Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story

Interlude: Family Tree

272 INTERLUDE Family Tree How muc h l onger , my parents and I would ask ourselves. How much longer could our family remain uprooted on our native soil, before our roots would wither away and die? In the spring of 1987, as leaving the USSR consumed my daily existence, I developed something of an obsession with our family tree. I perused family albums (some of which wouldn’t survive emigration), and I pestered my parents with questions that seemed quite idle, given the daily pressure of their lives. It was an oral, truncated family history I was parsing, and in collecting our ancestors ’ Jewish, Russian, and Soviet past I was finding some of the keys to my family’s refusenik present. I discovered, for the first time, that family history comforted but also filled one’s life with pain. All four of my grandparents came from the Pale of Settlement, from what are now independent Ukraine and Lithuania. Up until 1917, the vast majority of Russia’s Jews had been constricted to the boundaries of the Pale, originally the empire’s western and southwestern frontiers. All four of my grandparents had made sweeping—and in many ways successful— transitions as young people. As did tens of thousands of children of the Pale, in the late 1920s and early 1930s they actively sought a place and a career in a new world, which during the first two Soviet decades still intoxicated the Jews with a promise of equality, if not acceptance. All four of my grandparents were culturally Russianized, and yet for each one of them, Jewishness was inescapable. Over the decades of living outside the former Pale, even their first names and patronymics had become palimpsests of acculturation, a Jewish past still echoing in my parents’ own birth certificates issued before World War II. My paternal grandfather Peysakh In te rl ude: Fa mil y Tr ee | 273 Borukhovich became Pyotr Borisovich, a name free of Judaic tell-tale signs. My paternal grandmother Bella Vul’fovna, a Lithuanian rabbi’s daughter, metamorphosed into Bella Vladimirovna. My maternal grandfather Aron Ikhilovich put on the tidy clothes of Arkady Ilyich. And only old university friends from Kharkov remembered my outwardly Slavic grandmother Anna Mikhailovna as the once Jewish Nyusya Moshkovna. Both of my mother’s parents grew up in the Ukraine (which has since lost its definite article). My mother’s mother, Anna (Nyusya) Studnits, was born in 1914 in the town of Bar, presently of the Vinnitsa Province of Ukraine. Around the time of my grandmother’s birth, almost half of Bar’s population, or 10,000, were Jewish. She lost her mother as a young girl. After living with the family of her father’s sister, she left home as a teenager to go to junior college. My maternal grandmother came of age at the time when the Soviet Union was moving at a fast clip toward Stalinism. She was, in many ways, a typical member of that first all-Soviet generation, collectively orphaned during the 1917 Revolution and the Civil War, later schooled and brainwashed in the late 1920s through the early 1930s into accepting Stalin’s collective fatherhood. Although never a member of the Party, my grandmother lived much of her adult life in the Soviet Union by pretending to believe in the official ideology. Like so many women of her generation living through Stalinism and World War II, she had learned to be a survivalist. My grandmother told me about being a student at Kharkov Economics Institute in the 1930s. After Grigory Petrovsky, an “old Bolshevik ” and then President of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, was purged in 1937 (he would be released from the Gulag in 1953), my grandmother and two girlfriends stayed up all night sifting through their photo albums in search of their pictures taken alongside Petrovsky at a gala for top university students. The pictures with the deposed Ukrainian leader were either eviscerated or burned altogether. As a young boy, I spent a great deal of time either alone with grandmother Anna Mikhailovna or together with her and my cousin Yusha, daughter of my mother’s sister Zhanna. For a number of years I would spend a whole summer month with my grandmother at the Estonian resort of Pärnu, and curiously I don’t recall my grandmother’s Sovietness spilling into our conversations. Perhaps I just don’t remember or don’t [18.227.161.226] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 19:05...