In memory yet green : the autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954

by Asimov, Isaac, 1920-1992

  Though it means nothing, Joseph Stalin was also born on December 21, but in 1879. My father, therefore, assuming his birthdate is correct, was born on the day Stalin turned seventeen.

  My father, it appears, was the apple of the eye of his grandfather Mendel. My father was a bright and precocious boy and, as he said, "I was so loved by him that he would, without giving it a moment's thought, have given his life for me or killed somebody for me."

  1 When my father came to the United States, the transliteration of his name dropped the final "h" in Judah. His official papers made him Tuda, and on numerous occasions he had to sign himself in that fashion. That aidn't seem to bother him, and in later years everyone called him Jack anyway.

  My father entered Hebrew school at the age of five. There were ten boys at school (no girls, of course), and my father remained there till he was sixteen. Afterward, he received advanced instruction in the Talmud from the rabbi. That was the extent of his formal education.

  My father, in his childhood, had a Gentile girl of about twelve or thirteen who took care of him. She had been in the house for four years, spoke Yiddish like a Jew, and even learned all the prayers in perfect Hebrew so she could supervise young Judah at his homework.

  Once when my father was eight, the young girl came to Hebrew school to bring him his lunch and found my father crying. She rushed back with the story, not to his father, Aaron, but to his grandfather, Mendel, figuring that she could count on old Granddad for the heavy artillery.

  Off rushed Mendel to school, convinced that the rabbi, having been displeased by some failure in scholarship on the part of young Judah, had thereupon struck him. This was a common action on the part of the rabbis, who, being instructed by the Bible not to spare the rod, never did.

  Once Mendel reached the school, he did not bother to find out the facts of the case. These he considered irrelevant. What counted was that the rabbi had struck his grandson and that the rabbi must therefore be dismembered. The only thing that saved the rabbi was my father's top-of-the-voice screaming that it hadn't been the rabbi; the rabbi had intervened to save him; it had been another boy, taller, older, and stronger, who had been annoyed that little Judah had known an answer he didn't know, and who had therefore thoughtfully chastened him with his fist in order to teach him respect.

  Slowly, Mendel understood, but he was not going to let the rabbi off easily. He explained to the rabbi very distinctly that if anyone struck young Judah while said young Judah was under his, the rabbi's care, the rabbi would be held responsible.

  Thinking about that story, it occurs to me that my father must have deserved the beating he got. My father doesn't say anything that would lead me to think that he thought so, but I remember my father when he was much older than eight, and he had the most offensive way of being right. Worse that that, he acted offensively right, even when he was wrong. It would never occur to him at any time in his life to save another person's face, or to let some small error go if it were unimportant.

  No, sir, however small someone's error might be, or even if the error were only imaginary and it was my father who was wrong, he would charge in immediately with all his troops, with all machine guns blazing, and with all his planes circling overhead.

  Following in my father's footsteps, of course, I was rather like that when I was young and you can bet that many people found it very difficult to be fond of me. However, I changed as I grew older (or, at least, I like to think I did).

  At another time, my father, being eleven by then, and having been scolded by his father, went straight to his grandfather and reported the incident. Whereupon Mendel came to Aaron and dressed him down without inquiring into the rights and wrongs of the case. My father found himself very embarrassed at this. He found he couldn't stand having his father scolded and he made up his mind never to carry tales to his grandfather again—and he never did.

  In 1916, Mendel (who, by then, must have been in his seventies) fell sick at a time when my father, then nineteen years old, was in Borisoglebsk on some business matter. It was 450 miles southeast of Pe-trovichi. He received a telegram to return immediately, but by the time he reached Petrovichi, his grandfather was dead.

  My father always schooled himself never to show emotion, but he wrote me of this more than fifty years after the event and, in his careful understatement, I can still hear his sorrow. He says, "I could not forgive them that they had not called me home sooner, but I was told that when he first became sick they hoped for a quick recovery, and then he went so rapidly that under no circumstance would I have been able to reach him while he was still alive—and in this way my beloved grandfather was taken from us, and I was not around to see him at his death."

  3

  As for my father's mother (my grandmother), my father says, "She came from a family in which her mother counted for more than her father. Her father was a very simple man but a very honest and pious one. My grandmother, his wife, lived to a great old age, passing, I believe, the hundred mark. She had eight children, three girls and five boys, with my mother the oldest."

  Nowhere, however, does my father tell me his mother's name. I learned it from another source. It was Anna Chaya.

  My father was one of six children who survived infancy, he being the oldest. I know of three younger sons, since he talked of them occasionally in my younger years. They were Ephraim, Samuel, and, the youngest, Abraham Ber. The youngest had something wrong with one of his legs apparently.

  My grandfather, Aaron, never raised his hand to any of his children, but only reasoned with them, according to my father. I can well

  believe this, for my father never raised his hand to his children that I could remember, but only reasoned with us. 2

  However, that didn't make life so entirely wonderful, because my mother, who was a terrible-tempered woman, did not follow the same philosophy my father did. She raised her hand to me any time she felt she needed a little exercise and then she reasoned with me, in addition, and at the top of her voice, for hours at a time.

  In doing so, she made use of an extensive Yiddish vocabulary of derogatory terms, which were colorful and expressive and, for the most part, incomprehensible to me. I must admit that I liked the sounds, which were full of Russian gutturals and sibilants, and I repeated some of them once in front of my father when I was annoyed.

  My father, terribly shocked (for he never used bad language), said, "Isaac, where did you hear such terrible words?"

  I said, "Mamma says it all the time."

  My father, doubly shocked, said, "Mamma never says any such words." I know he believed it, because he was such a terrible liar that he had long since given up trying to lie—yet when my mother used those words, my father must have heard them, for everyone for blocks around did.

  Anyway, at one time, my grandfather did strike my father, full in the face with his open hand, and at a time when my father was already a grown youth of eighteen. It's a long, complicated story, which ended with my grandfather Aaron and a fellow townsman with whom he was having a dispute, standing before the town rabbi, who was, of course, the Supreme Court of Petrovichi in his single person. My father was an observer.

  The rabbi's decision went against my grandfather, and my father, outraged, denounced the decision. Whereupon my grandfather struck him for being disrespectful to the rabbi, saying, "The decision is made and we must not question it."

  Fortunately, I never had the opportunity to commit this kind of lese-majeste, so that my father was never compelled to strike me on principle.

  My grandfather was, apparently, quite well-to-do by the standards of Petrovichi. He dealt in all kinds of grain, particularly buckwheat, owned a mill that was in constant operation, owned horses and cows, and passed for a rich man. When my father was still quite a young boy, not long after he started Hebrew school (at the age of five), he began to be given little jobs to do in connection with the family business.

  2 For my part, a moderately hard blow would have been preferable to s
ome of the reasoning I got, because it would have been over much more quickly.

  It was only natural. He would someday inherit the business, and the earlier he began to leam its ins and outs, the more proficient he would be and the easier his life would be.

  It seemed normal to my father, then, that when I was a little boy, I be put to work in what was then our new family business. However, it was not something I planned to inherit, and I never really threw myself into it wholeheartedly.

  4

  My mother, whom I have already mentioned, was named Anna Rachel, and her maiden name was Berman. She was born (officially, but give or take a little) on September 5, 1895, and she was roughly a year older than my father.

  She was a small woman, about four feet, ten inches in height. My father was five feet, nine inches in height—average height, you see, though when I was young, I thought he was a tall man, and when the time came that I discovered he was not six feet tall, I was rather crushed.

  The children of the family did not particularly outdo these hereditary starting points. I grew to be just my father's height, five feet nine inches, and my brother is perhaps half an inch shorter. My sister is five feet even.

  My mother's father, my maternal grandfather, was, according to my father, "a great scholar in Talmud, even among the many great scholars that our home town had. Petrovichi was known through the whole area surrounding our town for its great scholars, but even so, your mother's father was spoken of with great reverence. It was enough for someone in a scholastic agrument over a certain point of doctrine to mention that your mother's father explained it this way or that—and that would end the argument at once."

  My mother's father was Isaac Berman, and I was named for him.

  Isaac Berman was married twice. By his first marriage, he had a number of children of whom my father named only three: David, Mor-decai, and Joseph. Mordecai died young.

  Joseph was the first member of either my father's or mother's family to go to the United States. I do not know in what year exactly he came to the United States, but it must have been before World War I.

  When Isaac Berman's first wife died, he married a second time to a woman named Tamara, and it was she who was my mother's mother.

  My father said about her, "She was like any other Jewish woman of that time. She was not educated, because Jewish education was for

  men, but she was very smart. In town, if they wanted to speak of some woman's cleverness, they would say, 'She's another Tamara.'"

  Isaac Berman had, by his second wife, Tamara, four children in his old age. The first was a girl, my mother, Anna Rachel, and then three sons. Isaac Berman died in 1901, when my mother was six years old.

  Apparently my father did not want to mention things he considered disgraceful, but from another source I learned that he was divorced before he died. "Your grandmother Tamara," I was told, "had divorced him because he didn't want to give up his learning and to occupy himself with the trivialities of her business." 3

  After Isaac Berman's divorce and death, it fell upon my mother to help with the business and to act as surrogate mother for her three younger brothers. Tamara married again, too (no one stayed unmarried in the shtetls) and had another set of children so that my mother had two sets of half siblings, one by her father's first wife and the other by her mother's second husband, as well as full siblings of her own.

  My mother's stepfather owned what we would call a general store, and my mother, together with a younger half sister, along with a Gentile girl employee, eventually ran the store. According to my father's admiring account, my mother did so with great efficiency and intelligence, with a smile for everyone, and a quick wit, so that she was beloved by all—at least so my father says, but he was always very prejudiced on my mother's behalf.

  But that was my mother's fate in life. Coming to the United States meant for her only a shift in counters. For nearly all her life, her world was bounded by customers and merchandise and by profits made up of accumulating pennies.

  5

  However things might have been for Jews in other parts of Russia, things apparently went reasonably well in Petrovichi—at least according to my father's gold-misted memories of a half century later. He said, "When I think of Petrovichi, I recall the inhabitants to have been always happy. I can't say that we had very rich people there, but among the more wealthy ones were my father and my mother-in-law. We never experienced pogroms, or anything like that."

  It's not surprising that, under those conditions, my father failed to be terribly anti-Russian after he came to the United States.

  3 That strikes home, because I know quite well that I wouldn't want to give up my learning in order to occupy myself with the trivialities of any business. Fortunately, my learning turned out to be profitable as Isaac Berman's did not, so I was nevei in a position of having to leave it to a resentful wife to support the family.

  It was even possible for Jew and Gentile to be friendly. My father said, ''In the Gentile part of the town there was a boy who became very friendly with me and who was a couple of years older. In Petrovichi, there was a Church school where they taught religion and where the children were taught to sign their names and read a little. My Gentile friend used to come to me for help with his reading."

  My mother and father were bom on the same block in Petrovichi but on different corners. My father went to Hebrew school with my mothers younger brothers, and when he came to play with them after school, he said, "I noticed that the brothers had a sister. I was very young when I started to like to talk to her, but she used to dress up and go away with girlfriends, giving me the impression that she didn't care for me."

  My mother, being a year older, undoubtedly felt annoyed at the hobbledehoyish attentions of this kid who hung about with her baby brothers. If my father was, as a youngster, what he was as an adult, he could not possibly have been a suave wooer. I visualize him as dogging my mother's footsteps to the point where she couldn't turn suddenly without falling over him. She married him in June 1918 and may well have done so as the only way of getting rid of him.

  Once, I remember, my sister said to my mother, "Mamma, did you have a lot of boyfriends when you were young?"

  My mother cast a ruminative eye backward into her life and said, "Let's see now. Maybe five, maybe six—and I married your father, so you can imagine what the rest were like."

  As far as I know, however, my father, who fell in love with my mother at puberty, if not before, never wavered. He did not, in the time I knew him, ever look at another woman, say a flirtatious word, make an off-color remark, or in any way indicate that sex, in even its mildest form, existed for him—except, of course, in connection with my mother, since he did, somehow (but I presume in the usual fashion), have three children by her. 4

  As for my mother, she was an earthy creature. Whereas the thought of "fooling around" is inconceivable in connection with my father, I would readily believe it of my mother, if she had been given a chance—but, of course, circumstance saw to it that she never was.

  I wouldn't dream of telling an off-color joke to my father. (He refused to laugh at any jokes at all, in fact, considering them foolish and

  4 There is no question that those children were his; the family resemblance is too strong to admit of any doubt. To this day, if I unexpectedly come across a full-length mirror in a dim light, my heart jumps because I think I am looking at my father. My brother resembles my father even more closely than I do, and I can trace some of my father's lineaments even in the face of my beautiful daughter.

  undignified.) I would tell them freely to my mother and she would laugh her head off.

  In any case, they remained a devoted couple throughout their entire marriage, though when I say "devoted" I merely mean inseparable. They were certainly not cooing lovebirds. I rarely heard either one utter an affectionate expression to the other. And a kiss or a squeeze in public? Never!

  World War I, somehow, didn't seem to affect my parents. My father
was not taken into the Army, which is puzzling. Since he was nearly eighteen when the war broke out, strong, and in good health, I don't see how he escaped. My father never said a word about it, and I never felt like asking him. It is possible that money changed hands and that his family bought immunity for him. I don't know this; it's just a guess on my part.

  My mother used to travel to Vitebsk, about 120 miles northwest of Petrovichi, in order to buy merchandise for the store. Why Vitebsk, when Smolensk was closer, I don't know. During the war, this grew increasingly dangerous as soldiers became more common along the route and as defeat after defeat drove the government ever closer to disorganization and revolution.

  On March 16, 1917, the Tsar abdicated, and Alexander Kerensky established a socialist government. It was attacked from both sides. Kerensky tried to continue the Russian role in the war, but elements among the army officers and aristocrats wanted the Tsar back, while the Bolsheviks under Lenin wanted an end to the war and the immediate communization of the nation.

  In September 1917, General Lavr Kornilov decided to take the Russian capital, now called Petrograd (the Russian version of the German, St. Petersburg), and restore the Tsar. Kornilov ordered an army northward from the front, but the soldiers wanted to go home, so that his army disintegrated and the effort failed.

  At just about this time, however, my mother went to Vitebsk on one of her periodic journeys, and when she returned to the train station, there was Kornilov and his army. My mother, being a small woman, with a girlish air and a quick, conversational wit, could usually manage to talk herself out of any fix by enlisting the co-operation of the men about her.

  She managed to find that not all trains had been commandeered by Kornilov but that one train was actually going to Roslavl. Somehow

  she managed to have all the stock she had bought transferred from the train she was going to take to the train that would actually move, and she reached Roslavl with herself and her merchandise intact. My father "happened to be that day in Roslavl" with his horse and wagon, and he got her home.