🇺🇸 Translation (EN)

Foreword

Although my name is on the cover, I am not the author of this book. It consists entirely of the memoirs of my mother, Tatyana (Tayba) Izrailevna Mostkova, written between 1976 and 1980, of her personal letter to Boris R., in which she tells of the life and biography of my father, Baskin Iosif Moiseevich, and of several oral accounts my father wrote down from her words. My mother told of her reunion with relatives after 40 years, in Mexico and the USA, in letters from there.

I also considered it possible, after my mother’s account of my father’s life, to attach to the book the original of his petition to the Prosecutor General of the USSR, written in December 1939, along with documents about his release from exile, the review of his case, and his rehabilitation. My father also left memoirs of his own life; some of them have been published in Russia and Israel in Russian, and some still await their researchers.

My mother’s manuscripts were kept by my brother, and on their basis he wrote the book “The Branch of a Tree,” also published in Israel in Russian. After my brother’s death I reread my mother’s manuscripts once more and understood that the best person to tell about herself, her life and family, and about the lives of people in that difficult time, could only be she herself, her living memory — and so I am publishing her writings, touching nothing except for rare grammatical and stylistic errors. I am glad that I was able to publish it in Israel in Russian, and I hope that someday my grandchildren or great-grandchildren will be able to translate it into other languages; I hope it will be of interest to an Israeli or American reader.

I think that if my mother were still alive, and were publishing her own memoirs, she would have dedicated them to her mother, Shifra Mostkova, and through her, to all Jewish mothers.

For my part, I dedicate it to the blessed memory of my relatives, killed in 1942 in the Braslav ghetto.

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Remembering Childhood

My earliest childhood memories are divided by a line — before the fire and after. Before the fire, which was probably during the years of the revolution, that is, before 1918-19, there are few vivid impressions. I wake up early — it is still dark in the room, and on the wall a lamp burns with a matte light; the furnishings are decent, the furniture rather rich. This is a picture of my home, probably the house in which I was born, 7-8 years before this. Now the bedroom door is half-open, and Papa stands peering through the crack. There, in the bedroom, on a wide double bed, all in white, lies my mother. She is giving birth. At her feet is the midwife, a stout, good-natured Keilya (Klara), so it seems to me, or maybe Roza. Which of my brothers my mother was giving birth to, I can only guess — Lev, 1914, or Misha, 1917.

The street was made of wood, the houses stood close together, and it, in the near future, burned down. Three years before me, my elder brother Abram was born, and altogether my family was formed, probably, in 1907- 1908. All my other memories belong to later years. So, I remember the Polish occupation. I ran to school — to first grade — and remembered that I had no pen, ran home and right back again. I remember how a patrol stopped me and sent me home, and after that we didn’t go anywhere at all — all the neighbors stayed in their own yards — everyone waited for someone to come and demand something. Everyone pooled money and kept it on themselves, to buy their way out if needed. This was already in another house, on the other side of Sadovaya Street, in the yard of the owner Wolfson, in the wing, next to the big cement outhouse. The owner himself lived in the large front house, and was soon pushed out (resettled into 3 rooms) by the Soviets, and the house was taken over by the customs office. All this happened a few years later, already after the fire. I remember the whole burned street, with only bricks, chimneys, and ruins left. We played hide-and-seek in them, hid there, and they served us as a refuge in our games. We lived in this house until 1928-29, when we left — my mother with the children. I remember more from this period of my life, and I want to write from my own impressions about my ancestors, mostly from what I’ve heard.

So, we lived in the yard of the Wolfson house. The front house was large, with 6-8 big windows and a stone front porch. Next to us was a rebuilt synagogue on the corner, fenced with boards, and a small street, also burned, leading out to the market. Along this street, set back only a little — 20-40 meters — flowed the quiet Sluch River, the place of our childhood freedom. Here we swam, not once or twice but many times a day; here we rinsed laundry, washed dishes, scrubbed pots, waded across, picked water lilies, and went on night dates.

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At the back of the yard stood an old house, divided into two halves with a shared porch and entryway. The door led straight to us, and to the right to our neighbors — an old couple. Opening the door, we entered a large kitchen with a chipped floor that was very unpleasant to wash. In the front corner of the kitchen stood a huge Russian stove that heated almost the whole house and served my mother for cooking. Under the stove was a chicken coop. The window to the yard was opposite the stove. Right behind the stove was a small room, 10-12 square meters, a nursery or girls’ room. There lived I and my cousins Masha and Nina, whom my mother had taken in after their mother died of tuberculosis in Saratov. Their father, Isaac Bunin, had brought them to relatives, wanting to get settled and earn a living himself. It happened that he went to Minsk for goods, and on the way back bandits overtook the convoy, robbed it, tied him to a tree, and burned him. So these two girls stayed with us for good.

To the left of the entrance was a hall and a small bedroom. The whole furnishing was already more than poor, but in the hall there survived, from the old apartment, a mirror with pretty legs and a chest-cabinet with secret drawers and a fold-down top. This was all that remained of former prosperity, and, according to my mother’s stories, all of it had been gathered for my parents from the rich house of my mother’s relatives — the Polyaks — who probably fled to Moscow, Leningrad, or even abroad. My mother didn’t know exactly where they went. But there had been rich people named Polyak, from whom my impoverished grandmother, Pesya Polyak, descended — she married a poor but very cultured and learned man who was, as they said then, a good manager of affairs,

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that is, respectable, trustworthy. Nakhman Borukhovich — she bore him 11 children, of whom only two lived to old age. I remember how my father hid in the ruins of the fire — from whom he was hiding, I don’t know. Probably from conscription. He went hungry, and gave himself a stomach ulcer. Many people cut off their own fingers [to avoid the draft]. I remember how, already during the revolution, the town was burning — our haberdashery shop was burning, the entire property and fortune of my parents — the market was burning, and we children sat with a neighbor by the window, watching the flames and crying because there was still no Mama and Papa.

In those distant childhood years our grandmother Khaya lived with us, in the corner of the bedroom. She was a small, quiet, very old woman. I remember her one treasure — a small forged chest, and in it, colored balls of yarn. She knitted, and the thread always trailed somewhere on the floor, and our fluffy Siberian cat always tried to roll it far away to have its fill of play. This grandmother was the mother of my father, Isrol Mostkov. She lived her whole life in a distant village near the Polish border, near Nesvizh. I don’t even remember her voice, so powerless and silent was she. This woman gave birth to and raised — or they raised themselves — many children. I knew her youngest son, my father, who was born in 1880; I heard about the eldest daughter Tayba, the son Motle, the daughter Ginde, the youngest son Eizer, and others. Their house stood by a bridge, and so, according to family legend, the surname Mostkov (“bridge”) came about. What her husband, my grandfather Leiba, did for a living, I don’t know, and there’s no one left to ask. He was a poor man — that much I know for certain, and the growing young people left for America.

This was around the end of the last century. The elder brothers left, and with them my future father, then 15 years old. They ended up in Mississippi, and struggled, doing small trade and odd crafts, while the uncles worked for some employer. They were peddlers — with a sack slung over their shoulders, they carried around all kinds of small goods, mostly notions. When we children were growing up and asked to eat, in those hungry 1920s, Papa would tell us: “Now in America we didn’t ask to eat — the boss would say, look at the sausage and eat your bread, drink cold water and lean against the hot stove — that’ll be your tea, American style. That’s how it has to be.” About me, the neighbor women used to say: “What a wonderful girl — plays all day and doesn’t even ask to eat.”

(Here in the original a photograph of the mother’s manuscript is pasted in — “Mother’s Manuscript,” a page of the original handwritten letter, not typeset text.)

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In this way my father went through his first school of life’s discipline, in America. When he grew older and started to think of marrying, he became homesick for his distant home — or maybe he simply hadn’t found a bride — but he was already over 25 when he returned to Russia and became the intended husband of my mother, by then a rather overripe 27-year-old bride-to-be. But more about my mother later. My father was, by nature, a good man, easygoing, but America had left its mark on him in the form of stinginess — thrift, roughness, selfishness, and, of course, a lack of education and refinement. I remember how neat he was. His suit and hat (a novelty at the time) always hung in the wardrobe, as they should; his shoes (and in the hardest times of life he still had several pairs) gleamed, and my face was reflected in them. His stiff collars were always white and were changed often. He was red-haired, a bit freckled, thick-haired, blue-eyed. That is how he appeared before my mother in 1907.

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My mother — Shifra Nakhmanovna Borukhovich. About her father, my grandfather, to whom I was more attached than to anyone, I have already written. Tall, slender, hook-nosed, dark-haired, good-natured — he lived near the town of Slutsk, in the outskirts called Ostrov. My grandmother Pesya was of noble but impoverished stock, and she was married off to a poor but learned young man. Grandfather Nakhman and his brother (the father of Enta Moiseevna) studied in the cheder and then in the yeshiva — the higher religious school. Grandfather also had a general education above the average level; he was by nature a cultured and charming man, respected by everyone in business circles and at the synagogue. People trusted Grandfather, came to him for advice, borrowed from him, and he borrowed from them in turn.

Grandmother Pesya was left a fabric shop as an inheritance, but she managed it only briefly, owing to poor health. According to the stories, Grandmother Pesya bore 11 children, of whom I knew three — my mother, her eldest and favorite daughter Shifra, and the younger ones, Malka and Mikhail. The other children were spoken of only in whispers. One boy was mentally unwell and left home — they said, out to sea — and never returned. The rest died in childhood of various illnesses. I remember Grandmother already ill. She died of a kidney disease. She lay weak in bed and, calling me over, asked — has the ice already broken up? (spring was coming), and I ran to look at the ice and, excited, ran back, hurrying with my answer — yes, the ice is moving. Grandmother sighed and said — then I will die soon too. I remember, even earlier, when she could still walk, she took me by the hand and led me to the shop of some acquaintances, where she bought me fabric for a few school dresses. I remember a checkered dress. That must have been when I was 6 or 7. I went to school for the first time in those dresses. I’m not mistaken — I wore all three dresses to school at once, one over the other, since it seemed to me that would show myself off better, and besides, there was no one home to help me dress properly.

Now, my grandfather’s eldest daughter was capable and clever, and because of her mother’s illness and the size of the family, she ran the household and

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my grandfather’s affairs. Grandfather was a specialist in furs and other agricultural raw materials. I remember that in his apartment there always hung bunches of dried mushrooms, which smelled wonderful. People brought him animal pelts they had prepared, and he would smooth them out, assess them, and, never cheating anyone, name the true price. His word was law. Later, in the 1920s, as one of the former owners and small traders, he was taken on to work for the Soviet customs office, as a specialist paid 25 rubles a month, and he became a union member, which was considered very respectable.

My mother was clever and capable in business. It was told that once a fire broke out in their house while valuable furs lay in the storeroom. Grandfather jumped up in the night, panicked, and started praying to God. My mother, in nothing but her nightgown — already a young bride at the time — threw open the window and threw out all the goods, saving Grandfather and his entire fortune. This story was told many times, along with others like it. My mother never received an education, since she was the eldest in the family and bore the whole burden of the household. She was drawn to politics, to public life. She took part in mutual aid, befriended the poor and the impoverished, collected help for them, and helped everyone however she could.

So it was that she was friends with Khaya Rabinovich. Her husband was a very educated man, but sick and hunchbacked, and this poor woman alone had to feed her large, gifted, and needy family. My mother helped them constantly, and in her own hard years she helped them still, through others — that is, she collected donations for them. My mother was never a member of the Bund party, but she was close to them and close to the revolutionary movement. Why did such a pleasant and intelligent woman remain unmarried so long? It happens. There was a man who loved her very much, but he was a shoemaker and not her equal — a matter of status. In those days that was very important — parents did not allow marrying below one’s own class. When my mother first met my father, she was drawn to his dashing looks and self-possession, though his American manner did not escape her notice either. But the time came to start a family, and they married. My mother’s dowry was modest — a haberdashery shop with ties, buttons, and ribbons, which stood in boxes not only in the shop but also at home, under the bed. We,

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the children who soon appeared, played with this haberdashery, though it could not provide a living.

What do I remember? I wake up at night and hear my mother crying. I went out barefoot into the hall, and there by the hot Dutch stove stood Papa, Mama, and Papa’s nephew — already a young man of 17 or 18, Israel Tsukovich, son of the eldest sister. Mama, in bitter tears, was telling him that Papa gave her no money to live on and she had nothing to feed the children, and there were already four of them then, with a fifth soon to come. I remember how Papa, chilled through, would come home in the evening displeased, gloomy, and eat his supper alone, carefully cutting the crusts off white bread with a sharp knife, while we, a pack of half-starved young ones, sat at a distance and watched his mouth. Then he would start counting his takings and put everything away again. My brothers, three and six years younger than me, grew up weak, with round bellies from too much potato, which they ate constantly. We’d sit down to a whole pot of potatoes, mealy and crumbly (I wouldn’t say no to some now), with a glass of cucumber brine, and eat with relish. Lev was nicknamed “the potato-eater.” We were dressed any old way. From early spring we went barefoot, our feet chapped. Clothes were passed down from the older to the younger. I don’t remember us ever having enough sour cream, eggs, or even milk. I remember potatoes. We took an apple or a pear to school with us. That was the cheapest thing.

We had happy days too. Spring, April. Passover was coming soon. Everyone bustled about. The winter window frames were taken out and carried up to the attic. My job was to wash the frames, wash the glass with soap, and carefully wipe it dry afterward. Over the big dining table in the hall hung a metal lamp, which I would wind round with green cigarette paper. All the kitchen dishes were scrubbed to a bronze shine, to whiteness, then roasted over a fire. Because for Passover everything had to be new, sterile. Away with bread, with grain — everything had to be Passover-ready: matzo, matzo meal, special wine, meat, chickens, rendered fat for Passover. The old dishes were carried off to storage, up to the attic; the whole apartment was washed, painted, swept out, and new and fresh things brought in, specially for Passover. Whatever could be carried, we children took down to the river — there was sand there and plenty of room to wash and scrub. My mother did the laundry, sometimes even hiring a washerwoman. All the white linens were boiled, rinsed in the river, starched, and then not ironed but rolled smooth with a mangle-board, to a shine, to softness and smoothness. That was Passover.

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But there were also the Sabbath days — festive ones too. Cleaning and preparation went on for those as well. Already on Thursday evening my mother would clean a great deal of carrots, grate them on a grater, and prepare a big clay pot, wrapped round with wire. That was for tsimmes. A kugel was tucked into the carrots — a flour-and-dough filling with a fatty piece of meat inside. In another pot, also a large one, a compote of dried fruit was cooked, mostly of apples and pears. For the Sabbath a chicken was slaughtered. That was our job too. I would carry it to the shochet [ritual slaughterer] for a couple of kopeks. He lived in a little house somewhere on the next street. The shochet would come out, a thin man in a black skullcap and a long black coat, as all the devout Jews wore, take the hen from me by the scruff, and step a little into the garden. He bared the underside of its neck, plucked away a few feathers, and nicked the throat. I would shut my eyes; the hen would thrash and shudder, then go still. I’d take it by the feet and drag it home. My next job was to pluck it. I’d go into the shed, put a kerchief over my shaggy head, sometimes an apron too, and start plucking, from the legs first. Then the wings, and hardest of all, the head. Not pleasant work, but it had to be done. I had to do a great deal of this plucking at my grandfather’s, when I lived there alone with him after Grandmother Pesya’s death.

Sometimes, instead of chicken, they cooked meat — a lean beef. But it was proper to have chicken for the Sabbath, and my mother made sure of it. On Friday my mother would get up very early, light the Russian stove, and set a pot on it with chicken, carrots, and onion. That was the broth, and she’d also stew potatoes with prunes. This dish was called “golit”; then a pot of carrots was set to cook — tsimmes — along with compote, and black coffee (not real coffee, but a substitute). By the time we woke up, my mother had already finished with the stove and gone off to work, helping Papa at the shop, and I would be told to wash the floors, which had once been painted but were now worn bare. There was a lot of work. The first rooms I washed calmly enough, but by the time it came to the big kitchen, already tired, I’d start slacking — skipping corners, wiping poorly. The boys wanted to eat too, would try to grab something, and I’d lash out at their bare feet with the wet rag. Sometimes this struggle and the mopping dragged on until Papa and Mama came home, and then I’d get it.

All day Friday we hardly ate a proper meal, just snatched bits here and there. But on Friday evening, when the sun went down and the long-awaited Sabbath began, we came back to life. By then we also had to

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go to the bathhouse, or wash up at home, and clean our shoes and clothes. The main work was done by my careful, energetic mother, and even Papa was a little in awe of her.

And so, the festive supper. On the long table, spread with a white tablecloth over the ordinary oilcloth, the dishes were set out, with little plates for herring or chicken-liver pâté. Everyone clean, quiet, hungry — waiting. Mama would carve the chicken and say, “The drumstick for the men — for Papa and the eldest son. The family rests on them, all our well-being. The wings for the girls — they’ll grow up and fly away from us.” — “Mama, but you’ve given everything away and kept nothing for yourself!” — “No, my dears, I have the tail left — that’s enough for me.”

We’d go to bed full, sated, freshly bathed, while Mama was still doing something, unheard. In the morning we’d wake up to find clean clothes laid out for each of us by the bed, even our shoes all cleaned, and in winter even warmed in the oven. In the morning no one hurried; everyone walked calmly out into the hall, where on the table stood the burnt-down Sabbath candles that had been lit the evening before and left to burn out (they must never be put out), and Mama, covering her face with her hands, prayed over them. In the morning a small pot of coffee was pulled from the stove and we’d drink it with pastries Mama had baked early Friday morning. There were also the challahs in the cupboard, which Mama had also baked for the Sabbath. Everyone went off to the synagogue to pray, all dressed in their best. We children peeked in too, but mostly ran about in the synagogue-school yard. At midday we ate golit — hot, browned, stewed potatoes — with broth, tsimmes, and compote to drink.

In the afternoon Papa slept. The shutters were closed, everyone walked on tiptoe — no noise, Papa is asleep. Everything for the Sabbath. For its sake you could go the whole week hungry, deny yourself much. But the Sabbath was holy above all — you looked forward to it starting from the Sunday before. On the Sabbath it was forbidden — to light or put out a fire, to work, to count money, to buy or sell — you could only rest, eat, drink, sleep. Not bad at all.

I haven’t told everything about Passover yet. Passover is the great festival of spring — a week of rest, cleanliness, plenty, pleasure. The symbol of Passover is the freedom of the Jews from bondage. Victory, it seems. I’ve already written about the preparations. Instead of bread, matzo is eaten. The thin, white kind we never had — we ate the thick, dark, homemade sort, but matzo, only matzo. From it dumplings were made, matzo meal, flour mixed with eggs. Our

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matzo was kept in baskets lined with white sheets, in our girls’ room, in the corner they called “noge-koge,” in the hope that we girls would not be naughty about it. But we were naughty at night anyway — we’d nibble matzo quietly under the blanket, I have to confess.

Special Passover wine was prepared and offered to the angel — Eliyahu ha-Navi — who was said to visit that night. The youngest son would search for the matzo hidden under Papa’s cushion. Songs were sung and questions asked, answered in chorus. We went to pray every day and walked about on the sunny April days. All hardships were forgotten. There were fast days too. I remember the feeling. “I’m going to fast the whole day.” — But you’re still little, half a day is enough for you. — “No, the whole day” — and I was proud of it. So on Friday we ate our fill for the last time, but the whole Sabbath day was long, and one grew hungry. You’d wait for the stars to come out on Sabbath evening, when supper could finally be made. At last it was allowed. There was no time to peel the potatoes — Mama would wash them whole, put them in the pot, light the stove with birch wood, and soon the pot would be boiling. The herring was cleaned. The tail for me, the head for me too. The middle piece for Papa. Whoever had fasted got to sit down first, and how delicious the potatoes tasted with the herring, how happy one was to have kept the fast through to the end, alongside all the grown-ups.

All these are the holidays that stayed with me — impressed by joy and by taste. But let us also remember the ordinary days, of which there were many, right up until I was sixteen, when I boarded the Slutsk-Moscow train, changing, I think, at Osipovichi, Minsk, and, I believe, Smolensk, and arrived at the cobblestones — Belorussky Station — in Moscow, with a big wicker basket (we had no such thing as a suitcase), into which fit my two or three cotton dresses, a patched winter coat, and even, I think, a feather pillow or perhaps a featherbed. Everything my mother could spare for me. There was also a plywood satchel with provisions. In a pocket sewn into my underclothes were 25 rubles (quite a substantial sum, and the only capital I would have for years of study, even later years of work — it was my grandfather who gave it to me).

Let us remember the ordinary days.

Dysentery. A girl named Dveyra-Dora came to stay with us, my father’s niece. My mother was very, very kind and felt for everyone. Some misfortune had struck their house — perhaps she was left an orphan — and she was brought to us. She was pretty and well-built, and I was 10, and we

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nibbled little apples the size of walnuts — just set, unripe — of which there were plenty, since the orchards around were ownerless after the fire. I remember only that I was sent to the pharmacy for medicine, and I was too shy to open the door — I sat outside and didn’t dare knock and open the pharmacy door, because my uncle worked there as a pharmacist (a cousin of my mother’s, Khaim Yudl). So I just sat there. Then I ran home and lied that I had been, that there was no medicine, but I was told — it’s not needed anymore! At first I didn’t understand and was even glad that it wasn’t needed. Then, looking at my mother’s grim face, I understood. Dveyra was already lying dead in the bedroom. She had died of dysentery. I remember my mother tearing at her own hair — she was pregnant at the time too. We children were strictly forbidden to pick or eat the little apples. In August 1921 my mother gave birth to a daughter and named her Dveyra (Dora).

Fetching water. We had no well nearby, so water for everything came from the river. My mother would send us children to fetch drinking water from a good, deep well with a well-sweep, in the yard of a wealthy peasant (probably he was paid for it). It was quite far. We had to cross diagonally through the burned-down street, now overgrown with tall grass, past the ruins and ashes, near which apple trees and the wonderful Slutsk pears still grew and blossomed. It wasn’t a pleasant errand for us, and we’d bargain over who had to go, and often shirked it. Still, I remember the pleasure of the whole business. To carry two buckets of water, a long pole was used, or even two poles with nicely smoothed handles. We’d run there for water, hopping along on the poles, buckets clattering. We tried to go in a group. We’d call the neighbor children — come with us for water. And off we’d go. The well-sweep worked well and quickly, and the tub was full of bubbly, cold, delicious water. We’d drink our fill, like horses, sigh, and drink again (fooling around at the well wasn’t allowed). Then we’d fill the buckets to the very brim. The poles were slid through the handles of the buckets and carried out of the yard as if bearing something priceless. We’d balance them and walk in pairs along the deep, soft grass, along the trodden path, barefoot, straining our growing young strength, testing our tightening muscles. And we girls, all together, rejoiced, laughing at the labor — both hard and pleasant. We’d stop once or twice, worn out, sprawl on the ground and look up, eyes shut,

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breathing in the smell of fresh air, fresh green grass. Such happiness was felt in the close touch of a young body with the damp, fresh-smelling grass. Real clover grew there, or as we called it, “konyushina.” We’d get up and run about chasing each other, pick large, full daisies and count the petals — loves me, loves me not, will spit, will kiss, will press me to his heart, will send me to the devil. There was no end to the joy.

Our riverbank. The Sluch River split our dear town of Slutsk in half. People used to say — I live across the river. Sadovaya Street ran like a ray straight down to the river, and since our house was the last one on it, all we had to do was pass the synagogue and cross a narrow dusty road, and we were at the river. The bank was soft, sandy, well-trodden. Further along on both sides were wonderful thickets of water lilies, and we, not afraid of the depth, picked the flowers on their long stems for garlands. The riverbank served us not only for bathing and pleasure. Here we learned skills you couldn’t learn in any workshop. Washing small things was our job all summer, and even in winter we went to rinse laundry at the ice hole, unafraid of cold or wind. We washed anything that came to hand or eye. Dirty laundry never sat around long — we carried it straight to the river. Washing was combined with swimming — we’d soap up the dirty things and leave them in the sun to loosen the dirt, then rinse thoroughly. Sometimes you’d take something and swim out with it into deep water, where the swimming was better. There were losses too. I once had quite a big mishap. My aunt Malka came from Moscow — she was studying at the Krupskaya Academy. This was, in fact, already in 1925, when I was 14. She arrived in a very lovely dark marquisette dress with a white lace collar and matching cuffs. She took off her good dress, and pulled off the collar and cuffs to be washed. Without asking, I took them, since I was going swimming and wanted to surprise her. Imagine — I lost one of the cuffs in the river. I couldn’t bring myself to confess; I said I had brought everything back — I confessed only once home, but to this day I remember how I suffered.

At the river we also scrubbed dishes. With sand, with sand, with our bare hands,

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everything came clean. We bathed the little ones. The older girls would lead the runny-nosed, dirty little brothers and sisters down, sit them in the shallow water on the sand, and scrub them till they shone, while they cried and laughed by turns but always tagged along after the older ones. We swam until we turned blue, staying in the water for hours. We’d go learn our lessons by the river, and hide there too, from Mama, whenever there was trouble or mischief afoot. When I went to see my friend Perle Rabinovich, I didn’t go the long way round by the bridge, but took off my underpants (or we simply went without any), lifted my dress above my navel, covered the edge with my hand, and waded across. On this river even the grown-ups rinsed their laundry, drew water for every other need, watered the cows and the horses, and so on. The river was our second home.

There were “wars” at the river too. Two teams of boys from either bank fought with wooden rifles, and there was crying, even casualties and victors. We were afraid of these battles, and Mama wouldn’t let our brothers join in — they were too little besides. Young women from Troygai, a suburb of the town, also bathed in the river. Pretty, buxom girls. A military garrison was stationed nearby, and there were unkind rumors told about those girls. I’d swim up close, but never got to know them. Those were the years when Veresaev’s book “Behind Closed Doors” came out, and grown-up thoughts were already stirring in my young head. Something started itching, and I decided I’d caught some disease from bathing near those girls. I endured it a long while, then confessed to Mama and we went to the doctor. She examined me and said, “You’ve been reading things you shouldn’t.”

Family. I want to describe our life when I was 10-13, in my parents’ household, since afterward the family broke apart — Father left, and Grandfather took me in. So then, in August 1921 my mother gave birth to the youngest — the girl Dveyra-Dora. Times were joyless. Our haberdashery shop had burned down, and my father, already a poor small tradesman, was now out of business altogether. But life had to go on, the children were asking to eat. I don’t know what was tried, only that nothing worked out. We bought a little cow, hornless and polled, that kept running off from the herd, and we were always chasing after it. I don’t remember us ever drinking our fill of milk from it. I remember my mother’s very sad face, grown haggard by her fortieth year. She would do her hair hastily by the mirror — the dressing table — and I turned up next to her. She stroked my head and said, “May you have a better life, daughter, than I’ve had.” She tried her hand at sewing for

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people, at serving here and there, to help along. We never saw butter at all. Once I found myself in the house of a rich merchant and saw butter on the table — I was so amazed that to this day I remember telling my mother about what I’d seen.

Papa was bought white bread, and he’d cut off the crusts while we watched his mouth, mouths watering. We bought potatoes in the village; in summer we ate rotten pears, which were quite tasty. We at least managed somehow, while the Rabinoviches went hungry and sent their children out to work for others — the elder ones, Khana and Sarochka. Polinochka and I went to school together, where they fed us a little.

And it was in such hard times that my mother gave birth to a daughter, and her milk turned bad — she developed mastitis. I remember, at ten years old, how hard it was for my mother, already no longer young, how she moaned, and I said — “Mama, let me.” I lay down beside her and drew out the poison with my mouth, sucking and spitting it out, until it gradually eased.

Little Berta, the youngest Wolfson daughter, ran out into the yard with a frying pan on which lay an omelet, thin as cigarette paper. To us that was unheard-of luxury.

Mama was busy with some work outside the home, and I, already a schoolgirl, had to look after the baby, rock her in the woven wicker cradle. The neighborhood girls beckoned me out into the street; I couldn’t wait for my sister to fall asleep, and pushed on the rocking runners — faster, faster, let her sleep already — and then the cradle tipped over. The baby fell out and started crying. I was terrified. Thank God it all turned out fine, she was whole and unharmed.

In that bedroom stood a big wardrobe, and I loved to dig through Mama’s clothes and dress up. In those hungry, cold years (firewood was scarce, the house was old, and we were always chilled, warming ourselves against the Dutch stove, rubbing our backs against it or climbing right into the oven), I would pull out a long black silk skirt and a lovely white blouse with black polka dots — Mama’s fine wedding blouse — and wrap myself in it all. Mama sometimes caught me in this getup, and her grim, worn face showed regret for dreams unfulfilled. I remember Papa in those years as thin, gloomy, even angry and short-tempered with us children. In summer we ran about the yard, the street, down to the river, with the other kids; in winter, poorly dressed, we stayed cooped up at home in the hall. We ran around

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the big long table, hid behind its carved legs, grabbed at one another, sometimes fought, piled on top of each other, then ran again until someone got smacked and, crying, we’d all start over.

One sunny day at the end of August, guests arrived — Aunt Malka, come from Moscow, and her younger brother Mikhail, who was studying at a medical institute in Leningrad and had, without his parents’ or anyone’s consent, suddenly married Khaya Pastron, a lively girl who, as people said around, wasn’t right for him (Genya’s mother). Malka brought me a piece of chintz with a brown pattern, spread it out on the table right away, cut out the neck and kimono sleeves, and said — sew it yourself, take a needle and thread and sew it neatly, and make the collar round with a turned-back edge. This was my first independent piece of work, my first concern for my own creative life — my mother had no time to teach me such things, she had to earn a living.

Our neighbors in the house were elderly people — in one little room lived an old bachelor, in another an elderly couple. And then this couple broke apart — the husband suddenly died — and we all took part in the funeral. By Jewish law a lone woman could not live together with a lone man, so I was put there as a kind of chaperone for this woman. I slept on a hard couch, and Mama had made up my own clean bedding, everything proper. How frightened I was when, a few days later, I began to itch and endured it a while, not understanding the cause. When everyone was still asleep early one morning, I looked under my arm and was horrified — big fat white lice were crawling lazily in the seams. I burst into tears and never spent another night there. We don’t know today what lice even are, but I remember them well, more than once. There were lice again in 1933, in the Khabarovsk hospital where I lay ill with typhoid fever, and again in 1943 — famine, nothing to be done about it. I fought them off as best I could to protect my own three children — we fought hard against the lice, but they stuck in my memory; they must have been terribly tormenting and frightening.

My first school years I remember little of. I started school early, and for some reason not in the preparatory class (as I should have) but in the second grade, where Aunt Malka taught. I sat at the back desk, and all the other students eyed me with a kind of deference (the teacher’s niece), and I didn’t understand that I had to study like everyone else. I remember my first scribblings. That was around the time Uncle Mikhail brought

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me a drawing album with colored pencils. That was quite a novelty and a luxury. Until then we wrote on scraps of paper, and I used up old ledger-books lying around at home — narrow, long ones. Already in third grade Aunt Malka brought me a lined notebook from Moscow, of thick, glossy paper. I stroked the cover of that notebook and put it under my pillow at night. In the night I remembered it, got up, took it out, and waited impatiently for morning, so I could write, on the first page, neat long-legged German Gothic letters.

It was quite a walk to school, and my hands and feet froze on the way. Coming home, we’d warm up in the big open oven in the bedroom, fighting over who got closest to it. In spring and autumn I wore Mama’s wide wool jacket, belted tight. My thick, reddish hair took the place of a hat — we didn’t even know about scarves. For underwear we had the “shpentser” — a flannel one-piece with buttons on the back and across the waist. Mama washed and mended them every week, and they were passed down from the older children to the younger.

I remember, too, that my stomach always growled and there was a hollow feeling under my ribs — I wanted to eat, and we never walked home, only ran. We called our teachers by their first names. My teacher was Mogilevsky Meilakh, and we called him “Teacher Meilakh.” He was nearsighted and clumsy, and, it seems, always hungry and unhappy. We didn’t only see him at school but ran to his house too — what we did there, I don’t remember. He had a niece, Liza Charnaya, who was my bosom friend, and I used to hang around their place. Her father was a dentist, and people came from the nearby villages to have their teeth fixed, paying in kind. I was fed off the fruits of those visits too. She valued our friendship greatly, but her father soon died, and after that I don’t remember much more about her — it’s faded — though I very often think of that dear, curly-haired, near-sighted friend, and even looked for her in Leningrad, in the 1950s, but in vain…

I also looked, in Leningrad, for my second cousins Manya and Nina (Nekhamka), with whom I once shared a bedroom, our beds pressed close together, where we secretly nibbled matzo, helped my mother around the house, and listened to Papa’s grumbling about the “freeloaders” in the “noge-koge.” Manya was already a young lady and went out walking in the evenings, and we would follow along behind. We spent our time on the front porch of the house

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of Wolfson, now occupied by the customs office. The young officials there courted Manya and her friends, sat late into the night on the stone benches, cracking sunflower seeds and strolling round and round on the road. The strolling began toward evening and lasted deep into the night. Was it every day, or only on holidays?

I too used to go walking, with Nina. We’d link arms, two or three abreast, and walk decorously along the sidewalk, as if on a parade, out toward the market and back another way, as far as the commercial school. We’d whisper quietly to each other. Sometimes we’d stop at the confectioner’s for a pastry (if the chance came up, or someone treated us). It gave us a sense of pride, that we too were like everyone else. We’d dress in our best, do our hair carefully like grown-ups. We’d come home on tiptoe, so as not to wake Papa and hear his grumbling. Our rooms were papered with newspapers, and waking up we’d read the slogans, the poems, and so on. We knew and sang all the songs — “little roast chicken, little boiled chicken, the chicken wants to live too. They caught it, arrested it, and sentenced it to prison.”

On the evening of January 22, 1924, Aunt Malka came to us and told us Lenin had died. We had heard a great deal of good about Lenin, read everything printed about him in the papers. We had also heard of his comrades — Leon Trotsky, Rykov, Bukharin, Zinoviev, and others. At that time none of them were yet considered oppositionists or isolated. We began guessing who would replace Lenin, someone said Rykov, and my older brother Abram said he’d like to take his place. Papa told him — well then, study, work hard. Already, in second or third grade, we studied political economy, wrote essays and dictations — notes on Lenin, on the Soviets, on the October Revolution. I remember helping my older brother learn dialectical materialism — reading it to him and explaining it.

By 12 or 13 I was already politically active and well-versed. There was an organization called “Spartak.” I believe it existed even before the Pioneers. Every Spartak member had a walking staff, as thick as a spade handle, well and smoothly planed. [several lines on this page are too damaged to make out] That was

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an ordinary wide skirt on elastic, with the seams not at the sides but front and back. Down the middle of the skirt was a slit, fastened with buttons, halfway up. When the buttons were done up, it made a kind of bloomers around the legs. The blouses were white. Later on we wore red neckerchiefs, badges with a bonfire on them, and dressed in Komsomol uniforms of khaki — riding breeches, shirts worn untucked with a collar and fastenings, belted with straps, and even, proudly, a shoulder belt worn across the chest. A cap completed the whole uniform.

(Photograph: a Pioneer-Komsomol girl, middle row, third from the left, Polina Rabinovich second from the right)

We Spartak members gathered together at the Peretz club. It was a Jewish club. Our Jewish teachers ran it, and all its work was carried on in Yiddish. At this club I became friends with the Rabinovich girls — Perlechke, my age, and her older sister Sarrochka. I wasn’t especially privileged there, since I wasn’t of proletarian origin. I was accepted into the club, one might say, thanks to Aunt Malka, who was greatly respected. Among the club’s leadership were older people, respected by us all and utterly devoted to the club’s cause — people like Movshovich, Lisnyansky. They practically lived at that club day and night, sometimes going hungry, but never letting it show. The club would come alive toward evening, with a lecture on some political topic. To be active, I

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learned to draft resolutions, and I wrote them out every evening. They consisted of general phrases: “the general assembly, having heard comrade so-and-so’s report, states that — the cause of Lenin has triumphed! The Great October Revolution … we pledge ourselves… Signed… Secretary T. Mostkova.”

With what pride I signed those, having mastered the style and the monotonous content and pathos of the new cause. Later I became a Pioneer-Komsomol girl. I remember the parades, standing in formation, each of us having a red calico neckerchief tied on by the senior Pioneer leader, and a badge on the chest — a world bonfire with five sharp flame tongues, for the five continents. “For the workers’ cause — be prepared!” — and back came the chorused answer — “Always prepared!” We sang a great deal, and our voices were good and clear, and I had a good voice too. I even tried singing solo, and it went rather well. That comes from work and practice — practice conquers all!

What songs did we sing?

1. Curzon wanted a fish, wanted a fish, and flew off into the White Sea!
2. Pilsudski’s dead, Pilsudski’s dead, dead.
3. We are the young guard of workers and peasants.
4. Our locomotive flies forward, next stop the commune.
5. We shall tear down the whole old world, and then build our own new world; he who was nothing shall become everything!
6. The Internationale.

Our club was Jewish. It was named after Peretz and Sholem Aleichem. Later we were given a 3- or 4-story building for the club, the former commercial school, and the club became international, with all sorts of circles and a large program. I was elected chair of the sanitary commission, and I was very proud, and set right to work washing the windows on every floor. Polinochka was a member of the club’s board. I took an active part in the work of the bookbinding workshop and learned that trade there too. Our main activity, though, was marching and agitation among the workers and peasants (we would go out to nearby villages to put on plays, recitations, and human-pyramid displays). We held secret gatherings in the woods, made our way there by passwords, and sang around the campfire, danced, and made merry.

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The town of Slutsk, 1911-1926.

My school friend Etl Muler and I sit on the porch of their little wooden house, studying. We are preparing to enter a technical college — and it had to be a Moscow one. A month before, we had finished the seventh grade and decided not to waste time, and to prepare seriously for our trip to Moscow.

At school we studied all our subjects in Yiddish, which was our native tongue. As a separate subject we studied Belarusian, and Russian, of course, we also knew, having devoured Turgenev whole nights through, but we understood well that we would never get into a Moscow institution unless… we worked hard, all day long.

The windows of our apartment looked out onto a wide, cool, dirty yard, with no greenery. Time and again I’d raise my head from my book and steal a glance across at the opposite side of the yard, where, on a similar veranda, people were milling about. I wanted to see HIM. I knew he had finished his second year at the Minsk Pedagogical College and had come home for the holidays, to his large, poor, but rather orderly family. His father was a craftsman who drank, and his mother could barely make ends meet. The children were good, and had all, in their time, studied at our school. He had sharp, keen eyes, though I never once looked into them. Our love was secret. Back in fifth grade he gave me — paints, and I disgraced myself in front of my family. I put the paints in the pocket of my light cotton dress. And Mama took me with her to the bathhouse, where, in the changing room, the paints melted and ran down. I was ashamed, but I never admitted where they had come from.

I remember the little notes he used to pass me. One of them fell into the hands of my teacher, and my expression must have given me away, and I felt ashamed. Then I remember hearing some bad story told about him, and I decided to tear him out of my heart — I’d pass him by and not look at him, though later I’d suffer and search for him with my eyes anyway. He finished the seventh grade two years ahead of me, and had entered the Minsk pedagogical college,

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and now here he was, back on holiday. The girls told me he had someone else there, and I told myself I didn’t care — but still…

I was living then with my grandfather, my mother’s father. Grandmother had died, and he was alone. My mother was burdened with a rather large family, and there was neither work nor a living to be had. Our grandfather was a respected man in town, honest and calm, and he had been entrusted with the procurement of furs and other agricultural goods. He held a government post, was a union member, and earned 25 rubles a month. He lodged in an apartment, renting two rooms from a landlady who cooked our dinners. It was my job to keep our little rooms clean, do the washing for Grandfather and myself, and wash the dishes. Grandfather promised to send me to study in Moscow the following year, a promise he honestly kept.

Two of my aunts lived in Moscow — Enta Moiseevna, who had finished the Krupskaya Academy, and Aunt Malka, my mother’s sister — and the Pastrons also lived in Moscow, Genya Borukhovich’s mother, and her uncles and aunts. So many, and… yet no one.

My grandfather loved me tenderly. If I sometimes helped myself to a bun meant for him, he would pretend not to notice. When I sat up whole nights reading Turgenev, he would call out timidly from the next room — “daughter, you won’t get any sleep.” If I stayed out late into the night with HIM and, feeling guilty, tapped softly at the window, he would get up, groaning, and mutter quietly, so the landlady wouldn’t hear: “knock louder, it’s easier for me when you knock loudly — I wake up at once and let you in, but otherwise I lie there listening, not sure if it’s you knocking or not, and not sure how long you’ve been out there.” In those hard, half-hungry years I lived tolerably well with Grandfather, and, as they say, never went in need. My mother, meanwhile, lived on Sadovaya Street, once the street of the wealthy, but after the fire only the synagogue and two or three houses on one side remained standing. All the rest was ashes. I remember the beautiful, tall stone porch — the grand entrance of the landlord’s house. Behind it a long hallway of a fine house with big windows on the street. In my memory a customs office was housed in that building, and I remember one Smirnov, an official there. We children and the neighborhood youngsters used to loiter on that porch at night, cracking sunflower seeds. That house, most likely, had been confiscated, and the owners, the Wolfsons, lived in

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a side apartment of that same building. The yard was large, with outbuildings, and an outhouse toward the back, also of stone and, for some reason, unfenced. The little house where we and one other Jewish family lived stood at the back of the yard, its windows facing the outhouse, which we found endlessly interesting to peer at. The porch of our house, and the entryway too, were made of boards and quite crooked. The house was low but roomy. I remember a big kitchen with a Russian stove, a long kitchen table with stools, and a big dining room, also with a long table, covered with oilcloth and a hanging kerosene lamp. Along the walls stood old, once-grand furniture — a mirror, a bookcase, a bed — and two bedrooms, one after another, one of which was the girls’ room. The thing was, in that hungry year of 1920, a family arrived from Saratov — my mother’s cousin’s family — her husband and two girls, Masha and Nina. Their mother had died there of tuberculosis. They settled with us temporarily, and the girls, a few years older than me, slept with me in that same bedroom. The girls’ father went off to find work. That’s the polite way to put it — more honestly, he went to Minsk to buy some goods and sell them here at a profit, that is, to earn some money. Those were years of banditry. On the way back, the whole loaded convoy of carts with goods was surrounded by bandits, who tied all the living to trees, doused them in kerosene, and set them on fire. That’s how Isaac, Masha and Nina Bunin’s father, died. And the girls stayed with us for good.

My father, for some reason, called our bedroom “noge-koge.” It’s something from the Talmud. In the other bedroom stood the boys’ beds, and there was an oven where all our things, washed by Mama in the evening, were dried, so we could put on clean clothes in the morning. I also remember a fire in the center of town. That was during a change of power — which side to which, I still can’t quite work out even now, since it was Poles, White Guards, Bolsheviks, and so on, one after another. I remember Father hiding in the burned-out houses, and I ran after him, and he told me sharply to go away. I must have been about 10 at the time. I went to a Jewish school, starting at age 6 in the preparatory class. Aunt Malka was a teacher in the first or second grade, and I ran off to be with her — I simply couldn’t understand why I wasn’t allowed to be wherever she was. I remember myself in a big knitted jacket of Mama’s, and remember always hopping about. I also remember getting as far as the market and discovering I’d forgotten my notebook. I turned back home, and on the way

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I was arrested — by Germans, I think, or Poles. From earliest childhood I remember — “psia krew” — that’s a Polish curse.

I also remember — Mama gave birth and developed mastitis. As if it were today, I remember lying down against her and drawing out all the pus — sucking and spitting it into a little bowl. I also remember waking at night to Mama’s crying, so full of anguish. I jumped up and went into the hall. Papa, Mama, and a strange young man, I think Isrol Tsukovich (my cousin). Mama was complaining about Papa about something. I stood by Mama, as if to protect her.

More vivid in my memory is my active political life. The Peretz club. A two-story stone building, a bookbinding workshop downstairs. Meetings with lectures, circles, performances. There were talented singers, dances in paper costumes. We staged a fairy tale — how a girl fell asleep and dreamed of flowers that sang and danced. And there I was, playing the girl, asleep, but the flowers hadn’t finished their part yet when I woke up too early, and there was an embarrassing scene. I couldn’t get over the shame for a long time.

I was active in the labor committees too, and was elected chair of the sanitary commission. On the club’s board were Sara Rabinovich and Movshovich (Fanya Iosifovna’s husband). Polinochka was much loved, and she was chair of the club’s governing board.

Then came the NEP. My father opened a haberdashery shop and traded in small goods. Want never left us, but somehow we had to live. I was a Pioneer and, at meetings, wrote resolutions — “The assembly of young Pioneers, having heard… states…” My social standing embarrassed me greatly, though people were lenient with me because of my activism. I would sneak paper, cardboard, and boxes out of the shop — all for my own club. It was dearer to me than home, and… than my family, especially my father. In him I saw our class enemy.

White bread. Papa had a bad stomach and was bought white bread. In the evening, he sits at the table in the hall, carefully cutting the crusts off. We children watch, and afterward pounce on them. Papa lays out the small change on the table and counts it, sorting coin by coin.

On Thursday Mama cleans a great deal of carrots for tsimmes. On Friday the Russian stove is lit, and Mama cooks for two days — tsimmes, kholodets, golit, kishke — all of it set overnight in the hot stove and eaten with relish on Saturday afternoon, and Friday evening. A holiday. Nothing

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may be done — one must rest, pray to God. My father, and especially my mother, weren’t very devout, but in front of others one had to keep up appearances. The synagogue was next to our house, fenced with a tall wooden fence. We always played hide-and-seek in the yard. The men would put on the tallis (a white shawl), tie straps on their foreheads and fingers, and pray standing with their backs to the wall. I don’t know the prayers, but I understand — they gave thanks and asked for things. The women sat up in the gallery, their heads covered with scarves. I remember cantors coming to visit now and then, and the whole Jewish community pouring into the synagogue.

The Sabbath was a very sensible holiday — besides rest, it gave a person a sensible release. The day before, everyone bathed, put on clean, festive clothes, shoes shining, slept, ate, visited each other, and rested through the afternoon until the depths of Sabbath darkness.

A special holiday was Passover — Peysakh. Preparations for it were thorough. Up in my mother’s attic, packed away in boxes, waited a special set of dishes — the Passover ones. The whole house was transformed. Everything ordinary was shaken out, swept out, dragged out. Everything old was considered chametz, unfit for Passover. We washed, scrubbed, glued, and thoroughly scrubbed the floors. Mama did the laundry, starched the linens. Something new was sewn for everyone. Matzo was bought made from white flour, or in lean years from dark flour. I remember the dark, hard matzo, impossible to bite without soaking it first, and we baked it ourselves at home — house by house, that is, neighbors helping one another. The matzo was packed into big woven baskets and covered with a white sheet. The temptation to eat it began long before Passover, but it was forbidden. The baskets stood in our girls’ room, and at night we… crunched away at it quietly. From the matzo, at Passover, Mama made all sorts of delicacies — dumplings (kneidlach), matzo balls. I remember the seder, the festive meal itself at the table. A white tablecloth, homemade red wine in decanters, a little cup for each of us, and a large goblet of amber-red wine for HIM — for God. Everyone in their best clothes, cheerful, waiting. The youngest, thirteen years old, asks the “kashes” (the questions), in a kind of chant, and everyone answers him, chanting too. Why — the story of how the Jews came out of bondage, how they lived without bread and had to bake matzo, and the door was left ajar for HIM, so He could take part in the celebration along with everyone else. On the chair by Papa, under the cushion,

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lay the hidden matzo — the thirteen-year-old had to find it. Would he find it? It was all funny, but warm and joyful too.

Freshly trimmed, flushed with color, in his holiday suit — the master of the house, father of a large family. Mama — always busy, always concerned — was today a queen, a mistress, mother of a great household. She’d divide the chicken among everyone, so no one felt hurt. Everyone got their fair share. For Papa, a good strong drumstick — he carries the family on his shoulders; for the girls, the wings — they’ll have to fly away one day; and for herself she’d keep… nothing — just the tail. My dear good mother — I’ve even forgotten her face now.

What else do I remember about Slutsk? I was a Pioneer, then a Pioneer-Komsomol girl. Despite my non-proletarian background, I was trusted. I march in formation, staff under my arm. We sing — Curzon wanted a fish, Curzon flew off to sea. Oh Pilsudski, oh Pilsudski, oh. After meetings we sing the Internationale with real enthusiasm. We go home in little flocks, in our boots through deep snow, in old worn coats. We don’t walk, we run, and afterward spend a long time warming our frozen fingers, then eat cold potatoes with great appetite and greed, washing them down with cucumber brine. We held secret gatherings in the woods, far from people. With my heart pounding, nervous, I run from one contact to the next, repeating the password all the way, and it’s already night out, and I mustn’t lose my way, must reach the campfire on time. The fire burns, potatoes bake in it — our supper — and we all sing together — oh potatoes, delightful, ightful, ightful, the Pioneer’s ideal, al, al, he who hasn’t eaten potatoes knows no joy, oy, oy. Oh, you dear little potato, tato, tato… Glory to our Belarusian potato! What would we do without it? The tastiest dishes I remember — baked, potato pancakes, “teikhauses,” and with fried onion, and it was matchless with brine. My brother Lev had a great appetite, and could put away a whole pot of potatoes with an enameled half-liter mug of brine besides, and his belly was quite big — we’d pat it and call him “the potato-eater.” You could easily count his ribs, and he was thin all over — only his blue eyes bulged out at you. A neighbor whose children I used to play with used to say, “Look at little Tanya, a golden child, plays all day and doesn’t even ask to eat.”

My happy Pioneer years, when I was accepted as an equal into a great working family, were bound up with the Rabinovich family. With

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Polinochka I went to school in the same class. She was very sweet. Somewhat dark-skinned, with soft down on her tender cheek, she was the youngest in the family. The eldest, Anya, was already earning her keep working for others. Sarochka was a fiery revolutionary, the ringleader at the Peretz club, and observed honestly every rule of our Pioneer organization, and later of the Komsomol. She was principled in everything and jealously watched our childish pranks, our slips from the straight and narrow — “watch it, Sara Rabinovich is coming.” Boris, their brother, was the pride of the family, though he was rarely home. He had a bride somewhere in the shtetl, Tsilya. Their little house was near the synagogue, across the river, a house on chicken legs. The rooms were tiny, with small, low windows looking out onto a big through-yard. In the back room the father almost always lay down praying. The mother was a small, quiet, unremarkable woman. I heard from my own mother — we need to collect something for them — meaning there was no bread in the house, nothing to live on. Later I remember them not in that house at all, but in a long rented room, where they lived without their parents (both having died). I hung around them a lot, and they thought of me as a laughing sort, treated with affection, but a bit condescendingly too. Anya was already working somewhere, and Polya and Sara were still studying. Lastly, I remember a grand apartment on Proletarskaya Street. This apartment had been confiscated from rich people who had fled the revolution and given to Boris for his use. The former owners’ furnishings had all been kept, Boris was off traveling somewhere, Tsilya hadn’t yet moved in, and Polina and I ran through the rooms, went strolling along Proletarskaya in the evenings, back and forth with everyone, like real young ladies, and ran off to the club — our dear beloved club, to which we gave all the warmth of our hearts.

Did we study, though? Yes! I remember school — a Jewish school, but a real one. Our math teacher was Broide. Dry as toast, a gloomy man of about 45. He’d come into class quickly and start right away. Dead silence in the room. I’d catch myself having drifted off, losing the thread of his explanation. I’d try to understand, and at last, joy — I’d grasped the theorem. The teacher would pace back and forth, repeating the theorem or problem over and over. Everyone’s heads would come up, and they’d fall silent, and he, as if in a trance, would keep repeating and repeating, until finally he stopped. I love mathematics. We wrote on scraps of paper, since there was no good paper to be had — until Malka brought me

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Shaposhnikov and Maltsev’s problem book, and I worked through every problem in it, from the first page to the last.

Now I am 65, and with my grandson Igor I can still easily solve the same equations — they stayed with me for life.

I had some ability, but was only an average student overall. I wrote essays well, always on the topic of the revolution and Lenin, though. Those came easily to me. I remember historical materialism — a great deal of attention was paid to it. My brother Abram, two years older than me, could never quite grasp it, and Mama made me teach him dialectical materialism too. I remember — quantity turns into quality, and so on.

Before my eyes stands the evening of January 22, 1924. The whole family gathered together. We had supper. Lit the lamp. Still noisy, the children running around the table playing hide-and-seek. Aunt Malka came and told us all the latest news. Lenin had died! Everyone grew tense, even the little ones fell quiet. What would happen? Who would replace him? How would life go on? I ran off to the club. It was all mourning, and we gathered in small groups and prepared for the gathering. Mogilevsky’s funeral speech — study hard, the Leninists’ oath, and tears.

The last thing I remember of my mother’s house is Papa’s departure. We all sit on the cart — Papa, Mama, and the five of us children. Dorochka is four or five. I’m already a young lady, and it’s a little embarrassing for me to ride in a cart, but I understand I need to be with Mama and the children, and we ride far to the station, down the whole length of Proletarskaya Street, past our club. Several other men travel with Papa. They are going from Russia to Mexico, while Mama and the rest of us stay behind. Papa isn’t leaving out of a good life, and not for political reasons, even though he doesn’t like the Bolsheviks and calls them riff-raff. There’s really nothing to live on, nowhere to work, terrible unemployment, and besides Papa has no trade at all, and on top of that he’s drawn back to America, where he had once come as a young man to marry, and now, weighed down by an unsettled family, he hopes to find his fortune there again. They won’t let him in there, but you can go to Mexico, which is close by, and so — off he goes, and later he’ll earn money and send for his wife and children. He imagines he’ll live frugally, save on everything, hang up a sausage just to look at it, but eat bread and water, as he told us everyone who wants to get ahead does. Mother cries quietly, but the situation really is hopeless. At least Papa isn’t traveling alone, and that’s some comfort.

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On the eve of his departure Mother was doing her hair at the mirror, and I came up and stood beside her. I remember it clearly — she ran her hand over my curly hair and said, “My daughter, may your life be better than mine.” The train left and carried our father away. The following year several more families went to Mexico, and Papa asked that Abram be sent with them, which Mama did. He didn’t want to study, there was no work to be had, and Papa was over there alone and needed help earning money.

(Photograph: our family before Papa’s departure, 1925.)

By that time I’d had to go live with my grandfather, and I would visit Mama. Grandfather would send her a bit of flour, or a piece of meat or some money, and she herself took in sewing for other people — she wasn’t a skilled enough seamstress to earn much. The children were growing up, and along with them, my last year of life in Slutsk — in the town where I was born and where my parents, and perhaps my grandparents too, had lived — was a memorable one. I understood I was preparing to step out into a bigger life, and that I had to rely on myself. I had to work hard at my studies, respect my grandfather, help Mama and the children, and be sure to join the Komsomol

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— to earn my place in it. One winter morning, bitter news came to the house. Grandfather’s son, his beloved and only one, handsome and talented, a school inspector for the Belorussian Commissariat of Education in Minsk, had taken his own life — hanged himself with a towel in his little room. It was hard to find a reason, but Grandfather’s grief knew no bounds. He cut up all his own clothes, sprinkled ashes on his gray head, sat on the floor and wept. My mother and Aunt Malka both fell ill. His wife and daughter Genya lived in Moscow. Malka had finished the Krupskaya Academy in Moscow and had been made an education inspector in Bobruisk. Her fiancé had betrayed her — married her friend instead. Around this time Faivel Harakh appeared, who loved Malka very much, a good, calm man, but he could not put out the fire of Malka’s suffering. Faivel moved into Grandfather’s apartment, to stay with him once I left to study in Moscow. So, for those last months, the three of us lived together, and I had more time for my studies. Mama sewed me a couple of cotton dresses and one combination wool one. Everything else was old but patched, clean, and quite decent for the trip to Moscow. Grandfather had saved 25 rubles for me, enough for the ticket and about a month’s keep — after that, we’d see. The summer was warm, and my heart was light.

I am going to Moscow. So much had already been heard about Moscow — I would live there at first with Aunt Enta, then enroll somewhere, and of course have a dormitory place. Study, study, and study again — Lenin’s words, which we knew by heart. And HE was there beside me. There was no time during the day, but in the evenings we’d stroll until the roosters crowed. Through the cemetery, which was close to our house. He kissed me, swore he’d love me always and forever, that we would surely meet again. He was leaving to study in Odessa, at a theater school — giving up the pedagogical college.

The last whistle. My big wicker basket, into which Mama had packed my featherbed (how could I sleep without my featherbed), is loaded into the compartment to my seat, everyone gets off, waving, Mama crying, we say our goodbyes, our eyes meet, and I’m off. My hand feels for the little pocket on my chest, where Mama had sewn in my money and tucked away my ticket, so it wouldn’t be lost. I am going to Moscow.

I never again returned to Slutsk, my hometown, the city I had loved as a child. It never came to pass. Life swept me up and,

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as they say, carried me along. During my first winter break, and it was a very short one, I didn’t go home to Mama, but instead… to some little town near Minsk. There lived Dveyra Ostrovskaya, HIS older sister, who had also finished the Minsk Jewish pedagogical college and was working there as a teacher. Why did I go there? I look back on it now with bitterness. HE never wrote me a single letter, and out of pride I never wrote him either, and besides, I didn’t know his address or what had become of him. Someone had written to me that Dveyra was already working, and I went hoping to find out something about him. It seems to me now that I didn’t even ask about him, and there wasn’t any talk of him at all. Maybe I even went home too, since it was nearby — that part has faded from my memory.

(Photograph: I leave for Moscow, 1926.)

To finish the story of my first, bitter love, let me add this — so that my children may know their mother was once young and in love too. We met again by chance, nine years later. I had given birth to Nyusenka at Aunt Malka’s place in Vitebsk, and on the eve of the first of May, 1935, was getting ready to travel with her to Birobidzhan, to my husband, who was waiting for me with joy, and our son. I was walking through town with a friend from Slutsk, Mnukha, when suddenly we spotted a poster — a touring performance by the Odessa Jewish Drama Theater.

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Among the cast was his name. I said, let’s go, let’s watch, we’ll see him. I came home, told everyone, laughing — I’ll get to see my first love. Faivel, Malka’s husband, came with us to the theater too. We watched the first act quietly, but didn’t recognize him in anyone on stage. I said — let’s go and look for him backstage, it would be interesting, wouldn’t it? I didn’t dare, but Mnukha went behind the scenes and came back with him. My legs gave way beneath me, I couldn’t speak, I stood there staring foolishly at the floor, while he said something to me, and I was almost relieved when the bell rang — we went back to our seats. I felt his warm breath behind me, and in the dark his hand settled on my shoulder. I sat quietly, but saw and heard nothing of what was happening on stage. When the second act ended, he took me by the hand and led me over. In a chair sat a pregnant woman — I didn’t get a good look at her face, since I wasn’t really looking at her. He pushed me toward her and said — Tanya, this is my Tanya, the one I told you so much about. I don’t remember what we talked about after that, but the feeling left in me was awful, I cursed myself for everything. Fool, fool! We walked home laughing, myself most of all at my own expense, and came home and told Malka, laughing and giggling about it. She said — oh, forget it, go quickly back to your Iosif, before you do something even more foolish. That was the third of May — we left that evening, so as to be in Moscow by morning. There was a great deal to do, Nyusenka was six months old. Not a baby, but a doll — round, bald, always smiling, and loved by everyone. HE turned up early the next morning. I was in my robe, getting ready to bathe the baby, do the wash, and pack. We greeted him cheerfully, the whole family together, and I told him calmly (it was all over by then) that I had a whole day of chores ahead of me, and it was pointless of him to have come so early. “I’ll help you with everything — I’ll learn to” — he hung around us the whole day, and in the evening saw us all off at the station together with the rest, and we shook hands, like old comrades.

Since I am finishing here the “story” of my life in Slutsk, I want my children to know a little about our relatives. Everyone in our family knows Aunt Malka, Mama’s younger sister. She took the place of my own mother, and I’ll write more about her later. Grandfather moved to live with her in Vitebsk, and I saw him one more time, in 1932, when I first came with Papa (Iosif) from Birobidzhan.

There was also, in my time, Grandfather’s sister living in Slutsk — Aunt Yakhna, with her son Khaim-Yudl. Aunt Yakhna was an energetic woman who ran a grain shop and managed it well. Her son Khaim Yudl was a pharmacist and worked at Gipchin’s pharmacy. Big and burly — he looked like

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Malka. A few words about him. He was an old bachelor. He married late in life, to a Pastron, herself no longer young, a cousin of Samuel and Khaya Pastron — Genya’s aunt, that is. A couple of stories were told about them. When Slutsk was occupied by the Germans and all the Jews were being exterminated, he kept working at the same pharmacy — the Germans needed him as a specialist, and left him alone. But when he sensed, or perhaps was warned, that an action was being prepared against him, he gave poison to all his household at a meal, and to himself as well — and the whole family, old Aunt Yakhna, his wife, their three children, and he himself, poisoned themselves and, in this way, did not let the Germans have the satisfaction of destroying them. Another daughter of Aunt Yakhna’s (whom I never knew) had married a Russian (considered a terrible sin at the time) and moved with him to Penza, where Malka, with her husband and children, met her at the start of the war, while evacuated there.

Enta Moiseevna was a cousin of my mother’s and Malka’s. She was born and raised in Bobruisk, and I met her in Moscow, though we only became friends later, when we were living in Velikiye Luki, and Klara had gone to study in Leningrad.

Grandmother Pesya died of kidney disease when I was about 6 or 7. I remember her that spring, ill in bed. She must have been sick a long time, since she never went outside. She called me over once and asked — has the river broken up yet, has the water started flowing? I happily told her yes, spring had come. Then I’ll die soon, she answered. I don’t remember her funeral. She had come from a rich but impoverished Polyak family (so the stories go), and so she was married off to a good young man from a well-off household (that was considered a privileged match) — a young man from Ostrov, meaning not a city man, and not poor. I’m sure she was happy with him, since my grandfather was cultured, refined, very even-tempered, and clever. And handsome, too! Tall, slender, dark, with strong bones. Our love — his and mine — was mutual. He called me “daughter” and never once raised his voice with me. They had 11 children, but only four grew to adulthood. So seven children died young of various illnesses. My mother told me, with sorrow, the fate of her youngest brother. He ran away from home without his parents’ consent, served in the navy, and never came home. I’ve already written about the fate of Meishke (Mikhail).

My mother once loved some simple young man, and this was not acceptable, so she wasn’t allowed to marry him. She stayed unmarried, as they say, for

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quite a while. And then a handsome man arrived from America, with a mustache, curly-haired, red-headed, and she was matched with him. She told me she had wanted love, and hoped it would come, but her husband was made of different stuff. A man who was, of course, honest and respectable, but who never understood my mother’s romantic side, though he stayed faithful to her all his life. My father was a small-town man; his own father, Lev, died young, leaving a wife and children behind, and all the older ones scattered off to America and Poland.

In Slutsk lived my father with his family (he had returned from Mississippi around 1905-8), his sister Lyubka — mother of Bronya and Grisha, from Leningrad — and, at a summer place in Urechye near Slutsk, another sister, Etl — mother of Musya and Anya Reznik. Our elderly grandmother Khaya lived with us for several years, and I remember her little chest full of colored balls of yarn — she was always knitting. I don’t even remember when she left us, or perhaps died. I don’t recall. We loved our Aunt Etl of Urechye very much. For us children, it was a joy to go to Urechye in the summer. Uncle Samuil Reznik worked at the railway station in Urechye, in charge of fuel supplies, and lived in a big official wooden house. In the yard was a tank of kerosene, and it was very pleasant and cool to lie there during the summer heat. Aunt would send us off into the woods with a hammock and a bag of provisions. I remember very well the cheese (gomulka) — dried hard as bone, like a kind of curd. We used to gnaw on it. There were pastries too, and fruit. Her way of speaking was distinctive — bubbling, ringing, and very pleasant. Uncle Samuil was a kind soul who loved to tease us.

I remember! Morning. Everyone already up, while we lie there dozing, having stayed out late the night before. Ah, those fragrant Belarusian summer nights! At 12 or 13, how can one possibly go to bed early? I’d pull the blanket over myself and fight off sleep. Uncle stands facing the wall in his tallis and phylacteries, praying, chanting…, while tickling my feet with his fingers, and I’d choke with laughter. Lev Reznik was already falling in love with the girls, while Khanele still sucked her thumb, and we’d tease her, not wanting to take her along to the woods. The grass was tall, tall and soft. You’d fall onto it, arms flung wide, and it would close over you, shielding you from the sun. You’d sleep. Sweetly, sweetly you’d sleep. I remember the house of Uncle David and Aunt Lipke. They worked with animal hides, and in their storage rooms it was cool and damp. They lived on Bolotnaya Street, and the wooden pavements would creak as we walked over to visit them. I remember their daughter Luba leaving for Poland — she was a beauty (she is Khanele’s mother, from New York).

My parents had five children.

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Abram was born in April 1909. Tayba in June 1911. Leiba in August 1914. Mikhl in November 1917. Dveyra in August 1921, the year of famine.

Abram finished seven grades in Slutsk, but never studied in Mexico — he helped Papa instead. He married twice: the first time he had two children, Nokhem and Pesya; the second time, three more children.

Leiba finished school in Mexico, married a Mexican woman, Chelo, and had six children — Lucy, Shifra, Pesya, Moises, Lazaro, Ida.

Mikhail had a son, Alberto (who died at 13 of Botkin’s disease), and a daughter, Silvia, born in 1956.

My grandfather on my father’s side was Mostkov Leiba, and my grandmother was Khaya. All my father’s brothers and sisters, along with their children and grandchildren, live in the USA.

My grandfather on my mother’s side was Borukhovich Nakhman, and my grandmother was Pesya. Besides my mother, I knew and loved for many years her younger sister, Malka Borukhovich, who married Faivel Harakh; they had children — my cousins Misha and Polya (Pesya). Now their whole family, children and grandchildren, live in the USA and Israel.

My mother, Shifra Nakhmanovna Borukhovich, was born in Slutsk in 1880, and died in Mexico in August 1962.

My father, Isrol Leibovich Mostkov (Mostkoff), was born in 1880 in the shtetl of Ostrov, and died in Mexico in 1956. Both are buried in the Jewish cemetery in Mexico City.

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Moscow 1926-1930-1931

It all felt like a dream. Farewells, goodbyes, parting words of advice. The main instruction — be sure to take a cab at the station — and a little money had been set aside for just this purpose. The address — Bolshaya Pirogovskaya, 2a. A half-empty train car, a wooden berth, and me with a big but soft wicker basket in one hand and a bag of provisions in the other. It swayed, then started moving, then everything ran past, and I was off. My first long journey — even to Moscow — and alone, and for a long time, maybe forever. I had traveled by train a few times before, to visit my Aunt Etl (mother of Reznik’s Masha and Anya) at Urechye station, 20-30 km from us, but never any farther. Now there would be transfers — two or three — the main one at Minsk, the biggest city in Belarus, of which I had heard so much. Was I afraid? No. I remember, at Belorussky Station in Moscow, climbing into a horse-drawn cab and fastening the leather strap across myself. A huge coachman, sashed in a bright belt, took my basket beside him and drove me to the address. I wasn’t the least bit afraid of anyone. The horse trotted along, clip-clop, hooves on the cobblestones, and then we stopped. “We’ve arrived, get off.”

It’s close by, B. Pirogovskaya, from Belorussky Station. That’s it, I’ve arrived. A big white house on the corner, a grand building with some kind of little tower. From the side alley, the front door with a doorbell. There the cabman left me. I knock at the door. Timidly, then louder, and again. No one. I leave the basket and go around the corner. Ah — a kindergarten. A little front garden, and children running about. A passerby understands I’m from out of town and says to me — someone will steal your basket like that, this is Moscow, you know. You have to ring the bell, not knock. I run back for the basket and already peer through the fence, searching for an adult with my eyes. I call out. A pleasant middle-aged woman comes up to me, and I explain to her who I am and why I’m there. She shrugs, sorry to say — Enta Moiseevna is now living in Leningrad, her room is locked. She must have understood everything from the look on my face — that I had nowhere else to go. The gate opened, and she told me — don’t be afraid, I won’t leave you out in the street, you’ll stay with me until your aunt arrives. I stayed a long time, I don’t remember how long,

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and the memory of her has stayed with me my whole life. As it happens, I was always lucky with good people, my whole life through. The next day she took me with her into the city center, and we got on a bus. These were small buses with spring seats. I sat down and sank right in, and burst out laughing. Everyone turned around, and I said — “you sit down and you go for a ride!”

I remember Moscow in 1926. The Yesenin craze. A man and a woman got on the bus — naked. There was much talk of suicides. Okhotny Ryad — rows of stalls where all sorts of trade went on. We bought two bags of charcoal, which we used for heating and cooking. We went to the Museum of Fine Arts. Then I began walking on my own to Zubovskaya Square, along Kropotkinskaya Street, through Petrovka, to Myasnitskiye Gate. There, at Chistye Prudy, lived the Pastrons. Two big rooms, but a great many people living in them. My Aunt Khaya had already gotten married, and she lived with her newborn, Esya, and with Genya in one room, while Tanya, Samuil, and Fanya with her husband lived in the other. I was unwelcome there, though not thrown out either — I visited anyway. There was somewhere else I really needed to be going.

Not far from them was the Bauman Technical School. There, I learned, it was hard to get in. But I began with that one anyway. I submitted my documents and did fairly well on the exams, even well in mathematics. But on the list of those accepted, posted later in the school’s courtyard, my name wasn’t there — there were ten applications for every place, and preference went first to the children of workers and peasants, while I was the daughter of an office employee.

Upset, I came home and found Aunt Enta Moiseevna already there. She was displeased. Without her consent, they had sent her a young girl, without even warning her first. The thing was, E.M. was considered the aristocrat of our family. She had lived alone all these years, used to strict order and a solitary life. In the end, though, she understood she had to help me get settled somewhere, and be rid of me. She had friends at the Commissariat of Education, and they advised applying to the agricultural technical college — competition there was low, and best of all, they fed you while you worked. I submitted my documents there and spent two or three weeks working in the greenhouses and hotbeds. We were fed three times a day. Morning and evening, a glass of sweet tea; at midday, a fairly filling vegetable dinner, and porridge.

I was accepted as candidate number seven — that is, not accepted outright, but if seven others dropped out, I would be. While I worked and took my

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exams, I settled in and got better at speaking Russian (I had grown up speaking Belarusian), and we candidates went off to study at a seed- growing technical college outside Moscow, at Bitsa station, where they took us without exams. There too we worked quietly and studied, and went into Moscow now and then to check whether a place had opened up. Finally, in January, I was accepted into the Timiryazev Moscow Horticultural-Gardening College, and I became a real student. I went back to Enta Moiseevna for my basket. I remember the steps I walked down, with her seeing me out onto the street. She said, goodbye — and I wanted to kiss her, but she turned away. I never went there again.

There were seven girls and nineteen men in our group. Most of the men were over twenty, some even over thirty. Some were from the ShKM (Peasant Youth School), from villages around Orel, Ryazan, and other corners of Russia. There were few city people. I studied well, since I was better prepared than the others. There were three of us Jews — myself, Yefim Breitner, and Riva Magidina. I made friends with Ksenia Andreeva, and I want to tell more about her. She was Chuvash. Her mother had brought her to the Volga region during a famine and left her, along with her brother, sitting on a bench at Kazansky Station. They were picked up and placed in an orphanage, where they were raised. She never spoke of her mother or brother — maybe she didn’t even know what had become of them. She was small, slight, but very clever, one might say gifted — she knew Yesenin and Blok by heart, and others besides, and I envied her greatly. She had a good heart, and to this day I still wonder why we never crossed paths again in life.

We lived under strain, but cheerfully. Our dormitory was in a two-story wooden building on Kudrinskaya Square, and every morning we walked to the college on foot, which stood next to the Trekhgornaya textile mill, past whose windows we would pass each day. We worked in the greenhouses, in the hotbeds, in the fields. Our feet were always wet, and we were always cold, since we were poorly dressed. I dreamed of a black skirt, a white batiste blouse, sturdy boots. We were never truly hungry. We were always chewing on something — rhubarb, cabbage, carrots — and our stomachs happily digested it all.

The Botanical Garden, where we worked, we knew like our own back garden. For a while we attached ourselves to the sanatorium at the mill. We took on the job of tending the flowers, and in exchange we ate supper

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and breakfast there for free. Usually we worked in the first half of the day, then came to our classes hungry, chilled, with wet feet, and once the lessons began and we warmed up, we’d be desperately sleepy. Then evening would come, and we’d be scheming — where to go. It was good if this was right after we’d gotten our stipend (we received 14 rubles, of which 8 went for meals). The first thing we’d do was buy, for a ruble, a hundred “transparent” candies, as they were called on the stalls of “Mossel’prom,” and suck on them endlessly. One candy could last a whole day.

We went to the movies. Getting into the theater was harder, difficult without a ticket. I remember a whole story — how we went to see the premiere of “Lyubov Yarovaya,” with, I believe, Vera Pashennaya in the cast. Not a kopek between us. The girls set off on foot. And there was Nikitskie Vorota, Okhotny Ryad, and we were at the Maly Theatre. The performance was starting, and we burst in noisily, saying we’d lost our tickets. We had had them, we said, but lost them on the way. They believed us, and up we went to the gallery. We sat, watched, and laughed our heads off. On the way back our stomachs were growling, and we decided to get on the streetcar without a ticket. The car was crowded, but the closer we got to Kudrinskaya, the fewer people there were, and the conductor asked — girls, where are your tickets? I don’t remember a thing after that. Everyone jumped off while it was moving, and I fell onto the road and broke — or rather dislocated — my jaw. I walked around a long while with a crooked jaw.

I loved Vorovskogo Street very much. We used to go there, to the library, and sit for hours. For a while Ksenia and I got into the habit of going to the Public Library instead. You’d dress in your best, freshen yourself up there, climb the stairs, and see your whole self in the big mirror. You’d sit down at a table under a blue glass lampshade, so warm, so pleasant to read and read, until suddenly the bell rang — already midnight, and the reading room was closing. Four or five hours would fly by, completely unnoticed. Then Ksenia and I went to work as cleaners at the workers’ school, run, it seems, by Voroshilov’s wife, Yekaterina Ivanovna. There were two of us for the job — one day me, one day her. We’d put on an apron, tie a red kerchief on our heads, and sweep and mop the floors. Students would bother us, but we never let on we were students too. We went to the station to unload goods — I could carry a whole sack of potatoes and it felt light. It was hungry and hard. We dreamed of love, of material comfort. Once I daydreamed about chocolate candies —

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that once I was working, I’d always have some in my wardrobe, and I’d take one whenever I wanted.

A few couples stood out — the most fortunate ones, whom we were a little envious of. They seemed happy enough, though not all of them lasted to the end of college. In my second year I made friends with Grishka Tukhmanov. We went to the movies together, even once visited his brother’s place. I can’t remember anything romantic about it — I don’t think we ever kissed — but I liked talking with him, walking with him. Then Valka took him away from me. Valka was lively, cheerful, easy in her manner with boys — she went through several of them in three or four years, and in her final year took her own life.

Ksenia was reserved and plain-looking on the outside. Once she told me — “Sashka Makarov (a handsome 25-year-old, and quite the singer) declared his love for me — asked permission to court me — and I told him — what am I, a cabbage, that you’d bother courting me?”

I should say I was unhappy with my looks in those young years. From early spring the sun would cover me in freckles, and my nose kept peeling, layer after layer, and my bare neck and arms suffered from the sun too. My hair — thick, even too thick, far too thick — blew wildly in the wind, and I felt like I looked like a witch. I had to make a cap out of a colored stocking and tuck all my curls into it. I dressed poorly, like everyone else, though I could have asked my relatives for a good dress — I just didn’t want to stand out. I was serious and, at the same time, a great giggler. I could laugh until I was helpless, almost for no reason at all. Once I was even sent out of class because I couldn’t stop laughing.

We had a military instructor named Stol. Once, when we stood at attention in formation, he said that if hard trials came and he needed a loyal friend, whom would he pick? Everyone waited, and then — Mostkova! I turned red, and everyone stared at me.

I wrote home rarely and didn’t miss it much, or so it seems to me now. Time flew by, we took part in the graduation evenings of the older students and waited our turn. Once, at a graduation

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evening, Professor Edelstein came and, in his speech, told this parable about Ivan. “They dressed Ivan in a jacket and told him: fasten the first button, and you’ll rise to a certain height; fasten the second, and you’ll rise higher; then still higher — and Ivan cried out, I understand, I understand it all! — and kept buttoning and rising, higher and higher, until he reached the sky and stopped, not knowing how to get back down to earth again. — Don’t be like Ivan. Live on the ground. Hold on to the earth!”

In the spring of 1929 we were sent out for collectivization work. I was sent to the Pronsk district of Ryazan Province. A commune. Early spring, the snow not yet melted. I taught a course in agricultural techniques. Along a long table sat men and women in sheepskin coats; we drove out to the villages, inspected the farm equipment. The smithies were working, mending tools, getting ready. There was a canteen, and everyone ate free of charge — thick oat kissel, cabbage soup, and the sour cream was very good. A tall, dark man, I think by the name of Svinenko, came there from the Timiryazev Academy along with me. One evening he caught me and tried to force himself on me. But I struck him hard across the face and opened some gate, so that the dogs’ barking scared him off. He disappeared soon after — frightened.

We went from village to village, apparently for talks, with musicians along, giving little concerts. For some reason a lot of people had sunken noses — I didn’t understand why, until it was explained to me — chronic, hereditary syphilis.

Once I’m riding in a cart with a driver and two women, going somewhere, and suddenly — “Tatyana, what nationality are you?” I say, Jewish. — “Can’t be, you don’t look anything like them. You’re a very nice person.” — “And have you ever seen a Jew?” I asked him. No, he says — I’ve only heard, they’re all traders.

Though our practical training didn’t last long, I came away stronger for it, and eager to finish my studies quickly, to be with people, to do something useful. That same spring I was sent to a village near Moscow — to organize the planting of early cabbage. The peasants there had always run their own small farms and were, for the most part, well-off, living in good houses, and knew their agricultural craft well, but now they had been voluntarily united into TOZy (associations for joint land cultivation), and we agronomists were sent to lead them.

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I remember arriving in the village early one frosty morning — no one at all out on the plot. I went from house to house, and no one would come out to plant — only old women greeted me, the young people having hidden themselves away somewhere. I went to that village several days running. I remember the tea room. At the tables the men drank tea from saucers, with a small lump of sugar tucked in their cheek. On the tables stood a large porcelain teapot for each person. Everyone was flushed from the heat. And we drank too, and the tea really was delicious, the sweetness quite pleasant.

We were already considered almost agronomists by then, and went to work at organized orchard estates. I remember one victory well! Each of us was given rows of wild rootstock, a bunch of cuttings taken from cultivated apple varieties in hand, and a bundle of bast tied at the waist. With such pride I would, watching my fellow students and friends around me, use a special grafting knife to make a T-shaped cut in the best part of the rootstock, cut the bud just right, and, folding back the bark of the rootstock with the knife, insert it under the bark, pressing with my fingers, and then tie the bud in place on both sides with the bast. The quota was 1000 grafts per shift. Everyone’s rows were recorded, and how well the buds took determined our grade. My rows took very well.

I was an active Komsomol member. I read the newspapers and journals and kept up subscriptions for every course in the college. My last winter of study there was filled with a great pull toward Moscow’s cultural life. I went to every show at Meyerhold’s theater, to the Hermitage, to exhibitions — something kept pulling me, pulling me along, as if I were saying goodbye to everyone.

One spring day I was called to the teachers’ room, where the only telephone in the whole college was. I ran. It was Khaya on the line — “Tanya, come to us, your mother has arrived with the children. She’s on her way to your father in Mexico.” I was frightened, but went right away. Mama was only in Moscow a few days, but I remember them, and remembered them my whole life.

My mother! She was around 50 then, but looked old, worn out, dark- skinned, and the children were thin, and Dorochka was limping — she had fallen the day before they left and broken her leg. They were dressed in old army greatcoats. Mama wore a coat made from a greatcoat dyed black; the boys were simply in greatcoats, only somewhat taken in and stitched up. It was Bronya, my cousin from Leningrad, who had gotten Mama ready for the trip. She was the one who dressed them, so there’d be no shame in front of others. I cried, out of pity and out of shame — yes, yes, shame.

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We went together to the consulate, somewhere downtown. The thing was, a ship’s ticket — that is, a visa — had been arranged for me too, but I said I wouldn’t go, I needed to finish my studies. Mama didn’t object, but the man processing the papers looked down at me and smirked — I don’t remember exactly what he said, but something hurtful — something like “fool”! Mama spent one night with me at the dormitory, and I remember — she mended my coat, which had worn through.

We all went to Lenin’s mausoleum — Mama gazed, transfixed, into Lenin’s face, and coming out, she said — “My daughter, I don’t want to go there, but I have no other path — if I could only work here, even as a cleaning woman, just to earn bread for my children, I wouldn’t go, I’d stay with you.”

What could I have done for her? I still had a year left to study in Moscow, and the country was in the grip of unemployment. Father and Abram were already there. My thoughts turned to how, once I finished my studies, I would go to Mexico too — after all, people came to us from other countries, and our people went there too, and I could get there through the Comintern, even for menial work. Mama agreed with me, and my poor mother spent her whole life waiting for me, expecting me to arrive as nothing less than a Soviet ambassador to Mexico. That’s what my brothers told me, forty years later.

Mama traveled on by train, and then by steamer, to Mexico. I saw her off. Only when the train started to move, and Mama and the children began waving at me, I saw big tears in my mother’s eyes, my legs gave way, and I sat down, and the train picked up speed and soon vanished from sight. I sat there a while, wiped my wet, tear-streaked face with a handkerchief, and went back to my own life.

I spent my last vacation summer in Vitebsk, with Aunt Malka. Little Pesele was small then. We lived at a dacha outside town. Malka and Faivel surrounded me with attention and care, and I rested from everything I’d been through.

My last year of study went by quickly. We were graduated ahead of schedule, since collectivization was underway and the countryside needed trained people, and we were nearly agronomists ourselves. We tried our best to soak up all we could of Moscow, knowing that we’d be leaving, and that many of us would never see Moscow again. I got a ticket to a Komsomol evening for Mayakovsky, at the Krasnaya Presnya House of Komsomol. I remember a dimly lit hall, plank platforms, and the tall, tall, long figure of Mayakovsky.

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The hall was noisy, and he read and read on. We understood little, of course, and it was noisy besides. Shouts — “We don’t understand you!” He stops and says loudly — What is it you don’t understand? “A Cloud in Trousers”? You have to listen carefully and understand! — Why do you travel abroad? — He falls silent, then raises his head and says quietly — Because — “And he, rebellious, seeks the storm, as if there were peace within the storm”! I walk home, and for some reason my heart feels heavy.

A short time later his cold body lay in the Writers’ House, on Vorovskogo Street, next to where we lived, and we went to see him. For a long time, newspapers with his final poems lay in my nightstand. “It’s all over! Love’s little boat has been wrecked against daily life. Comrade Government — take care of my mother.” All sorts of talk went around, mostly unkind.

We went to hear poets at the Polytechnic. Zharov, Bezymensky, and Iosif Utkin, along with Lunacharsky, all spoke. “Accordion, accordion — dear homeland, poetry of Soviet villages.” — Zharov. “Oh Sun, stop, oh do us this mercy, don’t you see the fiery heart of Ilyich has stopped” — Bezymensky. His “Party Card” rang in my ears — “Just one small thing, one lost membership card, and in the party’s heart a gaping hole. Do you hear me, Party?” Utkin — so tender, reading about a hat, about my sealskin coat, about the patches he sewed onto his trousers and jacket.

Lunacharsky, too, stands before my eyes — quick, passionate, speaking of the young poets with real affection. Of poetry, of our future life, of the joy of being young. I’d walk home on foot (not a kopek to my name), or ride the packed streetcar, my head full of humming verses. Life was all ahead of me, and it had to be lived so that one need never feel ashamed…

We were being assigned to our postings. There was a recruitment drive under way, sending us to distant regions. They gave out money and assigned us to particular shops where we could buy something decent to wear. I signed up along with Nina Lapina, and I bought a wool dress with some sort of red bow, and Nina a blue crepe de chine dress. We got ready for our exams.

Thoughts were swarming in my head. What if I went to the Komsomol district committee and asked to be sent for underground work in Mexico? The Comintern Congress was in session then, and I read every page of it, and it only

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fed my desire to do something big all the more. I went. I told them everything — about my father, my mother, about myself. They listened carefully and said I’d get an answer. The final preparations for the state exams were under way, we were reviewing our material. The bell for recess rang. I go down the stairs and see, on the notice board, some freshly printed slip of paper — an announcement. I read it and my head began spinning — “Mostkova T.I., as a class-alien element, is to be expelled from the college. Vacate the dormitory.”

The girls came to the dormitory and found me on my bed, all in tears. Everyone was silent. Only Ksenia said — “You’ll sleep next to me. Don’t cry, and don’t give up.”

Life went on as usual — everyone else went off to classes early each morning, while I wandered around Moscow. Hungry. I went to MOZO, MONO, MO, MOMI. I went day after day, week after week, month after month — everywhere they promised to look into it, and everywhere, refusal. I left my tears everywhere I went. I stopped going to the college at all. I’d come back late, once everyone was asleep, and get up only after everyone else had already left.

Whoever put the idea in my head, I went to try to get an appointment with Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin himself. There was a reception office where you could sign up and speak with M.I. in person. It was a hot summer. I was exhausted, and cried everywhere, all the time. I didn’t go to see my relatives, I was too ashamed; I didn’t write to Malka either. Ksenia was the one who fed me — bringing bits of food from the canteen and slipping me money.

I was finally received by some tall gentleman. He wrote down my name, age, where I was from. He wrote and wrote, and then said — you’re a countrywoman of mine, don’t cry, M.I. will help you. Don’t cry. Go on, go on — and pushed me into a huge office, where, behind a writing desk, a little beard bent over some papers. I stepped in timidly and stood by the desk, head down, while he read through everything his assistant had written, then looked up at me and said — “Well done, you, wanting to go all the way to Mexico. There’s plenty of work for you right here too — here, go and work in Birobidzhan instead. Everything will be fine. What, are your exams finished? You know everything perfectly well already. Here!” — and he thrust into my hand a note, on which was written: “To Rozalia Samuilovna Zemlyachka. Look into this and reinstate her. M.I. Kalinin.”

And I ran out onto the hot avenue, ran to Red Square, where in some narrow little side streets the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate was housed. I found it. Behind a lattice partition sat a tall, gray-haired, thin woman, in

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a long skirt. I asked her where I could find Zemlyachka, and she, in answer, simply held out her hand and took the slip of paper from me. I didn’t need to say another word. She picked up the telephone receiver, and told me — sit down. I sat on the very edge of the chair, still not quite believing my ordeal was over. I remember her conversation with the college. She told them — give her the diploma, like anyone else, if her academic marks are good, right away, and let me know. She looked me in the face and said — go to your college, everything will be fine there now. I didn’t even say goodbye, I ran off to the place where I’d been cursed, where everything had once been hateful to me.

Everything around was quiet. Summer. Vacation. Everyone had scattered. I stand at the door of the teachers’ room, afraid to open it. Suddenly the door flies open, and our headmistress, with a happy smile, pulls me in, shakes my hand, congratulates me, and hands me my diploma, showing that I had, in 1930, completed the Timiryazev Moscow Horticultural- Gardening College.

Beside myself, I fly straight to OZET — I’m going to Birobidzhan. There, at OZET, I feel happy — many people are heading there, specialists too, all the more so from Moscow; they say there will be a republic, though for now it’s only a district; there they process the documents immediately, give a bit of money, and invite me to a meeting under the leadership of Smidovich, Kalinin’s deputy.

I’m going to Birobidzhan. My preparations didn’t take long. I made short work of the money I’d received as an advance for my assignment. We were given a special shop where I bought myself a violet silk dress with a bright bow, and a few other things besides. Three of us were going from our college — Yefim Breitner, Riva Magidina, and I. Yefim had managed to marry a fellow student, a year behind us, and the two of them set off before us. I traveled later, with Magidina — a kind, plump girl — riding in a train car with young men for ten days; it was cold in the car, hard on the wooden berth, but cheerful.

We arrived in Khabarovsk on the 12th of February, 1931, early in the morning. A biting frost stood over everything. We were bound for the Khabarovsk Regional Land Department. There was no transport running yet, so we set off on foot with our light luggage. Along the way women stopped us, kindly helping to rub our cheeks, which had gone red with frost — we’d already gotten a bit of frostbite. All our clothes, especially our shoes, were quite unsuited to the Far Eastern February cold.

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Inside the Regional Land Department it was warm, and we thawed out, rubbing our frostbitten cheeks and fingers, waiting for the staff and management to arrive. Our travel orders were from the USSR People’s Commissariat of Agriculture. Split lengthwise into three parts, the document certified that I, Mostkova T.I., was being sent to serve under the Khabarovsk Regional Land Department, in permanent work as an agronomist specializing in vegetable growing. One part — the stub — was kept by me as a record, one was filed in the personnel department, and the last was sent ahead to my future place of work.

The three of us were assigned to the Birobidzhan district, but for now were sent to Pokrovka, to the state farm director Finkelstein, to be taken on there. Pokrovka station is the first stop out of Khabarovsk — it was something like a practical training placement. We were fed well in the canteen, taught to ride horseback, and shown how seeds were prepared for planting. Finkelstein was a kind man, of short stature and even a little shy, unassuming. We took to him at once, and his young, beautiful wife, Galya, charmed us all. The neighbors told us — he had left his first wife and son and married this one, who was almost still a girl, the daughter of his landlady at the Crimean state farm, where he’d first gone to work as an agronomist.

(Photograph: with Grandmother, Faivel, and Grandfather Nakhman. Vitebsk, 1931.)

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We were taken under the wing of the section manager, a powerful, gray-haired man, very likable, who had once been a steward for a landowner somewhere in the west, and now had come to help build a new Jewish republic in the Far East. We were dressed in padded cotton suits — quilted cotton trousers tucked into felt boots, and quilted jackets. The material was plain cotton, dark in color — we thought the outfit suited us, and, more importantly, it was comfortable and warm.

And so the manager taught me to saddle a horse, to hold the bridle firmly, to bridle the horse and mount up with a quick spring. You feel like the master of the situation, proudly steering the swift horse wherever you need to go, unafraid of either a fast ride or a gallop. It quite took your breath away. With pride you’d dismount and hand the reins back to the manager, and get, in return, his praise — “You’ll make an agronomist yet, no fear in you, well done.” We stroked, with real tenderness, the first “Internatsional” tractors that arrived at the collective farm, sat beside the tractor driver, even tried shifting gears, or starting the engine ourselves. That last part took a fair amount of physical strength.

Our days in Pokrovka flew by quickly. Riva left with the first steamer of the navigation season, bound west for Amur Province as an agronomist for a kolkhoz. I went by train back west to Tikhonkaya station, twelve kilometers from which lay the new Jewish resettlement kolkhoz “Valdheim,” where I had been assigned. We arrived at Tikhonkaya station already at night. We were fellow passengers riding the local train to that station. During the journey, which lasted three or four hours, everyone got to know one another. Where would I spend the night, where should I go? There wasn’t even a question of that. Stolov sat down beside me — the head of the resettlement department — and said, I live with a local resident, a forester; there’ll be room for you there too, and tomorrow you’ll set off for your kolkhoz, “Valdheim.”

I remember how we stepped out onto the empty little station, which, they’d probably named “Tikhonkaya” [“the quiet one”] for good reason. It was a dark, frosty February night. I walked behind Stolov, and we came to a tall porch, where a crowd of people had gathered. The windows were brightly lit. Stolov grew anxious. He was living there without his family for the moment (they hadn’t yet arrived from Minsk), but he’d already settled in, and everyone there

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was already close to him. We flung open the heavy wooden door and went into the front room, and before us, laid out on straw, was the master of the house, killed the day before by a falling tree in the forest. On either side stood his wife and small children. I did not sleep that night.

In the morning I went out into the yard. It was 20-25 degrees below freezing, but the sun shone brightly and warmed things so much that the cold felt more like a caress than a bite. Underfoot the packed, glittering snow crunched, and you could look into it as into a mirror. My heart felt light. At the resettlement office they told me the horses from Valdheim would arrive at four in the afternoon, and I mustn’t miss them. The kolkhoz chairman, Misha Shkolnik, would be waiting for me.

And so I went to work as an agronomist at the “Valdheim” kolkhoz, a market-garden farm on the outskirts, with greenhouses, hotbeds, and a small area of newly cultivated land under vegetables. The kolkhoz had already existed for two years, with two Chinese gardeners running the vegetable operation — Volodya, old and lean, and Misha, young, tall, and handsome. I was to be the agronomist, meaning I was supposed to direct them, but in reality I would be learning their trade and craft from them — absorbing the rich experience accumulated by the local people of these parts, the Chinese, with their ancient culture of vegetable growing.

And I would be working with people, mostly former shtetl folk and others from far away, who had come here to live, to work, to have their own piece of bread, and raise their children. These people had lived through a great deal in their old homeland, and had had to come here to start a new life.

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But growing used to the hard physical labor of a peasant, and to unfamiliar, harsh climatic conditions.

[Here the last of the surviving photographed pages of the manuscript breaks off.]