In Memory of Memory

by Maria Stepanova

  What Tolstoy doesn’t say is that the attraction of these testimonies, what makes their syntax so lively and the choice of words so exact, lies in their forcedness. They are not the product of free will — they result from pain. The Russian language of the accused and the tortured is the child of a terrible conjoining, quite literally torn from you by another’s hands. It’s without internal compulsion, it isn’t a drawing, but an imprint, the raw (as meat is raw) tracing of events. The words of the victim are without design, they have no interlocutor, and we can be sure that the victim never wanted them to be voiced. It is the most extreme example of what Rancière called the “monument” — a message that is entirely matched to its reason for being and has no desire for a long life, a listener, or even understanding. Speech is tied up, naked, in the last stages of pain and humiliation, on the brink of collapse.

  Like everything that is not intended for the inadvertent gaze, the words of an arrested person under interrogation, the words of an informant and of a witness, have a particular direct quality. We see the prohibited, that is, we see what we shouldn’t see under any circumstances, and it blows a shell hole in the mind, like Arlette Farge’s “tear in the fabric of time.” It happens outside the normal way of things, the usual framework, when the gaze settles on an object it wasn’t expecting.

  The language of document circulation and court proceeding is a revelation, but not because it lacks literature’s glossy veneer, the desire to “say it well.” It is perhaps more the case that this speech and its subject have no subjunctive mood. They have no past, they’ve already been torn from it; they have no future, you can’t see any future for them. Archival documents exist entirely in the present, and they see nothing more than themselves, their own process, their own result. This is life buttoned up wrongly; these are the ones who will never exist again, dragged out of the darkness into the sudden random light, and then deposited back into darkness.

  In Farge’s book about the poetics and the practice of archival work the light is dimmed, as if we are discussing the negotiation of catacombs. She continually describes the darkness and the difficulty of movement; she talks about the density of archives as one might talk about a rock in which we discern different scattered metals. As I read I imagine how the underground life of data congeals into one collective mass over the centuries, similar in form to the body of the earth itself — the thickening mass of millions of lives, freed of their past significance, lying side by side, without a hope of being recognized or seen for themselves.

  History, in contrast to the archive with its “overabundance of life,” has a narrow throat: it only has need of one or two examples, two or three enlarged details. The archive returns us to the single unit, the one-off nature of every unfamiliar event. But strange things happen — the general begins to stratify, to decompose into the constituent particles of individual existences; parts of the whole rise like bread dough; the rules pretend to be exceptions. The darkness of the past becomes a stationary screen, made of nearly transparent film that hangs before the eyes continuously, changing the proportions and the relationships between objects. Paul Celan, in his “Conversation in the Mountains,” speaks of this when he writes: “No sooner does an image go in than it catches a web, and right away there’s a thread spinning there, it spins itself around the image, a thread in the veil; spins around the image and spawns a child with it, half image and half veil.”

  *

  It was a July day. The heat was terrible, the city was filled to the brim with sticky warmth, and I was sitting in a small room in the Kherson State Archive reading the documents of the revolutionary committee. On one of the six tables, which looked more like school desks, was spread the blueprint of a factory of agricultural implements. The factory was enormous, and the blueprint barely fit across the table, with its sheds and outhouses, some of which hung down over the sides — I couldn’t inspect them properly. I had just finished reading the local sanitary health commission report, where I learned that in 1905 “the pink sago from Ioffe’s Stores was discovered to be colored with aniline and one and a half pounds were destroyed” and “in all the shops serving beer a jug of water is used to wash glasses. It is suggested that a tap and supply of water is used instead.” Alongside such hygiene measures were the orders issued to residents to clean and tidy their yards, privies, and dumps. Among the offenders the residents of Potemkin Street: Savuskan, Tikhonov, Spivak, Kotlyarsky, Falts-Fein, Gurevich. Whenever I stumble across my great-grandfather’s surname, especially in such unforeseen and even unfavorable associations, I feel the prick of sudden proximity, as if a pointed instrument had pierced a hole in the text of the report, and my eye had peered through and wandered the trash-filled yards in search of food.

  But there was nothing more for me in the yards and shops. The Kherson Revolutionary Committee file, swollen with typewritten and handwritten papers, orders, reports, and demands from that terrible civil war year of 1920 had nothing more for me either. There were no more Gurevichs on the lists of those who had made efforts on behalf of relatives, who had been left without housing or employment or who had asked for their requisitioned piano to be returned. I leafed through to the end, and then back to the beginning, I couldn’t stop reading. “I am applying for the advance payment of sixty (60) thousand rubles for the creation and establishment of the Kherson Criminal Investigation Unit, which has been trusted to me.” “I confirm that Citizen Pritzker is the father of Maria Pritzker, a bor’bist who escaped the persecution of the White Army. Citizen Pritzker was arrested and robbed, in place of his daughter. It is essential we provide support.” “Urgent information required as to who was given order to search and requisition property of the former bishop of Troitsky Monastery. This information needed for an urgent report to the Area Military Committee.”

  It looked as if no one had held these documents in their hands for seventy years — there were no names on the list of readers, the list of robbed bor’bists (the name for members of the left-wing Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary party) and former bishops was barely discernible against the stationary screen. Editorial staff at the closed local paper Our Land asked to be allowed to continue their work; Comrade Olshvang, dealer and repairer of typewriters, offered the Revolutionary Committee “typewriter ribbon, used, 800 rubles.”

  In some places what seemed like a choir was divided into individual voices, and the text expanded with the rising bubbles of literature. “The countless relocations of the Office of Management (four moves in a week) has left its nomadic imprint on staff and visitors to the Office. Everyone is rushing around, moving from office to office, and it’s a waste of energy,” wrote the Assistant Director of the Office, Comrade Fisak, who noted the importance of “girding our loins and finding a permanent location for the Office with enough (eleven) rooms.” And a St. Petersburg theater company, trying to move to the nearby town of Kakhovka, explained their desire to move because there were too many theaters in Kherson, the theater public had had enough, and the company had nothing to live on.

  It was as if I was traveling over the turbid dark waters of a lake in a flimsy little vessel, leaning down to the lip of the water, and the waxen rounds of heads were rising up from the depths to meet me. They increased in number, floating up like pelmeni do, bobbing at the edges of the pan of boiling water. I could hardly make out their faces, I had to pull those closest to me with a heavy boat hook, twisting them round, peering at them without recognizing them. Their lips moved, but they made no sound, and none of mine were among them. Almost no space was left in the boat, the hull was piled high with sacks of some nameless ballast. There was no end to this sequence, as there often isn’t in dreams, just the quiet unrelenting motion, the constant inescapable fact that you can never take anyone with you, or perhaps you can take this one, or this one. You can shine a torch into the blackness of a half-opened mouth and try to make out what he or she is saying, but to choose — is it possible to choose?

 
Perhaps there is no greater lie than the feeling that someone else’s prolonged daylight depends on you, their chance to flounder for a while longer on the surface, to appear briefly once more in the light before yielding to the complete and total darkness. All the same, I sat at the little plywood desk in the archive and wrote down someone else’s words, the captive tongue of our general history, as another might root around in the earth looking for last year’s rotten potatoes, trying not to change a single word.

  To the War Comisar of Kherson

  You comrade comisar sacked the head baker that saboter and theef and snak in the grass and White scowndrel. Also a specolater and a lot of others things besides but still living in the army house by the fotress and using the kindnes of the peepol and spiting in their faces. I says to you wot write does he have that eneme of the peepol and the sovietts. I a working man protest and ask you comrade comisar to chayse him out to a place where he deservs to be

  The same note is written in red pencil above this text, and typed in blue ink below: “By order of the War Committee: Forwarded for information.”

  PART TWO

  And you see only those who stand in the light

  While those in the darkness nobody can see.

  —Bertolt Brecht

  1. The Jewboy Hides From View

  My great-grandmother’s postcard correspondence (dozens of cards that had winged their way across the prewar borders of France, Germany, and Russia) has survived by some miracle, but its incompleteness intrigues me. The correspondents constantly refer to letters written and received and they are always promising to write more, in more detail. But none of these letters have survived, though doubtless they did once exist, and the explanation for this is almost too obvious: our continuing love affair with the visual. When, in my childhood, I leafed through the two stuffed postcard albums, I noted the skeleton embracing a marble-skinned girl, and the lights of Nice shining by night, but I never thought to turn the cards over, to where handwriting and postmarks jostled against each other — there was no need. The family knows everything about itself that needs to be known.

  I began reading the cards a century after they’d been written, and, as I read, events lined up obediently. It became slowly clearer who was answering whom, and in what order. Apart from the main topics of conversation and the very few details in passing, one thing struck me: in all this correspondence there was not one reference to Jewishness, however superficial. And beyond this absence (of festivals, rituals, anything connected with the observance of tradition), lay another: Yiddish, the language of exile and humiliation, was never spoken.

  There were flashes of Latin, the professional language of diagnosis and assessment, and tiny scatterings of French and German. But words from the language of home, words that could have served as little shared call signs or beacons of understanding, seemed to have been excluded from daily use, forbidden for conversation. Only once, when the discussion focused on family matters and summer examinations, my future great-grandfather suddenly reached for a phrase from this hidden register: «(«эс редцех а зай!»)» written just like that, with the double quote marks and the brackets, as if the phrase had been placed under the glass of a museum case. The meaning of the phrase “es redt zich azoi” is remarkable, literally “it is indeed so,” but the actual sense is the exact opposite: “it is supposed to be so, but I don’t believe a word of it.” What did hiding it in its punctuation mean? It seems obvious now: it was a form of distancing from the people who spoke “like that,” an attempt to define a common ground with a correspondent who lay outside the sphere of Jewishness, its general opinions, its intonations. That was how their childhood spoke: loudly, incorrectly, without brackets or quote marks. That — according to observers from outside — was how they were supposed to speak.

  In the 1930s the poet Osip Mandelstam read a description of himself in an emigrant poet’s memoirs. The author considered Mandelstam’s face so characteristic that he must remind even the old shopkeepers of their grandsons, “some little Yankel or Osip.” The same half-insulting, half-sentimental tone is heard in the late notes of another poet and critic, printed in a journal that had once published Mandelstam. These notes adroitly turn past events into little anecdotes, which is to say that they attempt to pass off the singular as typical. Among them is a description of the young Mandelstam visiting the journal’s editorial office with his mother, Flora Osipovna Verblovskaya, whom the author insultingly calls “mamasha” in the memoirs. Her speech is carefully stylized and even accented (and this was probably even clearer for the contemporary reader, more sensitive to the “deviant” in speech): the hilariously plain dealing appeal of the foreigner, “You tell me what to do with him. We’re in trade, the leather business. But all the boy can think about are his poems!”

  You could say that what is being sent up here is class, and not race, but it is Jewish identity (not poverty, nor a comic combination of insistence and uncertainty, and hardly even his poetry) that defines how Mandelstam is seen from the very outset in the literary circles of the early twentieth century. His identity was considered exotic then, to such an extent that it overshadowed everything else. Most of the documents relating to his first literary steps openly mention his “roots,” and the tone of these mentions is shocking today. Mandelstam first appears in Mikhail Kuzmin’s diaries without a name: “Zinaida’s little jewboy.” The writer Zinaida Gippius’s letter recommending the young poet to the influential Valery Bryusov had this to say: “A certain nervy young Jew, who was tied to his mother’s apron strings only two years ago, has come on tremendously recently and even writes a good line from time to time.” In the papers of the famous Bashnya literary salon in St. Petersburg, where attendance was meticulously recorded, especially of writers, Mandelstam is repeatedly called Mendelson. Because what difference does it really make?

  On October 18, 1911, the poet Andrei Bely wrote to Alexander Blok: “You mustn’t think I’ve become a chernosotenets [member of the ultranationalist and anti-Semitic ‘Black Hundreds’ movement]. But through both city noise and rural dreaminess I can hear louder and louder the future movement of race.” Blok was also listening to the underground rumblings: he was preoccupied with the relationship between Aryanism and Jewry, and the difference between yids (dirty, illiterate, incomprehensible) and the more acceptable Jews. Ten days later he wrote in his diary: “Had tea at Kvisisan this evening, Pyast, me, and Mandelstam (the eternal).” The shadow of the half-mentioned Eternal Jew stretches forward into the 1920s, when an offended fellow poet wrote an article in which Mandelstam is mentioned as a Jew (“hungry wanderer, Ahasverus”) and then given the epithet of “the Khlestakov of Russian poetry,” after Gogol’s comic impostor. As predictable as a menu: the mention of tribe and race as a starter, followed by the main course of personal slur. In Blok’s own words, from notes in his diary, written many years later, when he had more time for Mandelstam’s poetry: “You gradually get used to him, the jewboy hides from view and you can see the artist.”

  In order to get noticed, the “jewboy,” whoever he was, had to hide himself away: purge and recast himself, improve himself and destroy all traces of family, race, or tribe, or adherence to place. In 1904 Thomas Mann wrote approvingly about the family of his future wife: “One has no thought of Jewishness; in regard to these people, one senses only culture.”

  It was understood that belonging wholeheartedly to the world of culture meant rejecting your Jewishness. To insist on Jewishness seemed almost old-fashioned, “as if nations still existed after the fall of the Roman Empire, and it was possible to build a culture on the raw idea of nation” wrote Boris Pasternak. It’s worth noting that in all the general excitement about national heritage and folk arts and crafts, the flourishing of the Viennese movement in art and the Abramtsevo artists’ colony, the patterns and the firebirds, there is only one national identity left out of the party. At the turn of the century, enlightened, educated, secular Europea
n Jews felt no kinship with their relatives in the galut, with their accents, their chickens, their cozy inseparableness — and the cumbersome load of their religion. No lyric memoirs — for those who had the opportunity or the inclination to assimilate, everything that reminded them of the musk of Judaism was perceived as ugly atavism, the fish’s tail dragging the lucky survivor ashore. This lasted for decades: in Isaiah Berlin’s Personal Impressions, he describes a meeting with Pasternak in 1945: “He was unwilling to discuss the subject — he was not embarrassed by it, but he disliked it: he wished the Jews to assimilate, to disappear as a people. [ . . . ] If I mentioned Jews or Palestine, this, I observed, caused him visible distress.”

  The children of the turn of the century had three choices before them, and they all looked much the same. Revolution, assimilation and Zionism: there they were, like three allegorical figures spaced apart on the colonnade of a deserted building. Herzl’s dream of a Jewish state, conceived only a short while before, had not yet taken full shape. Yiddish or Hebrew? The choice of language was the subject of many heated discussions, and even back then Hebrew was the preferred choice: the language of denial of the current “self” (victim, exile, refugee) in favor of the ancient and original “self.” Assimilation, the voluntary immersion into the powerful river of another culture, happened gradually and naturally with a certain level of education and wealth. The archaic religiosity of parents faded before the eyes, and revolution (with its obligatory equality and brotherhood) was even more tempting because it knocked the barriers of nationality and social standing off the table with one sweep of the hand. On October 17, 1905, my great-grandmother joined street protests, arm-in-arm with half acquaintances and strangers, each of whom felt like a family member — and it felt natural because they had come together to build a new and better world, based on the stable foundations of reason and justice. This new sense of community had something in common with traveling: you suddenly found yourself a thousand miles from everything you knew and, as if floating on air, you felt yourself to be better than before, brighter, more beautiful, capable of greater depths of both good and evil. The leaflets she handed out in the town’s barracks talked of a reality very far from her own experiences in childhood and early womanhood, and so it was even more important to communicate their message to others. It was, even to her ears, a new message — those concepts had not existed in the language of her household.