I, myself, would undoubtedly have gone to school there and have done well. I would surely have managed to obtain a university education and would have tried my hand at writing. I have no doubt that in the end I would have proved able to turn out publishable material. I might well have ended as a science-fiction writer in the U.S.S.R.
However, in June 1941, the Nazis would have invaded the Soviet Union. I would have been twenty-one at the time and I imagine the chances would have been enormously good that I would have joined the Army, either as a volunteer or as a draftee. And the chances would also have been good that I would have died in the early months of the war or, what was worse, been taken prisoner, and have died slowly rather than quickly.
That it didn't come to that was the result of circumstance, and there was nothing terribly dramatic about it. 1
The key was Joseph Berman, my mother's older half brother, the son of Isaac Berman by his first wife. He was living in Brooklyn, New York, and in 1922, he remembered his little sister in Russia. I daresay he read of the disturbances in Russia and imagined our plight to be far worse than it was.
He therefore sent a letter to the Petrovichi rabbi to ask if his sister,
1 1 am sometimes asked to give the details of how we left the Soviet Union, and I get the distinct feeling that the questioners will be satisfied with nothing less than having my mother jumping from ice floe to ice floe across the Dnieper River with myself in her arms and the entire Red Army hot on our heels—but it just didn't happen.
or any of her family were still alive. The letter was given to my mother, who answered, and there soon followed another letter from Joseph Ber-man inviting us all to come to the United States.
Uncle Joe (as I came to know him in later years) was reasonably well off and could easily demonstrate to the American Government that he could guarantee that his sister and her family would not become charges upon the public. That, and permission from the U.S.S.R., was all my parents needed to get into the United States, for entry through the Golden Door was still fairly unrestricted.
When my mother received the letter from Uncle Joe, there was a family council, and the decision was that it might be well to go. It would mean leaving the home in which they had been happy all their lives, going to a strange land, with strange ways, and a strange language. They would, however, have Uncle Joe to cushion the shock and they were not immune to the general notion among Europeans in those days that in the United States everyone became rich.
Then, too, they might not have the chance again, for the invitation might not be repeated. My parents decided to go.
The problem was to get permission from the Soviet Government. That was not easy to do. Aside from the fact that the Soviets had inherited the bumbling tradition of the Tsarist bureaucracy, and had added a few refinements of their own, to want to leave the new paradise of the workingman was a rather insulting commentary on its value. The mere wish to leave had an anti-Soviet flavor to it, and the Soviet Government at that time (and at this time, too) did not feel secure enough to accept such wishes casually.
Fortunately, there was my father's childhood friend, whose homework my father had done for him, and who was now a high functionary over the entire region. (What happened to him, I wonder, since then? My father didn't mention his name and I'll never know.)
My father's friend had his headquarters at Klimovichi, forty miles southwest of Petrovichi. There went my father, in order to obtain a formal letter to the functionary next higher up. The letter would have to say that my parents wanted to go to the United States of America to join their brother and that in his view there was no objection to this and that he would appreciate any help, within the law, that the higher-up could give him.
This was, in itself, a not entirely unrisky thing to do, yet my father's friend gave him the letter and let him read it before it was sealed,
and thus proved his friendship in a very real way. That childhood help in schoolwork certainly paid off.
Off went my father to Gomel, 120 miles southwest of Petrovichi, to run the gauntlet of the next higher-up.
"I came there in the evening," said my father. "He and his wife were just sitting down to their supper. They invited me to have supper with them, but I politely excused myself and accepted only a cup of tea. After their meal, which took much longer than I thought I would be able to endure, I handed him my friend's letter. He read the letter long enough to send me out of my mind and what I felt at the time I don't think I could describe. Then he pocketed the letter and told me to see him at 9:30 a.m. at his office.
"At 9:30 a.m. I was at the door of his office and was taken into him at once. He said, Tou need for your petition a federal stamp costing six rubles, which you can get at the post office/
"I turned to leave and he stopped me. 'Where are you going?'
" To the post office for the stamp/ I replied.
" But how will you leave? Everyone is permitted entrance, but no one is permitted exit.'"
My father then said, "If I did not die right there, I hope to live a little longer, but I did not show how scared I was, or at least I thought I didn't. I asked in a calm voice, 'Then how can I get the required stamp?'
"He picked up a piece of paper with a number printed on it and said, 'Now go. The soldier will permit you to leave.'"
Apparently the official was just having a little pleasant fun with my father. What is the use of being a great, important official if one can't indulge in a little genteel sadism? This is not a particularly Russian characteristic. I have encountered this sort of thing among the insect authorities of the American bureaucracy also.
The next step was to get to Moscow, and here there was trouble, for my father was running low on cash. He said, "Usually, my credit was good with anybody who knew me, but once the word was out that I was going to go to Moscow for a passport to the United States, even my best friends would not risk their rubles."
I'm sure that not one of them thought my father would go abroad without paying his debts. They must have thought that my father would be imprisoned or executed and that in that case the authorities might not be thoughtful enough to give him time to pay his debts first. So my father sent a telegram to my mother, who instantly wired him the money. My father said, "Mamma was my true friend "
It took my father nearly a week to get the passports, during which
time he stayed with a friend (and his friend's brother) who had "one room with one bed with no heat, no wood or coal to be gotten, and the temperature way below zero." (That was zero on the Centigrade scale, so it may have been +10, let us say, on the Fahrenheit scale.) "I slept on the floor, covered only with my coat and without taking off my clothes for almost the week that it took me to get the passports."
He added, "All there was to eat was black bread and herring—we could not even get onions for it."
While in Moscow, he changed thirty rubles in gold for a quantity of paper money—more than the official exchange value—and even as he walked away, the police arrived to search for black-market dealers. He said, "I walked on very quickly."
He was also intrigued by a smart city fellow who tried to sell a large diamond to another city fellow for ten thousand rubles. The second fellow went home to get the money and the first one turned to my father and said, "I'm in a hurry. Here, you can have it for nine thousand rubles and when that man comes, he will pay you ten thousand."
My father, who till now had taken everything as an honest business transaction, said, "Now it dawned on me the diamond was plain glass," and he walked away very quickly again. The big city is a dangerous place for country bumpkins.
3
But he got the passports and I have them with me right now. They are dated December 13, 1922, and are bilingual. On the left-hand side of each page the information is given in Russian, and on the right-hand side in French, the language of international diplomacy.
My father's name is given as Azimy on the French side and it adds, "avec ses enfants: Ayzik de 3 ans
et Mania de 6 mots" ("with his children: Isaac, aged 3 years, and Mania, aged 6 months"). My mother had her own passport.
The passports had, of course, photographs of my father and mother respectively, looking incredibly young and pretty. My father had had hair. In fact, a picture of him, taken at the age of eighteen, shows him not only with hair, but also with copious, tightly waved hair. Unbelievable!
He began to go bald in his late twenties, and my mother began to go gray. By their thirties, my father had only a dark fringe of hair around a shining pate, and my mother was white-haired.
Both were inherited characteristics, and the baldness, in particular, seemed to strike all the male Asimovs, as far as I know. I took it for granted all through my youth, therefore, that I would turn either bald or white or, most likely, both, by the time I was thirty-five at the latest. It didn't happen. I wasted a lot of regret-in-advance over nothing.
4
Once he got the passports, my father then rushed back to Pe-trovichi, sold everything we had, and, on December 24, 1922, I began the first, the most arduous, and the most important journey of my life.
The first stop was Moscow again, in order to visit the offices of the White Star Line and arrange for passage. By the time we reached the town of Pochinok, halfway to Smolensk, at a time when "the frost was very severe," poor little Marcia was coughing and was obviously very sick. The only available room was unheated and it took all my mother's blandishments "and a few rubles" to have a fire made up. There was no doctor, of course, for the only one in town was celebrating Christmas somewhere out of town.
In the morning, Marcia seemed a little better, so we made it to Smolensk. We went to the inn where my father usually stayed when he was in Smolensk and asked for a doctor. The innkeeper, fearing contagion, at once ordered us out of the inn. My father pleaded for the chance to see a doctor first, and the doctor, when he arrived, assured the innkeeper that it was not a contagious disease. (How can a condition that involves coughing not be contagious? I wonder if a few more rubles changed hands.)
By nighttime, however, Marcia began to choke, and it seemed clear she might not survive the night. My father went to the other side of the town to a pediatrician and leaned on the bell till a woman answered. The doctor, alas, was at a meeting of the Smolensk Soviet and it would be impossible to disturb him. My father, however, wept and pleaded with her and in the end she found she could not steel her heart to it all and went for the doctor.
The doctor came to the inn, reached it at 1 :oo a.m. and prescribed medicines and treatment. He then refused all payment and asked only that my father pay the driver of the horse and buggy that had brought him.
After a week in Smolensk, during which time Marcia recovered with marvelous celerity, we set out again and reached Moscow. This was my first and only time in Moscow—at the age of three. My dra-
matic mother tells me she went about with me carefully buttoned up inside her coat to keep me from freezing solid since the temperature dropped to —40. Where she kept Marcia, I don't know.
The officers of the White Star Line sent my father to the Latvian consulate to get a visa, since he would have to take the ship at Riga, (Riga had been a Russian port before World War I, but was now the capital of the independent nation of Latvia.)
This was done, and finally, on January 11, 1923, we crossed the boundary of the Soviet Union and entered Latvia. From that day to this, none of the four who departed returned to the U.S.S.R., 2 and we have never again seen our home town.
5
Once the Asimov family was in Latvia, it quickly turned out that our troubles were not yet over. The original plan was to take a ship from Riga and to travel through the Baltic and North seas to France, from which a transoceanic liner could be taken to the United States.
On the day, however, that we entered Latvia, the French Army occupied the Ruhr in Germany. Expecting all kinds of troubles and disorders, France temporarily closed its borders and we had to be rerouted. We had to move on to Danzig, then a "free city," and take a small ship to Liverpool, England.
The ship was smaller, less comfortable, and rocked a great deal more than the planned ship from Riga would have. In the stormy winter seas, my father, whose first voyage by ship this was, went out like a light. For the duration of the voyage, he remained helplessly seasick, and my mother had to take care of him and of the two children.
When we arrived at Liverpool, it turned out that some necessary papers that would make a visa to the United States possible had, of course, been delivered to Cherbourg in France, where the original ship had been slated to go. Fortunately, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in Liverpool, learning of the rerouting, had sent for the papers for all the immigrants affected and they had arrived only the day before.
That meant the four of us could now board the good ship Baltic for the trip to the United States.
That wasn't a good trip, either. There was an enormous storm; my father said, "It started while we were on the ocean and the ship was bending from side to side. We had a trunk in the cabin with us and it was sliding from one wall to the other with a big bang. I walked out on
2 Oddly enough, it was just as we left the country that the U.S.S.R. formally came into existence—on January 1, 1923.
the deck and when I looked on one side I thought the ship was reaching for the sky, and when I looked on the other, it seemed to me that we were heading down into the sea."
My father apparently had his sealegs, though, as a result of the Baltic passage, and he survived it. It was my mother's turn to be seasick, and my father had to take care of the children. Fortunately, Uncle Joe had sent a small sum of money that had reached us, with the papers, in Liverpool, and my father at once found how different life was outside Russia. In Russia, to get a favor or a little consideration, rubles had to change hands. On the ship, it was altogether different— dollars had to change hands.
My father had one clear memory of biting into a biscuit someone had handed him and finding it contained a dead insect of some sort. Since my father's passion for cleanliness was little short of a disease, 3 he rushed indignantly "to the only steward that spoke in Yiddish and showed him the biscuit with the dead fly inside. He asked me to see it. I gave it to him. He didn't even look at it, just threw it in the garbage pail, then turned to me and said, 'What is it you are telling me?' I thought that I could tell him a lot but it was better to keep quiet so I turned around and walked away."
I have one vague memory that may be part of the trip to the United States. I recall a sheet being let down from a height and a motion picture shown on it—with people crowding about it. It was the first motion picture I remember seeing and I remember nothing about it, but I think the event took place on the Baltic,
On February 3, 1923, the Baltic docked in New York, and the day after, we all disembarked. My mother was twenty-seven years old, my father twenty-six; I was three.
My father, with myself in his arms, came down to Ellis Island and, after a while, noticed that my mother, with Marcia in her arms, had disappeared. He said, "They brought me with you in my arms into a large room where the noise was impossible. Some swarthy fellows were jumping one over the other and fighting—but it turned out later they were Italians and that was a game they were playing."
It was after that had distracted his attention that he realized that my mother and Marcia were gone. He rushed about, inquiring after
3 He once refused to eat any part of a bread I had placed on the steps, even though I pointed out that it was thickly wrapped in wax paper. "Heat can get through, so germs can get through" he said, and no amount of my scientific explanations of the essential difference between forms of energy and material objects would sway him.
them, and it was only after some time that he discovered the sexes had been separated as a matter of course and that no one had bothered telling him this.
As for me, I increased the general joy of the situation by choosing Ellis Island as the place to have measles.
> It was not till February 7 that the family was reunited. When my father finally caught sight of my mother and Marcia again, Uncle Joe was with them. My father was not allowed to speak to them, though, until he was asked by an immigration official what he intended to do in the country. My father said that he would take any honest work that was necessary to support his family; that nothing would be too hard for him. It turned out that that, more or less, was the answer they wanted.
Uncle Joe told him later that he had sent a letter with full instructions as to what to expect in Ellis Island, and how to answer the various questions, but if the letter was sent, it arrived in Petrovichi after we had left.
It didn't matter. We made it. And just in time, too. The year 1923 was the last year in which immigration into the United States was relatively unrestricted. On May 26, 1924, fifteen months after we had entered, a new quota law was passed that restricted immigration to a certain percentage of the numbers arriving from given nations in 1890. That was just before the flood of immigration from southern and eastern Europe began and it was deliberately intended to cut off that flood and favor the entry of the more easily assimilable immigrants from northwestern Europe.
Had my parents remained irresolute as to Uncle Joe's invitation, and had they allowed a year and a quarter to pass before deciding to leave for the United States, the decision would have done us no good. We would never have gotten in.
Van Siclen Avenue
Now we were in the United States. We settled down in New York City's borough of Brooklyn, where I was to spend my formative years, and to this day I speak with a pronounced Brooklyn accent that nobody can fail to recognize.
In memory yet green : the autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954 Page 5
