Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
It has been my experience — and I observe that it is true for others, as well — that interest in one's parents awakens later in life. At first you resist them and push them away, trying to affirm your own personality out of a desire to lead your own independent existence. You're so wrapped up in your own life that you have no use for your parents. You love them, of course, but they don't take part in the life of your heart. But with time, you become increasingly interested in where you came from, and you want to understand what the sources of your own life are, to learn what your parents did, who your grandmother and grandfather really were, and so forth, as far back as it goes. This happens later on in life. I see this in my own children, who at a mature age are beginning to take an interest in their mother and father — a father who is no longer with them ... I went through the same thing, with the difference that I had already begun asking my mother these serious questions when I was still young. So almost everything that I will say about my grandfather and grandmother is not from my own recollection, but from recollections about what others have said.
My mother and father were both from Poltava, Ukraine. I always wanted to go there. Many times I asked my aunt, my mother's cousin who was married to Alexander Frumkin, a well-known academic, to take me to Poltava. I wanted her to show me their house. This never happened. Finally, after Sima and I had been married some thirty-five years, Fate itself arranged for us to visit there. Sima had been recovering from several serious bouts of pneumonia, and the doctors told him that he needed to convalesce in a mild, temperate climate. My friend Flora Litvinova, mother of the famous dissident Pavlik Litvinov, advised us to go to Shishaki, forty-four miles down from Poltava. The beautiful Psel River flows through the region, there are pine woods, and it's a lovely place. Without a lot of deliberation — I make decisions like that very quickly — I asked Flora to rent a cottage for us, and we set out. Strangely enough, and completely by chance, we ended up in Poltava.
It was a very sweet provincial town with a few elegant stone buildings in the center. The outskirts, however, looked as though they were suspended in time. The houses and cottages were an unusual style of daubed clay structure. Unlike the ordinary rural dwellings — wattle and mud huts — these had visible wooden beams and supports, which made them seem more solid. Still, they were squat, one-story dwellings with little windows, and they looked more like barns than houses where people lived. I think that in the years that Mama and Papa lived there, the whole of Poltava, except for the very center, looked like that. And I imagine that in just such a small white cottage — they are all white, daubed and whitewashed twice a year, in spring and in autumn, so that everything gleamed and sparkled — lived my mother, Maria Danilovna Liberson. Her family called her Manya.
I know they had a two-story house. The first story was wooden, and the second was wattle and daub. The first floor was occupied by a drugstore. This was not an ordinary drugstore, because for some reason my grandfather sold toys there, as well. The drugstore had a large toy department.
My grandfather not only owned the drugstore, he was the chemist. He spent time making experiments and discoveries in a little lab. And he adored toys. He ordered the latest toys from Europe and the US. They say people came all the way from Kiev to buy his toys. The latest top-of-the-line toys. He loved mechanical toys. Many years later, when the first Toy Exhibit opened in Moscow, our then six-year-old son Pavlik said, "I'm not interested in mechanical toys." But my grandfather was fascinated by them.
My grandfather also had a medal for rescuing someone from drowning. He had thrown himself into the water and then plucked someone out. In addition, he had been chief of the Jewish self-defense militia during the Pogroms.
My father was called Zyama — Zinovy Yakovlevich Markovich. He came from a poor Jewish family with eight or nine kids. He was the only one who received an education. Grandfather and Grandmother had nothing to do with it. His brother, a petty official, played a minor role in my life. We used to visit him in Moscow, and I remember endless dinners from those times. Later his son was arrested as a Trotskyite, and perished in prison. Those are the only things I know about my father's side of the family.
My mother and father had a high-school romance. Mother graduated from Poltava Gymnasium, and Father from the technical high school, with an engineering major. I have in my possession one of Mama's diaries, in which she describes how on the 6th of June 1907, they celebrated her graduation on the terrace of her home. There were three boys and three girls, and there is a record of the wonderful, romantic plans they had for the rest of their lives.
I'll tell more about Papa and Mama, and about Mama's friend Rebecca, a true beauty, as well, but first I want to mention three of their friends.
Milya Ulman moved to Moscow, went to university, and became a history teacher in a Soviet Worker's College.
Papa's friend Sunya left for Palestine, where he became a professor of chemistry and head of the department at the University of Jerusalem.
Papa's friend Misha became a socialist, and when World War I started he wrote to Plekhanov, asking whether a social-democrat should enlist to fight or not. Plekhanov, who, unlike Lenin, was convinced that Russia should be defended, answered: absolutely. Misha volunteered, and died in the war.
Mama and Papa were separated. After the Pogroms of 1907, Mama's family fled from Poltava to Germany. They spent two or three years there, then moved to Palestine. But Mother couldn't bear the separation from Father. She left her parents in Jaffa and returned to Russia to look for my father. He, in the meantime, had managed to graduate from the St. Petersburg Mining Institute.
CHAPTER 2
In 1907 or 1908, soon after the failure of the first Russian revolution of 1905, the youth — primarily urban young people, and especially in St. Petersburg — were overwhelmed by a sense of bitter disappointment. There was a spate of suicides, almost an epidemic. Mass suicides. Young people didn't know what to do with their lives. It seemed that all prospects for the future, all hope for change, for movement forward in this country, was lost. And it was just at this moment that Mama, who was a student in the Higher Women's Courses, published an open letter simultaneously in two or three newspapers: "Young men and women who feel lonely and alone, come to a gathering at my place. Every Thursday at five o'clock, I will hold an open house. Let us have tea and coffee together, discuss things, make friends. Maybe it will become easier for us to live a life in common than it is for each of us individually."
According to the customs of the time this was quite a daring and unusual venture, and it did not go unnoticed. In those days a little book called The Society of the Solitary came out. Recently, when I was reading Blok's correspondence, I discovered completely by chance a reference to the "strong and courageous act of the student Maria Liberson." I was fascinated. Reading this I realized that Mama had begun very early to take an active part in the life around her. She didn't confine herself to her small circle of acquaintances, but opened herself up to other people in the larger world. I was very happy to learn this.
From the letter of Maria Liberson to Alexander Blok:
Yesterday's presentation revealed to me yet again how profound the problem of loneliness is in our society.
Alexander Alexandrovich, perhaps the fateful boundary between the intelligentsia and the people is so insurmountable precisely because an even higher barrier exists among people of the intelligentsia themselves? Perhaps someone from the intelligentsia can't find a path to the people because each person is so alone? Perhaps the only path to the soul of the people is the struggle against the solitude and alienation, the disconnectedness, of the intelligentsia?
Yesterday you yourself brought up the subject of suicide, which confirms your assumption that living this way is difficult, almost impossible.
No matter what the reasons for which someone takes his own life, at the moment that person does it he is undoubtedly profoundly lonely and alone.
My mother and father were by this time already deeply in love. Then World War I broke out, and my father went to fight as a "volunteer" — but in fact recruitment was mandatory. He was drafted. He was captured by the Germans and remained a prisoner of war in Germany for nearly four years, which is why he spoke German so well. I have postcards that he wrote from prison.
During the war Mama organized a kindergarten for Jewish children whose fathers had been mobilized. The first Jewish kindergarten was a "five-day" — in other words, children lived and slept there, and went home only on weekends. In her diaries she describes these little boys and girls with unusual tenderness and love. She talks about how hard it was to get hold of the children, how their mothers, hungry and poor, nevertheless feared giving them up for daycare, and how she tried to talk them into it. She describes the story of the kindergarten day after day and writes something about each child. It was so touching, I could hardly read it without crying, because Mama wrote with such love about those — abstract for me — little Moishes and Judiths, who then became so real in the pages of the diary. She talked about how he said such-and-such a word today for the first time, and how she made a little donkey out of clay. Mama recorded all of this, nothing was insignificant to her. This made her job in the kindergarten (she also found two helpers) appear as an exceptionally poetic undertaking. It was as though she were raising rare flowers. Each of them was a precious specimen. Each of them was watered with a special formula and on a particular schedule. Gradually, as I read the diary, these children bloomed for me: one of them soon learned to sing, another to dance, yet another could sculpt in clay or recite poetry. Absolutely crushed and broken at first, they were transformed into lovingly cultivated little plants.
This captivated me, of course. I began to see Mama in a different light when I read the diary. Not in a mundane light — she wasn't the mother who asked when I was coming home, or whether I had tied my scarf or eaten my meat patty. Truth be told, Mama wasn't a very good housekeeper in ordinary circumstances. She only knew how to rise to the occasion on holidays — to prepare an unusual meal, to come up with a menu in verse. There was no end of that sort of thing. She simply wasn't interested in run-of-the-mill activities, in "dailiness." She was a person who flourished during holidays.
Papa returned from captivity, like any other POW, at the end of the war in 1919. Evidently, Papa and Mama joined their lives together once and for all at that point. Since Papa had become a member of some Jewish workers' party — not the Bund, but another one that had merged with the Communist party when they came to power — he was automatically accepted as a member of the party of the Bolsheviks. He received his first appointment: head of the Municipal Public Education Authority in the city of Smolensk. Papa and Mama moved there, and were lodged in a room — a cell in the Smolensk Monastery, converted into a dormitory for business travelers. This was the room I was born in, on 16 June 1920.
CHAPTER 3
Papa was one of the few Bolsheviks with a higher education, and was also somehow acquainted with Anatoly Lunacharsky. When I was six months old, Papa was summoned to Moscow and appointed as one of Lunacharsky's deputies in the Commissariat of Public Education. We settled into an enormous building on Sretensky Boulevard. The apartment was divided into fifteen or twenty rooms with a family occupying each room, and a kitchen shared by twenty women. In our room we had a gigantic fireplace, over which, as far as I remember, heads made from black bread were always drying — puppet heads. During the entire Moscow period, and afterward as well, I was surrounded by puppets. Mama loved puppetry with a deep passion and wanted to start her own puppet theater. The black bread was inedible. It was soggy and sticky, and Mama used it as modeling clay.
I must say that Mama had a penchant for theater arts. She started her first puppet theater in Petersburg, in the kindergarten. Later, in Moscow, she got to know Ivan Efimov, the wonderful puppeteer and sculptor. Together with his wife he wrote an excellent book called Petrushka. He was an animal sculptor — his work is exhibited to this day. He was a superb artist, ruined by his student Sergei Obraztsov. In some sense, Obraztsov was also Mama's student, since she started working with Efimov first. Then Obraztsov ruined everyone. He threatened people by saying, "You either work with me, for me — or I'll strangle you." Which he succeeded in doing.
When I was two years old, Mama took me to Berlin, to a German pension, where we met up with my grandmother. I don't remember much, but judging from my mother's letters to my father, my grandmother constantly reproached my mother for not dressing me, or combing my hair, properly.
Here are a few excerpts from the letters my mother wrote to my father from Birkenwerder Pension in September 1922:
My relations with Mama remain very cool. Somehow we seem to have a different approach to everything. She doesn't know how to deal with Lilith, either. Here is an example of her pedagogical method. "Lucy," (that's the name she usually calls her) "Lucy, do you want a chocolate?" "Want a tsocolate!" Lilith pipes up. "No, you may not have a chocolate. I don't have any more now, we'll buy some tomorrow." "Want a tsocolate!" Lilith screams. "Why do you offer her some if there isn't any?" I ask, surprised. "Can't I just ask? She must be a well-behaved girl and understand what it means when someone says 'you may not.'" Then follows a two-hour lecture about raising Lilith. Besides that, Lilith is not allowed to raise her voice, which is an absolute necessity for such little creatures. She isn't even allowed to laugh out loud. She is called to order immediately for it: "Shush, don't make noise, you will bother other people." She has to be on her best behavior at all times, like a well-brought-up young lady. In spite of my protests, Deborah Solomonovna engages Lilith in conversations about theology. Today Lilith said to me, "Oh, Mommy, that's all right, God is with you." I asked what she meant by the word "God." "What is this 'God'? I don't understand." "God is ... well, I know, but I can't explain it," Lilith told me. "Wait a minute." Then she thought about it. "God is the name of what no one sees. It's just a name that we can pray to." I have written her words verbatim. Lilith asks about you every day: "Where's my daddy?" That's the first thing she asks as she opens her eyes in the morning. "Do you want me to give you a chocolate?" I said. "Give me Daddy," she answered. It's remarkable that such a small child has such a long memory.
One more tidbit:
Zyamochka, my dear friend. Today it is exactly two months since we left Moscow, and it seems it was already long, long ago. Now it is fall, and I'm a bit sad, as I always am in the fall. But the thought that I will soon see my dear one makes my heart beat faster from joy. I am saving up many sweet words for him, and sweet kisses, and, strangely enough, I have to admit that I think about him not so much as my husband, whom I've known for an eternity already, but as the sweetheart I am deeply in love with. I only tell him this in secret, though. It's awkward confessing your love to someone with such a grown-up daughter — in six days she'll be two years and four months. The little beauty is also in love with her Papa, and every day she asks, "When are we going to see Papa Zyama?"
At the end of 1924, Mama and I left for Palestine from Odessa by steamship to visit Grandmother. I can remember only two amusing incidents, and nothing more.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Word for Word"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Oleg Dorman.
Excerpted by permission of Abrams Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
