Regrowth: Seven Tales of Jewish Life Before, During, and After Nazi Occupation

Regrowth

✦ 155 ✦ Regrowth we are talking, here, about two half families—a man without a wife, and a wife without a man* —who lived, with facing doors, on the same floor of a single building in a big Soviet city. No further details about them or their activities are necessary . It is enough to say that one of them was Dr. Zemelman. He was an older, ill-tempered surgeon—the silent type, inclined to solitude; he was someone with a name in his field, both in the city and even throughout the land. That was him, on the one hand. And on the other hand, there was Mrs. Zayets—a well-known pedagogue, who worked in the People’s Commissariat as a division leader. And still more. . . . To understand the following, it should be mentioned that both individuals, already for some time now, had grown estranged from their Jewish origins and all that occurred in the thickets of their people. Both of them had only children. Dr. Zemelman had a son, and Mrs. Zayets had a daughter. The children were even of the same age. They both attended the same school in their early years, and, afterward, they continued at a higher level. And so they grew up accustomed to each other from the time they were small; naturally, between the children, there developed *This phrasing is a bit awkward, but it preserves the tone of the original; in Yiddish , man means both “man” and “husband,” and vayb (related to the English word “wife”) means “woman” as well as “wife.” 156 ✦ der nister familiarity. And so, too, it developed between their parents, who shared the same social standing and a position in the intelligentsia (to the extent that it was possible for extremely busy people, each of whom was absorbed, up over the neck, in his or her respective field, which swallowed them up and, as it happens, left no time for personal matters). When the children were grown, they became much closer. They shared many things together, whether in their studies or on their days off and during vacations—which they enjoyed in a youthful fashion, sometimes just together, and sometimes with other young friends. Whenever the parents had time, they stealthily took a look at the relationship between the adolescents, whose respective merits were evident. Mrs. Zayets’s daughter pleased the elderly, grumpy surgeon, who peered over his glasses and saw that it seemed she had been made for his son. And the same was true on the other side. Mrs. Zayets looked at the boy who seemed destined for her daughter, and she felt a mother’s joy that her child didn’t need to look far—that her promised one had been sent to her automatically, from one door to the next, and that he was there, on the same story, in a single house, as if he had been born for her. If things had continued in this way, sooner or later there would have occurred what happens in situations like that: a joining of both half families, whose two children would complete and unite them, to the delight and happiness of their parents. But something else occurred. The forty-first year came, with calamity for the land, for all its inhabitants—and, among them, the two families discussed here. Both young people, despite the fact that they were not among the first to be summoned for wartime duties, felt the call to go as volunteers, as most students did, both in the city where they lived and in other cities, everywhere and without exception. regrowth ✦ 157 The surgeon’s son—a boy who had grown up handsome, energetic , and strong willed—did not ask his father’s permission or advice. Instead, he “put him before a fact,” as they say: he went off to the necessary place and was enlisted as a party healthy and fit for service. Which was the truth. The other child, Mrs. Zayets’s daughter, also volunteered—either because she didn’t wish to do anything different from her friend and wanted to act as he did; or, possibly, she would have done so even if he hadn’t—following her own conscience and what the duties of a citizen demanded, she would have resolved to do the same thing anyway. Their parents, of course, did not object. They were loyal citizens themselves, and they knew that now one...