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Introduction
I remember once, when I was twenty-nine and beginning to feel that, really, I was on the threshold of old age, I began for the first time to wonder if I ought to write an autobiography.
The point against doing so was that nothing of any importance had ever happened to me. The point in favor of doing so was that I was a pretty good writer and that I might weave such a spell of words that no one would notice that nothing had ever happened to me.
On the whole, though, I decided against it because I had other things to do, and because I could detect no real craving for it on the part of the public.
Now a great deal of time has passed and I am actually beginning my autobiography, and a monstrously long one it will be. This is it.
What has changed? It still remains a fact that nothing of any importance has ever happened to me and that it will take all my writing skill to obscure that point.
Why, then, am I doing it? Ah, at twenty-nine, I had never published a book. Now I have published two hundred. There seems to be a widespread belief (according to my editor, the beauteous Cathleen Jordan) that no one can possibly write two hundred books of both fiction and nonfiction, in dozens of categories at all age levels, without being, somehow, an interesting person.
Besides, it might be helpful to ambitious young people or to curious not-so-young people to see How I Did It.
I pointed out that this had been exactly my idea in writing The Early Asimov (Doubleday, 1972) and Before the Golden Age (Double-day, 1974). In each of these books I included copious autobiographical passages. Cathleen said, however, that those passages had pertained almost exclusively to my literary life and she wanted a well-rounded tale that included my nonliterary life as well.
I said, "What nonliterary life? How can a person turn out two hundred books and have a nonliterary life?"
Fortunately, she explained it carefully to me so that I could understand what she meant.
She said, "Shut up, Isaac, and get to work."
So here it is.
In memory yet green, in joy still felt, The scenes of life rise sharply into view. We triumph, Time's disasters are undealt, And while all else is old, the world is new.
Anon.
PART I
Out of 'Russia and into Brooklyn
My Birthplace
To begin with, I was not born in the United States, but in Russia. At the time I was born, the Russian Empire had already died and was replaced by a variety of Soviet Socialist Republics, the three chief being the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (R.S.F.S.R.), the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (Belorussian S.S.R.), and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (Ukrainian S.S.R.). The old-fashioned names for these were Great Russia, White Russia, and the Ukraine, respectively.
Two years after I was born, these units, together with others, were combined to form the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.), which took in virtually all the territory of the old Russian Empire except for some far western provinces lost in the course of World War I and the Russian Revolution.
Strictly speaking, then, I was not born in Russia, nor in the U.S.S.R. either, but in the Russian S.F.S.R. (Great Russia). The place of my birth was just sixteen kilometers (ten miles) east of the border of the Belorussian S.S.R. That was where my parents lived and their parents for an indefinite number of generations.
This was in itself rather unusual since my family was Jewish and, in theory, Jews were not allowed to live on the holy soil of Great Russia, which had been the Russia of Ivan IV (the Terrible) and Peter I (the Great).
Beginning in 1772, however, under Catherine II (the Great), Russia had annexed large tracts of what had made up the vast, amorphous, and anarchic kingdom of Poland. Until that time, White Russia and the Ukraine had been Polish and the Poles had allowed Jews to live there. Indeed, they had welcomed them as a useful middle class of merchants. The Russians, naturally, annexed the Jews with the territory.
The Russian Tsars did not try to drive the Jews out; they remained a useful middle class. They were confined, however, to the ex-Polish territories of White Russia and the Ukraine, as well as to the Baltic provinces that had been annexed from Sweden, and these constituted "the Jewish Pale."
In a nation as inefficiently ruled as Russia, however, Jews could
drift beyond the pale now and then and, every once in a while in a fit of rigor, they would be pushed back.
In the time of Nicholas I, who ruled Russia from 1825 to 1855, things got a little sticky. Nicholas was a traditionalist, who was determined to maintain the autocracy in Russia (and in as much of the rest 'of Europe as he could manage) against the rising tide of democracy that had been unleashed by the French Revolution. Among other things, small deviations from the traditional Jewish Pale were to be corrected and Jews living outside it were to be moved back in.
That struck my ancestral town for, as I said, it was sixteen kilometers east of White Russia and therefore sixteen kilometers outside the pale. What happened then my father told me, for late in his life he began (at my request) to write me letters telling me what he could remember of his ancestors and of his life in Russia. 1
Apparently, there was at the time a "good landowner" (and for Jews to remember a Russian landowner as "good" must have meant he was saintly indeed) who owned many square miles of land on both sides of the White Russian/Great Russian border. On hearing that Jewish settlements beyond the White Russian border must be broken up, he carried the border sign from a position west of the town to a position east of the town, thus transferring it into White Russia and allowing the Jews to remain.
This was clearly illegal, but Tsar Nicholas, autocrat though he might be, was far away in St. Petersburg, 415 miles almost due north of my birthplace, and the landowner was on the spot. Since autocracies are usually tempered by inefficiency, bribery, inertia, and any of a dozen other ameliorative influences (or they would be unbearable), it was the immediate power that prevailed and not the Little Father far away.
2
The town I was bom in is named Petrovichi, pronounced ' peh-TRUV-ih-chee." I didn't know about the final i until I was an adult, for my father, although he spelled it as I have just given it, when I asked him, always pronounced it "peh-TRUV-ich."
When I was a child, he would talk of it frequently, saying, "Back home in Petrovichi-" He never said, "Back home in Russia-" I always assumed that Petrovichi was a huge city or perhaps a whole province, and later on I was quite disappointed to find that it was a small hamlet of no consequence whatever.
My father would occasionally come across maps of Europe or of
1 He wrote the letters in his own idiosyncratic brand of English, but in quoting from nirn, I will, of course, do a little polishing, since it is not my intention to make him a figure of fun.
Russia in my schoolbooks, or elsewhere, and he would always greedily try to find Petrovichi. He never did. He would pause in dismay over what had happened to the western boundary of Russia, astonished at the huge losses to Poland, at the independence of Finland and the Baltic states.
It was very odd. As a Jew, he had no cause to love Russia or Russians, and yet he was Russian. He could speak Russian, he read the Russian literature, and he somehow identified with Russia.
But then he would begin looking for Petrovichi, and compounding his annoyance at his not finding it was the fact that he invariably found the small towns that surrounded
it. He would find Khislavich, Mstislav, Klimovichi, and Krichev, for instance. (I still remember those odd names because of the disgust with which he pronounced the syllables, but of course, I have checked the map for the spelling.)
He would call my mother and say, "Look, they have these hamlets and hick towns and Petrovichi they don't have."
I would say, "Maybe they're bigger than Petrovichi, Pappa."
He would look at me with horror and say, "They were smaller. They were nothings. I don't understand why they don't have it." He may have suspected a cartographical conspiracy.
Later on, as I grew older, I took up the search, wondering if perhaps it were all a mirage, if I had been bom in an open field or a trackless desert. Then during World War II, I bought a large map of Europe into which I intended to insert colored pins and follow the ebb and flow of the armies. Studying the section of Russia that was under dispute at the time, I was amazed to find Petrovichi. It was the first time I had ever seen it on a map. I put a pin in it of a color I didn't use otherwise, and no matter where the European fronts were, that pin stayed. After all, I needed all the evidence I could get that I had really been born somewhere.
Then, in 1967, a new edition of the Times Atlas came out, distributed by Houghton-Mifnin, one of my publishers, and I obtained a copy. I turned to the map of the southwestern U.S.S.R. and there were all the towns my father had despised over forty years before, and nestling among them was Petrovichi, safe and sound.
The Times Atlas gives its exact location—53.58 0 North Latitude and 32.10 0 East Longitude. That's all I know about it. Except for its location and its geographic position with regard to other towns and cities, I can find nothing, not even its current population. It is not included in Webster's New Geographical Dictionary, for instance.
I daresay I could, if I wished, obtain Soviet reference works that might help me, but I am not willing to carry my efforts that far.
Petrovichi's position represents an extreme for me. Obviously, I
have never made my permanent abode farther east than my place of birth, since I was brought to the United States early in life and have never again left it for longer than a few weeks.
It is also true that I have never made my permanent abode farther north than my place of birth. Its latitude is that of Hamburg, Germany; Liverpool, England; Edmonton, Alberta. It is farther north than the territory of any of the states but Alaska, and I have never been in Alaska.
Before the "good landowner" had fiddled with the boundary line, Petrovichi was in the Smolensk-guberniya—that is, in the Smolensk district of Great Russia. "Guberniya" is a term no longer used in the U.S.S.R., I believe, and one would now speak of the Smolensk-oblast instead.
Smolensk, the chief town of the district, is 55 miles due north of Petrovichi. It is an ancient town on the upper Dnieper River, and was founded in the ninth century. It was long the object of border warfare between Russia and Poland and switched hands for the last time in 1654, when it became Russian. There was a great battle there in the course of Napoleon's invasion in 1812. Smolensk's present population is something like 220,000.
After the boundary-line shift, Petrovichi was part of the White Russian Mogilyov-district. Mogilyov, 75 miles due west of Petrovichi, is also on the Dnieper River, about 110 miles downstream from Smolensk. It did not become Russian until 1772, and its population is very nearly equal to that of Smolensk.
Nearer than either of these cities was the town of Roslavl, which was just 30 miles due east of Petrovichi. It served as Petrovichi's market town, and its population is about one quarter that of either Smolensk or Mogilyov.
After the Russian Revolution, Petrovichi was reinstated as part of the Smolensk district, although there was no longer any restriction as to Jews living there. By the time I was born then, I was born in the Smolensk district of Great Russia, and I manage to identify with it slightly.
On April 12, 1961, for instance, Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin became the first man to orbit the Earth in a manned satellite. It turned out that he was bom in Gzhatsk, a town 155 miles northeast of Petrovichi, but also in the Smolensk district. I felt an absurd local pride over that, just as someone who had been born in Cincinnati might feel rather
pleased that the first man on the moon was born in Wapakoneta,
Ohio.
One more word about the physical location of Petrovichi. Since no one I have ever met has ever heard of Roslavl, Mogilyov, or Smolensk, locating it in that fashion doesn't help. The best I can do is to say that I was born in a town just 250 miles southwest of Moscow. Or-if Moscow were located in New York City, I would have been born in Fredericksburg, Virginia. There!
My Ancestors
The earliest ancestor concerning whom my father could talk was his great-great-grandfather, who, like my father, was named Judah. My father gives no dates, for the very good reason that he probably knew none. Assuming twenty-five years to a generation, this early Judah must have been born about a hundred years before my father or, roughly, in 1800. The United States was then an infant nation and White Russia had been firmly under Great Russian rule for only a generation.
I suppose that even if I went to the U.S.S.R., I could dig up no information about the early Judah, or of anyone earlier still. No records were kept in the ordinary sense, and if the Jewish community kept its own records, they would be in Hebrew, with the dates given according to the liturgical calendar. Even if I were to imagine that I could manage to have someone translate all this, I feel rather sure that the records were destroyed in the course of World War II.
Perhaps if I stuck to it long enough (as Alex Haley did in the heroic epic he describes in Roots) I could find astounding details concerning my family tree, but let me be honest: I don't care.
I am not impressed by ancestry, since if I could trace my origins to Judas Maccabeus or to King David, that would not add one inch to my stature, either physically, mentally or ethically. What's more, what about all my other ancestors? There must have been uncounted thousands of human beings in the century of King David, all of whom in some small way contributed to my production, and every one of them but King David might have been criminals and drunkards for all I know. (Nor was King David himself entirely remarkable for his ethical standards.)
It is even possible that my ancestry might not move in the direction of ancient Israel at all.
About a.d. 600, a Turkish tribe, the Khazars, lived in what is now southern Russia. They established an empire that reached its peak about a.d. 750, stretching from the Caspian Sea to the Carpathian Mountains east and west, and from the Black Sea to what is now the Moscow region north and south. About that time, the Khazars adopted
Judaism as the state religion, a most unusual state of affairs. It was the only time, I think, it has ever happened in European history, that any nation voluntarily adopted Judaism. Undoubtedly, it was a politically inspired move designed to keep the Khazars from falling under the influence of either the Byzantine Christians or the Arab Moslems, who were busily engaged in the first part of their centuries-long duel.
About 900, the Khazar Empire went into decline and it was finally destroyed by the incursions of new nomadic tribes, the Pechenegs, from the east, and by attacks of the Russians from the north. After 965, the Khazars were through as an organized power, but Judaism may have remained, and it may well be that many East European Jews are descended from Khazars and from those peoples they ruled rather than from the ancient people of Israel. And it may be that I am one of the Khazar-descended Jews.
Who knows? And who cares?
It may further be that if one goes rooting among one's ancestors and is not careful to pick out only those one wants to speak of, one can find oneself to be a thoroughgoing mongrel.
My mother looked like a typical Russian peasant woman. I've hardly ever seen a small Slavic woman of the lower classes who didn't remind me, more or less, of my mother. In fact, so much did my mother look Russian that, on occasion, when she would announce to some Russian official
that she was Jewish (she would have been in trouble if she had tried to deny it and was caught doing so), she had to produce her passport to prove it—though why anyone in Russia at that time should try to fake Jewishness passes my understanding. It would be like someone in the old South claiming to be a black when he wasn't.
My mother had blue eyes, and in her youth, light hair. Though my father was brown-eyed and brown-haired, there must have been a recessive blue-eyed gene there too, for my brother, my sister, and I all have blue eyes. My hair was brown, but both my brother and sister had reddish hair. My brother's daughter has bright red hair and blue eyes; my own daughter has blond hair and blue eyes. What's more, I've got high Slavic cheekbones.
Where did all this come from? Surely not from any Mediterranean people, or from any Turkish people either. It had to be of Slavic origin and Scandinavian beyond that—plus a bit of Mongol to account for my B-type blood.
And where did the Slavs, Scandinavians, and Mongols come into it? I'm sure that my father would have rigorously denied any Gentile
intrusion, either legal or illegal, into the family tree; at least he would have denied it after he regained the breath he had lost in the horror of hearing such a suggestion. So I never suggested it.
I'll just make do with what my father told me and make no attempt to go beyond that.
The early Judah, together with his family and his descendants (said my father), 'were dealers in rye that is planted in our part of Russia in the fall. The seeds are kept warm under a layer of deep snow in the winter, and this kind of rye is called azimy khleb." (In English I think this means "winter grain/')
Jews in those days were known, in biblical fashion, by patronymics —that is, as so-and-so, the son of so-and-so. I myself would be Isaac, son of Judah, according to this system or, in Hebrew (transliterated), I would be Yitzkhak ben-Yehudah.
This is an inefficient system of naming people unless you live in a small and stable tribe, and as governments and economies become more complex, something must be done that makes it easier to alphabetize and classify. Therefore, in one country after another, Jews were forced to accept last names Gentile fashion (as Gentiles once had to do, for names like Thomas Johnson betray an original patronymic system there, too).
In memory yet green : the autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954 Page 1
