting Associate Professor in Berkeley, CA, active, like most of G.F. Chew group members, in both theory and phenomenology studies of S-Matrix Theory of Regge Poles. The Berkeley school approach was initiated by Chew and Frautschi in their 1961 paper, which led to the bootstrap theory. Less known in the West were Gribov's late 1950s and early 1960s papers which led to the definition of the Pomeron, the Reggeon field theory and the Pomeron partonic decomposition. In the early 1970 I was invited to give a talk at the Kiev Rochester Conference. I was very naive thinking that being invited would get me a visa to the Soviet Union, even though it had broken its diplomatic relations with Israel. A short visit to the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco ended with a rude and very clear statement that I did not have a chance to get the desired visa. Luckily, quite a few senior colleagues, who were also invited, convinced the Soviet authorities to grant a small number of Israelis, myself included, the desired visa, provided that we apply in Europe. I had to fly from San Francisco to Helsinki to get my visa and proceed via Leningrad and Moscow on my way to Kiev. Arriving in Kiev I was confronted by a very friendly person, introducing himself as Volodya Gribov. I knew that he was one of the Soviet stars of particle physics, but not much more. Volodya suggested that we should spend our free time in Kiev parks, where we could talk freely. Volodya's suggestion was too exotic to be declined, and we ended spending lots of hours, night after night, in Kiev parks, changing our route each night. Most of the time we were alone, joined by Lev Okun a couple of times. Our conversations centred, at the beginning, on Israeli politics, the Palestinian conflict with Israel and other obvious subjects. The issue of massive immigration from the Soviet Union to Israel following the collapse of the Soviet Union seemed too exotic to even be discussed. Volodya kept asking me about the quality of physics teaching and research back home, but, obviously, this subject was secondary on his priority list. What surprised me was how quickly we started to discuss also very personal issues. In general, I refrain from personal discussions on very private matters. But there was something touching in Volodya's wish to talk. A week later, when the Kiev Conference ended, both of us realised that we have become very close friends. I met Volodya again a year after his son Lenya died in a mountaineering accident, shortly after completing his Ph.D. It was a very sad meeting and in my opinion Volodya partially recovered thanks to Júlia. Years later, I still miss him…