by Masha Gessen
My grandmother Ester does not remember their first meeting and the beginnings of their friendship at all. It is as though it had always been there, or had at least always been meant to be. I can say with some certainty that, beginning the winter following their meeting, they spent their weekends cross-country skiing together, telling each other their lives. Some of these skiing excursions grew to include husbands and boyfriends and children and friends. By then Ester and Ruzya had filled each other in on all the essential milestones and had grown to assume each other’s presence in their lives, as they have for more than half a century.
Of course, they have proceeded to argue continuously, just as they did that first evening. They are different as women, as Jews, and as citizens. They argue about topics both know intimately, like books read and reread, and topics they have barely encountered, like feminism. During my first visit to Moscow in March 1991, when I was reporting on the Soviet Union’s fledgling women’s movement, I stayed at my grandmother Ester’s apartment. I conducted most of my interviews there as well: the city had virtually no public places where people could meet, and most of my subjects lived in cramped settings that precluded entertaining a foreign journalist, which I was at the time. My grandmother Ruzya happened to be visiting when a young graduate student came to tell me about her discovery of feminism. The grandmothers elicited the briefest of summaries from her over tea, then turned to each other.
“I find all this misguided,” declared Ruzya. “It is clear that men and women have different talents and proclivities—for example, men are more gifted in mathematics and exact sciences.”
“What are you saying!” Ester exclaimed, as each of them generally does when one of them says something the other finds outrageous to the point of absurdity. “Women have simply systematically been kept out of certain fields.”
The graduate student stared. “And you’ve never even read any feminist theory?” she half asked, with the awed condescension of youth toward age.
“Young lady,” Ester responded. “In my seventy years on this Earth I have taken some time to think.” And with that she turned back to her friend.
Perhaps it is the constant difference of opinion on everything that keeps them interested in each other: even after all these years, they cannot predict each other’s reaction to anything. Each listens for the other’s opinion so she can argue her dissent. And they laugh at each other’s familiar ways. Ruzya giggles over regular instances of Ester’s tactlessness: she can ask people about estranged spouses or make disparaging comments about current ones, and this is generally the least of it. Ester snickers at examples of Ruzya’s shy indecisiveness and never fails to be surprised by Ruzya’s reluctance to make a simple phone call to a literary agent or to take on a job she fears may exceed her expertise. And they wonder at each other’s strengths—Ester’s eternal fearlessness, Ruzya’s boundless energy (like when, at the age of eighty-one, Ruzya undertakes and carries out an apartment move all by herself).
They feel so different in their lives that I have been tempted to write the story of their relationship as tragic, with the attraction so strong and the meeting point never found. But that would be as absurd as looking for tragedy in the love of two sisters who preserved the closest of bonds for their entire lives. Consider the evidence. If I am looking for one of them, I can call the other—and I will be told she has gone to have an ultrasound and will probably be back by two in the afternoon. They trust each other completely, which is to say, with their lives.
JUNE 1951
Ester feels distinctly guilty. Not that she should. In her marriage to Boris, there have been more years when she suggested a divorce than years when she did not. Her suggestions were gentle at first, then ever more firm. He holds fast to his “no.” They both know this is the end of the discussion, because they have one room in a communal apartment, indivisible, and she has a son and a mother and no place else to take them. And she should not feel guilty, because she knows in her heart as well as in her mind that she did her best while Boris did not. Even his mother, who has put up with her own domestic despot for over thirty years, looks on with sympathy. Still, Ester feels guilty—perhaps because she knows that her own good faith was not inspired by love while Boris’s petty tyranny was somehow tied to powerful emotion. Or, perhaps, she feels guilty simply because what she is about to do, though undertaken daily by married women the world over, is not a done thing. She, for one, has never done this before.
The source of her guilt is one Alexander G, he of the non-Slavic surname but Slavic roots. He is reasonably tall, fairly handsome, and has been entirely focused on her ever since she arrived at this resort two weeks ago. He is married, as is she, but the rules of resort romances allow their liaison to proceed quickly and unambiguously, unhampered even by her nagging feelings of guilt.
In a fortnight they have exchanged personal histories, including information about their spouses and children: etiquette dictates that these sorts of affairs initially masquerade as friendships, making deceit or even discretion unnecessary. She has told him about Sasha and about Boris, and about how they met after he was released from the hospital, with that yellow ribbon on his chest and half a jaw missing. Alexander is a college instructor. He has a son, seven—Sasha’s age—and he was not in the military during the war. “I never tried to avoid the service,” he tells her. “I did not hide, but I did not try to get there either. And it worked out that I didn’t go to war: I got an exemption.” This strikes Ester as odd, if not necessarily false: she does not know any men her age who did not fight.
Tonight is the night. Tonight there is hardly any talking, because they dance. They move closer and closer in the dance, with that jittery excitement that comes despite mutual knowledge of what will happen next. They leave the dance hall hand in hand and kiss on the porch. Then they walk down a tree-lined alley slowly, deliberately, in a tiny final tribute to discretion. He carries her flat black purse. They talk. Ester steers the conversation toward “the Jewish question.” Though she has no doubt that Alexander is aware of her ethnic origins, she feels compelled to test his attitude one more time before she does something she might regret much more than simply betraying her husband—sleep with an anti-Semite. She has no reason to believe that Alexander is anti-Semitic, but in this age every non-Jew is suspect. She mentions that she had difficulty finding work after college—an uncharacteristic understatement—because she is Jewish.
“Well,” Alexander says in a tone that strikes her as smugly gentle. “I am no anti-Semite, but you must admit that Jews are not a particularly reliable group in a time like this. I mean, I am no anti-Semite, but if there were another war, surely your son would hide out while mine would serve.”
She stops dead to face him and removes her purse from his hand. “That must be because during the war that we did have, you hid out while my husband became a cripple.” She moves her purse from her right hand to her left and with a closed fist hits him, striking, quite by coincidence, the exact spot that is missing in Boris’s face. Then she turns around and walks away.
She can hear Alexander spitting behind her. It may be curses or it may be teeth, for all she knows and cares. Her hand hurts that much.
We—my brother, my father, whoever else might hear one of these stories of my grandmother Ester’s—are invariably awed. Sometimes these incidents showcase her fearlessness—like when, at the age of seventy, she sought confrontation with a deranged megaphone-equipped anti-Semite in a Moscow street. But this is not what awes us. It is the immediacy of her reaction, the true absence of the tempering anti-Semite inside. People who grew up in the Soviet Union are not like that; we have a tiny nagging need to hide our Jewishness or apologize for it, or at least apologize for not hiding it. My grandmother Ruzya has always, with alarming regularity, lost companionship over anti-Semitism, but not because of the immediacy of her reactions—because of the very opposite. After pushing the perennial topic off as long as she could because it pains her cosmopolitan heart
to discuss it, but also because she wishes, just a little bit but for as long as she can remember, that she were not Jewish, she will finally discover an acquaintance’s views on Jews and realize that they are unacceptable. My grandmother Ester could never lose a friend over the Jewish Question because for her it is an integral part of testing someone’s intellectual and human credentials before forming a friendship—even if, as in the case of Alexander G, the exacting nature of this test might cost her a much-needed distraction.
So she returned to Boris still, in essence, a faithful wife. She had no need of sympathy: she was unhappy as a wife but perfectly content as a person. By that point she had a job she liked, a child she loved, and friends whom she trusted. Her house was always full of people: they lived on Gorky Street, in the very center of the city, a place virtually everyone passed through several times a week, walking past her building, able to look up and see if there was a light on in the apartment on the fourth floor—and this in a time when few people had phones, so calling to arrange a visit was rarely an option. She no longer thought of her life as difficult. Her mother was home and could always watch the child, her friends were interesting, and so were the many events around town, and Ester felt she was living life to the fullest—in no small part because of the nagging suspicion that all this would end soon, when she and Boris and Bella and little Sasha and all their friends would be loaded into cattle cars again.
CHAPTER TWENTY
JANUARY 19, 1953
For nearly a week now, Ruzya has been translating Harrison Salisbury’s New York Times articles in their uncensored entirety for her morning reports, and for a week now she has been feeling nauseated. She loves translating Salisbury: he is a good and intelligent writer, and his writing makes her a better translator. But the chill in his words becomes hers. Salisbury, who has been here for four years, knows the best way of getting his copy cleared quickly is by reporting only what has appeared in the Soviet press—but the way he chooses his quotes makes them sound even more ominous, if that is possible. Three years ago, for example, she killed an article of his that was virtually a direct translation of an Izvestia item, dated January 13, 1950, announcing the reestablishment of the death penalty (which had been nominally abolished in 1947), for “traitors, spies and subversives.” Salisbury was the only foreign correspondent who realized, and made transparent in his retelling, that this was a clear warning of more show trials to come.
Six days ago, on January 13, the Soviet press announced the arrests of nine Jewish doctors who have ostensibly confessed to poisoning Central Committee members Andrei Zhdanov and Aleksandr Shcherbakov in 1948. Ruzya knows that many other Jewish doctors in the city have been arrested over the last couple of years, but the way the papers are covering the latest nine makes it clear that this is the final act of the drama that began with Mikhoels’s murder five years ago. This clearly is going to be a grand-scale show trial. The newspapers are detailing the doctors’ alleged crimes and printing endless letters from the public demanding punishment for the Jews. The public, fed a steady diet of anti-Semitic propaganda for the last five years, has truly been whipped into a frenzy. If a show trial commences, which it clearly will, all Jews will be in danger. There is talk, in Jewish circles, of having to ask to be saved—perhaps to be evacuated, as people were during the war.
The day before yesterday, Ruzya was awed by Salisbury’s masterly composition: she had translated and called in an entire passage that had made her shiver, but it was cleared by Stalin’s secretariat. Reporting on the media’s continuing coverage of the arrests, Salisbury had written:
The alleged connection of the arrested doctors with Zionists was not emphasized. It has not been found necessary to say anything in the press about the religious origin of some of what the press calls “fiends in human form.”
What might be considered an indirect reply to the chorus voiced abroad that the Soviet charges have an anti-Semitic as well as an anti-Zionist basis was published in the leading editorial of Pravda today. Its subject was cultural exchange with other countries. In one of the first paragraphs, however, Pravda denounced what it called “zoological racism of the Hitlerites.” Pravda charged that reactionary forces in the world today were seeking to use the “Fascist idea of zoological racism” to trample upon the national achievements of peoples.
In contrast, Pravda pictured the Soviet Union as a land where the greatest respect was shown to its own people and those abroad. Pravda said the Soviet Union paid special consideration to the cultural achievements of all peoples, in contrast to “man-hating” capitalists.
Ruzya had assumed that at least the speculative opening lines of the second paragraph and the however in the following sentence would be deleted—but no, apparently this publicity for the Pravda editorial was appreciated at the top. Today Salisbury reached all the way to Ukrainian Pravda to make his point with quotes. Which Ruzya will dutifully dictate to the typist, who is just now entering the room with that smile on her face that has been there for a week and that makes Ruzya want to run away.
“ ‘Speaking of the perpetrators of these crimes,’ ” Ruzya dictates, tensing her facial muscles in preparation for a passage that she must now recite without flinching, “ ‘the newspaper said that the “profound hatred of the people is aroused by all these Kahns and Yaroshetskys, Greensteins, Pers, Kaplans and Polyakovs.” ’ ”
“I’m going to tell you a joke,” the typist announces in a tone that will entertain no objection. “A phone call: ‘May I speak to Rabinovich?’—‘He’s not home.’—‘Is he at work?’—‘No.’—‘Is he on a business trip?’—‘No.’—‘Did I understand you correctly?’—‘So, yes.’ ” The typist’s laugh does not invite participation. Fortunately, Ruzya has already heard the joke, which has been making the rounds for a couple of years in far more convincing renditions of a Yiddish accent than the typist was just able to produce. In fact, the typist’s effort was merely a weak imitation of Ruzya’s own stereotypically flawed r. Before she can stop herself, Ruzya scans the next paragraph for r’s, which are, of course, plentiful, then clears her throat and resumes the dictation.
“ ‘Ukrainian Pravda declared that a loss to the state in’—open quote—“millions of dollars”—close quote—‘had occurred through the depredations of these criminal gangs.’ ”
“So, I hear you are all going to be deported,” says the typist suddenly. Her tone suggests a statement so obvious it needs no context.
Ruzya stares at the typist’s back, at the brown knit cardigan and the ponytail slung over it. She tries very, very hard to focus on the ponytail, because what she sees in front of her eyes is the image, brown like the typist’s hair but so much sharper, from the nightmare she has been having for many days: she is in a cattle car, holding Yolochka, who keeps begging for a drink of water. But Ruzya has no water. As the typist turns, seemingly surprised by the pause in the dictation, her face comes into focus and Ruzya manages to dictate the next sentence, about popular demand for the death penalty for the “fiends.”
The deportation talk that pervaded Moscow in the early months of 1953 could hardly be called idle rumor, so numerous were the precedents. Starting in 1944, six different ethnic groups had been packed in their entirety into cattle cars and moved to remote areas of the Soviet Union, ostensibly for their disloyalty: the Chechens, the Ingush, the Kabardines, and the Karachayevs from the Northern Caucusus; the Tartars from the Crimea; and the ethnic Germans from the banks of the Volga. Naturally, if Jews were now found to be a nation of criminals carrying out murders on behalf of a worldwide Zionist conspiracy with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee at its center and the murdered Mikhoels as its main agent, they would also be deported. The deportation, everyone assumed, would follow the show trial of the doctors.
Meanwhile, the “ugly scenes” continued, with increasing frequency and on an expanding scale. On January 17, Konstantin Omelchenko, the cultured head of Glavlit, was reproached by the Central Committee for not going far en
ough in writing his directive on removing books by the newfound enemies of the state from libraries: the way his order was written, apparently, only medical texts by the accused doctors and theater-related works by Mikhoels, as well as a book that portrayed some of the doctors as war heroes, would have been removed—when the order should have covered all books written by or containing any mention of the “fiends.”
In March, leaders of the Writers’ Union wrote a letter to the Central Committee entitled “On Measures Undertaken by the Secretariat of the Writers’ Union to Unburden the Writers’ Organization of Useless Ballast.” The letter identified one hundred and fifty writers—one in seven Moscow section members—to be dumped. The letter was signed by Writers’ Union chairman Aleksandr Fadeyev and his two deputies, Aleksey Surkov and Konstantin Simonov. At least two of the men—Fadeyev and Simonov—were married to Jewish women. Fadeyev would commit suicide in 1956 in what the Russian literary world has consistently interpreted as an act of atonement. The other two survived with their reputations intact: the fact that they signed the letter was not generally known. Various members of my own family lived in the same apartment complex as the Simonovs for years; there were social connections and even a romantic entanglement, and all of us perceived the association as a proud one.
Of all the wretched letters written during the early months of 1953, one that was not published for over forty years held the greatest significance. In February, an ostracized historian and a journalist made the rounds of Moscow’s few remaining prominent Jews, pressuring them to sign an open letter decrying the rise of anti-Semitism in response to the “Doctors’ Plot” and asking Stalin to move the Jews to Siberia for their own protection. The letter, which was slated for publication in Pravda, would have launched the deportation process. Something—perhaps the writer Ilya Ehrenburg’s refusal to sign—held up the publication for a week or two, by which time Stalin had died and the “anti-cosmopolitan” machine abruptly stopped. The process halted, but no Russian Jew emerged from what one writer called “the shameful years” both alive and uncompromised. As a prominent poet is said to have remarked about Ehrenburg, “He was cowardly; whoever was not, was killed.”
