Anna's Shtetl

1. The Two Shevchenkos

Eighty years later, Anna Spector still remembered the Ukrainian girl who was her best friend in high school: She was such a lovely girl. I don’t remember her ¤rst name. We always just called her Shevchenko. On the ¤rst day of high school, Anna Spector had sat next to Shevchenko because a teacher made a mistake. The art teacher wrote “Shpector ” when Anna gave her name. He was a Czechoslovakian and couldn’t pronounce the letter S properly in Russian.1 The desks were assigned alphabetically , so Shpector sat next to Shevchenko from that day in 1916 all through high school. Once they got to know each other, it didn’t seem to matter that Shevchenko was an average student, while Anna made top grades, or that Shevchenko was well-to-do and Orthodox Christian, while Anna was poor and Orthodox Jewish. They became friends because they both liked embroidery and despised injustice, and because they just took to each other. Shevchenko liked to take the side of the underdog. Two boys with poor grades accused someone in the class of copying work from another student . No one in the class liked what these two troublemakers did, but Shevchenko was the only one brave enough to do something about it. She argued vigorously to defend the innocent student. Shevchenko’s arguments carried weight. She came from a prosperous family employed by the princess , and she didn’t hesitate to speak up and stand her ground. Another time, Anna was the injured party, needing someone to stick up for her. A family had given her a velvet bag to decorate with embroidery. Closed by a drawstring, and meant to hold prayer implements, such bags were commonly given as gifts to young men. The family wrote out a particular young man’s name in Hebrew letters for Anna to copy in embroidery on the bag. At that time her family lived just across the street from the 1 The Two Shevchenkos dressmaking and needlework shop of a woman named Dina, where Shevchenko often came with her mother and older sister to have their winter clothes made. Anna would meet them there by chance while she was embroidering the letters. Proud that her lettering had turned out so well, she brought the ¤nished bag to school to show to her home economics teacher, Nina Constantinovna . The quality of the needlework was so good that the teacher didn’t believe Anna had done it, and told her so. Shevchenko jumped to Anna’s defense, furious at the teacher for calling Anna a liar. No one but Shevchenko would dare to stand up to a teacher that way. Nina Constantinovna had to back down, and the teacher never again doubted Anna’s word. Shevchenko lived about four miles east of Korsun in the woodland. Her father was the managing director of the princess’s forest. Anna saw their grand house when the class went on a picnic nearby, and her friend’s mother came out to greet them, bringing cookies and a drink. Another time, when Shevchenko invited Anna to her home, her older brother proudly showed them some squirrels he had shot, making Anna squeal in repugnance at the gruesome sight. That was in her ¤rst year of high school, two years into the world war, when life at school, and in the town, was still relatively tolerable. In the next two years, Anna’s life in Korsun, like the lives of most people in Russia, became increasingly hard. Russian people spoke of the bad years, the years when the upheaval of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution stretched into the Russian Civil War, as “the time of troubles.” The winter of 1918–1919 was the worst winter of all. That was during Anna’s third year of high school, when the poverty, the wars, the typhus epidemic, and the pogroms of “the time of troubles” had reduced her family to despair.2 The family’s need for food became most urgent in the summer of 1919. Another pogrom hit Korsun, and the looters who invaded Grandmother Beyla’s house, where Anna’s family was now living, stole every scrap of food. Grandfather Avrum needed to soothe his ailing stomach with food many times a day. Gaunt and pacing in pain from his cancer, he was actually crying for something to eat. Anna decided that it was up to her to bring home food. She went begging. Anna chose small farms as...