Chapter: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
The ghetto is a kind of magic circle. No matter where you go, you come back to the starting place. At least this was the case with me. It took me many years of hard struggle before I broke away completely. My first venture was to a nearby village to tutor the children of a wealthy Jew. Here I was to live in a big house with polished floors and a sheet-iron roof. The food was plentiful and good. I shared a room with the oldest of my three pupils, a pimply, heavy-set boy of my own age. So far so good, but my position also had serious drawbacks. I did not have the right to live in the village. Although the local official overlooked this transgression for a price, I always had to be on the lookout for a higher official from town. Then, my roommate talked at great length about his amorous exploits, real and imaginary, disturbing my rest and undermining my authority as a teacher. In addition, my employer expected me to help out in his store on busy days, something I was reluctant to do, since I was instructed not to be too punctilious about making change or weighing commodities. My pupils, village born, talked a much better Russian than I did which put me in an awkward position. Sometimes at the dinner table my employer would cast a glance at me that turned the bread I ate to gall. I was bitterly unhappy in my new environment, and at the finish of the stipulated term of half a year, I took the position of tutor in another town.
So it went, with a varying degree of success until in my wanderings I reached a town called Belaya Tserkov (White Church, dubbed by the Jews, “Schwartze Temoh,” or Black Unholiness). It was a turn in my life that decided my fate for all the years to come. This was a comparatively big city with a population of 50,000, predominantly Jewish, and it was a cultural center because it possessed a high school.
The time I settled there was one of the darkest periods in the life of the Jews in Russia. With the accession to the throne of Nicholas II in 1894, the reaction which had characterized his father's reign became intensified. The “Grand Inquisitor” and a host of rabid anti-Semites, chief among them the notorious “hang-man,” Plehve, Secretary of the Interior, had devised more and more means of stifling the Jews economically and politically. Monopolies on articles handled mostly by Jews, such as liquor and tobacco, were introduced. The villages were cleansed of the Jewish population; they were also expelled in toto from Moscow and given only three days for settling their affairs. The school norm was lowered, the only loophole being the right of any Jew to take an examination for part or all of the program of the high schools in the Pale. The legislators most likely depended on the personnel of the schools to make this privilege a dead letter, and so, to a great extent, it was.
But the Jews, with an optimism born of long years of suffering, seized this opportunity, and Belaya Tserkov became the focal point of attraction to Jewish youth from near and far. Not all aspirants were young; some were middle-aged persons with families to support, but all of them formed a distinct group called externs (outsiders) or sometimes “futurists,” since they were men with a future however remote and uncertain. While some of the externs received help from home, the overwhelming majority eked out a precarious living by tutoring, for which there was a great demand because the Jewish population was seized by a craze to have every boy enter the gymnasium (high school) and see him become an extern in turn.
I was lucky to secure a position with a family of modest means, receiving room and board in return for tutoring their son of 14 years. He was so obtuse that in my private opinion it would take him years to go through even the elementary course, thus practically guaranteeing me a long-term job. It was characteristic of this prize pupil of mine that he had the greatest aversion toward reading. To combat this, I assigned him to read every day a few pages from a selected book and then tell me its contents. Once the assignment was 30 pages from the fascinating novel, “Fathers and Sons,” by Turgenev. On these pages was related a quarrel between the hero of the novel, Bazarov, and a nobleman, resulting in a duel. When I asked him the outcome of the duel, he pleaded ignorance because this was revealed on the back of the last page assigned.
I now began to study seriously with the aim of taking an examination on the complete program of the gymnasium at once instead of by degrees. It was really a hard, ambitious task, since the program entailed a nine-year course with no choice in selecting one's subjects. A pupil in the school might have had it easy at times, but no allowances were made for an extern who was looked upon as a nuisance at best. The course in mathematics, embracing algebra, geometry, and trigonometry in no homeopathic doses, was a difficult one. The same was true of physics. History, as it was taught at that time, was primarily the story of wars with emphasis on dates, places, and names; and there were in Russia alone enough rulers by the name of Ivan to tax the memory. But the most difficult part of the program was the study of the classical languages, particularly Greek. The spelling was complicated because of duplication of letters with identical pronunciation. Three different accents were characterized by mysterious symbols. The grammar was the most difficult of any language I know. Most of the verbs are irregular, various tenses having a derivation entirely dissimilar from the original. There are three past tenses as in German and Latin, but they become transformed when used in a grammatical form called aorist, something that has no counterpart in any other language as far as I know. We studied Xenophon in prose and, of course, the Iliad and Odyssey in poetry. In Latin, we studied Virgil, Horace, and Ovid in poetry, Caesar's “De Bello Gallico,” and Cicero’s orations in prose. The examinations were both oral and written, the translation from Russian into Latin and Greek being the hardest. I must confess that I could hardly have expected to get a satisfactory mark in Greek if a friendly pupil at the gymnasium whom I helped in mathematics had not revealed to me the passage to be translated, the teacher having been forced to pass along this secret to the pupils for fear that none of them would pass the examination.
Another obstacle was the much feared “theme.” This was a composition in Russian on a theme sent in sealed envelopes from the administrative center of Kiev to all schools in the district. So great was the apprehension concerning this theme that an organization was once discovered which specialized in ferreting out the secret and selling it to those students who were able and willing to pay for it. However, this theme did not present any difficulty to me, and after a month of almost daily examinations, I found out--to my own astonishment--that I had passed all tests satisfactorily and had secured the highest mark in mathematics. To pass at the first attempt was rather unusual. The majority had to take examinations repeatedly, and there was one extern who failed on six consecutive years and was finally awarded a certificate for his patience and “optimism.”
I was now the proud possessor of a gilded parchment called a diploma with no hope whatsoever of entering the university within the existing norm. No extern ever did because preference was given to pupils of the gymnasium, and then only those graduates who were awarded a golden medal for excellent scholastic attainment and exemplary behavior could hope to be accepted. I was all dressed up with no place to go. However, I was greatly benefited by my success, since it established my reputation as a “mathematician,” and I was accepted as a tutor for pupils of the higher grades and wealthier class. My financial condition was improved to the extent that I could help out my family that was in a worse plight than ever.
It was during this examination period that I met two men who later became renowned for entirely different reasons. One, Novominsky by name, was a radical, an exponent of Marxism, a well-read man who extolled the toiling masses in mediocre verse. At times, we studied together and became close friends. Later, we entered the university together. He became involved in student disorders, was imprisoned, and upon his release was forced into military service at the age of 35. I lost track of him until I came to the United States and discovered that under the name of Olgin he was living in New York where he became one of the founders of the Communist Party and editor-in-chief of the Jewish Communist paper, “Die Freiheit.” I wrote to him, and he sent me an invitation to visit him, together with his voluminous and erudite book on Russian economics. He died, greatly lamented in the Communist press and also meriting a rather sympathetic necrologue in a liberal magazine.
The other man was a bulky, taciturn fellow named Euno Azef, whom I knew slightly. In 1905, at the time of the first Russian revolution, a historian who published a magazine in Paris called the “Past” came out with a statement that Euno Azef was a provocateur in the pay of the “Okhrana” or secret police. Since Azef was a member of the Central Committee of Terrorists who organized the execution of the hangman, Plehve, and the assassination of Grand Duke Sergius, this accusation was sensational. The chief of the Committee, the notorious Boris Savinkov, along with other revolutionists refused to believe it, but the evidence was irrefutable. By denouncing minor figures in the revolutionary movement to the Okhrana, he gained their confidence as an agent provocateur and his pay as well. On the other hand, by his daring terroristic acts and by his success in smuggling firearms and literature from abroad, he was very high in the terrorist councils with a firmly established reputation as a revolutionary. It was later proved that at least one big transport of arms together with escort was handed over to the Okhrana by him, and it was believed that the attack on Plehve’s life was executed with the tacit consent of the Okhrana for reasons of their own. Immediately, upon the revelation of his double dealings, which had the effect of a bombshell upon the revolutionary movement, Azef fled, never to be discovered. His wife, a devoted revolutionary, killed her child and committed suicide. The terrorist organization disintegrated to a large extent; and, while terror still prevailed, it became sporadic instead of organized.
Looking back, I find that the period following my examinations was the happiest time of my life. The improbability of entering the university did not dampen my joy because, under existing conditions, I did not expect it. It was the summer of 1903, the glorious summer of the Ukraine. I went bathing in the crystal clear waters of the river and boating in company with other externs. We sang and discussed matters political and ideological. Sometimes girls would join our group, enlivening the discussions and turning them often into levity and more tangible pleasures. Instead of reading the abominable Xenophon and the tedious Aeneid, I read Chekhov and Gorky, both enjoyable and instructive.
I made some social contacts and became a frequent visitor in the home of a family named Linetski. There were six boys in this family and one girl, Rose, with whom I fell in love at first glance. She was a lovely girl with poise, dignity, and modesty. She was proud without being prudish. She was optimistic and cheerful despite the fact that she was occupied with domestic work, her mother being an inept and sickly woman, and with the care of three young children under trying economic conditions. She also helped the family by teaching needlework part time in a professional trade school for girls. She was worshipped by her brothers and loved by her friends, pupils, and other teachers in the school. My love was strictly platonic. I could not contemplate marriage under the existing circumstances. I was not even sure of her feelings toward me, and the stimulants to love as practiced today were out of the question with a girl like her. The majority of Jewish girls at that time had prejudices against lovemaking without “serious” intentions.
It was an interesting family. The father was an orthodox Jew at his best. He was a man of the world, well versed in Hebrew literature and prone to overlook the transgressions of the young, religious and otherwise, thus avoiding discord and friction. As to the boys, two were lively youngsters, one was a brilliant student at the gymnasium, and the older three were externs and tutors whenever they could get pupils. The three were intellectuals, each with an ideology of his own; all of them played the noble game of chess reasonably well. Not long ago,* I received a letter from one of the boys, Grischa, now a man in his sixties who held a high position under the Communist regime. It read in part, “I was overjoyed with your letter which came after years of silence. Upon reading it, I was overcome with a nostalgia too hard to bear. I visualized your sitting with us at the table, playing chess or engaged in lively discussions and storytelling. My lovely, unforgettable sister was serving tea from the samovar with Father looking at us disapprovingly whenever we touched upon risqué and forbidden matters, but I am sure with inner pride and concealed satisfaction.” This from a hardened Communist to whom sentimentality is a mortal sin! I know he was sincere because I experienced the same feeling when I read his letter.
These three brothers were representative of three different ideologies current at that time among the Jewish intellectuals. The oldest, Leb, was an ardent Zionist. He was elected a delegate to the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1896 but had to decline in favor of a bright young lady because of monetary considerations. Grischa, the writer of the letter mentioned, was a Social Democrat. The third, Jacob, was also a Social Democrat but with a nationalistic tinge. He belonged to what was called the “Bund.”
* - About 1940