In Memory of Memory

by Maria Stepanova

  The other thing I noticed while reading the postcards, which danced back and forth between 1907 and 1908, was the warm, unquestioning sympathy the correspondence radiated. Alongside this warmth was the very thing an external world noted and attributed to us: the bonds of family, the inseparable clan, the continual care for every cell of the living organism, which drew into itself family, friends, relatives, acquaintances, the acquaintances of acquaintances. This was how Jews were represented in jokes and on cheap broadsheets — they knew their kind, they helped their own, they supported each other. There were a lot of them, and they kept to themselves. It’s hardly surprising when you realize the level of loneliness they felt, the wasteland surrounding them — these people who had taken a tentative step away from tradition were outsiders, with nothing and no one, apart from themselves.

  Where’s Katya? Fanya is in Naples; I haven’t got Vera’s address, but Fanya’s is below. Ida Shlyummer was asking after you. I’m sending Fanya’s address again. Did you see your family? They wanted to send a telegram. If you go to Lausanne please give my best wishes to the Vigdorchik sisters.

  What looks from outside like a comic scrabbling (soon to be captured in countless caricatures of Jews, like cockroaches, skittering away into nooks and crannies — fetch the insect powder!) is in fact the safety net of recognition and familiarity under the high wire. Even this becomes tiresome — not just for those looking on, but for the Jews themselves. The logic of assimilation, with its belief in progress and its basis in the sentiment that “not everyone will be taken into the future,” required of people that they admit (in their heart of hearts) that not all Jews are alike. So the enlightened residents of Vienna suffered terribly at the inpouring of their Eastern kin, with their mispronunciations, their inability to acclimatize to city life; so the secular inhabitants of Odessa took against the new Rabbi, brought from Lithuania, with his exalted ways and silly strictures.

  *

  Proust’s narrator observes with curiosity the eccentricities of his friend Bloch, a caricature of a Jew, armed with a host of carefully chosen mannerisms (like that other stereotypical character, the gay Baron de Charlus). One of his traits is a declarative anti-Semitism, loud and affected diatribes against the excessive numbers of Jews, quite literally everywhere, with their opinions and their noses!

  One day when we were sitting on the sands, Saint-Loup and I, we heard issuing from a canvas tent against which we were leaning a torrent of imprecation against the swarm of Israelites that infested Balbec. “You can’t go a yard without meeting them,” said the voice. “I am not in principle irremediably hostile to the Jewish nation, but here there is a plethora of them. You hear nothing but, ‘I thay, Apraham, I’ve chust theen Chacop.’ You would think you were in the Rue d’Abou-kir.” The man who thus inveighed against Israel emerged at last from the tent; we raised our eyes to behold this anti-Semite. It was my old friend Bloch.

  This episode has a tragicomic Russian counterpart — a quote from a letter by Boris Pasternak, written in 1926, “Everywhere you look, a mass of yids, and — this has to be heard — it’s almost as if they deliberately want to make themselves into caricatures, or they’re writing their own denunciations: they haven’t even a shadow of aesthetic feeling.”

  Unlike Proust himself, the narrator is not burdened by his Jewish or homosexual identity. He was created by the author in the role of an observer, a piece of clear glass, whose gaze would be unaffected by the shameful diseases of the century, one of which Proust considered to be assimilated Jewishness, not knowing himself what was harder to forgive: being different, or wishing to be like everyone else. In his opinion this wish was doomed to failure. In a later episode with Bloch there is an impromptu parade of “the unwelcome” across the Balbec beach, whose main failings are the peculiarities of their breed, which can’t be drowned out, or polished out of them:

  Always together, with no blend of any other element, when the cousins and uncles of Bloch or their coreligionists male or female repaired to the Casino, the ladies to dance, the gentlemen branching off toward the baccarat tables, they formed a solid troop, homogeneous within itself, and utterly dissimilar to the people who watched them go past and found them there again every year without ever exchanging a word or a sign with them, whether these were on the Cambremers’ list, or the presiding magistrate’s little group, professional or “business” people, or even simple corn dealers from Paris, whose daughters, handsome, proud, derisive and French as the statues at Rheims, would not care to mix with that horde of ill-bred tomboys, who carried their zeal for “seaside fashions” so far as to be always apparently on their way home from shrimping or out to dance the tango. As for the men, despite the brilliance of their dinner jackets and patent-leather shoes, the exaggeration of their type made one think of what people call the “intelligent research” of painters who, having to illustrate the Gospels or the Arabian Nights, consider the country in which the scenes are laid, and give to Saint Peter or to Ali-Baba the identical features of the heaviest “punter” at the Balbec tables.

  It isn’t altogether clear on first reading who would not care to mix with whom: the “solid troop” or those who watch them pass. Of course, people of the Orient, as E.T.A. Hofmann described them a century before, could certainly be ill-educated and ridiculous: this is often the preserve of those who have had to arm themselves against constant suffering and who mistrust sudden good fortune. Jewish children of the Belle Époque were the first or second generation to have a secular education; they were the product of a series of decisions, each of which drew them further out from under the protecting roof of tradition. Hundreds of new concepts, of shifts of behavior and changes to everyday ritual, entered their lives together with education, and all these needed to be invented from scratch, based on this novel object, culture, to which they now had a right. It is somewhat comparable to the early post-Soviet experience as I remember it twenty years later, now life has more or less straightened itself out: the new words have found homes, and what was once clumsy mimicry seems to have become the reality.

  In the 1900s the new language, spoken with an unaccustomed awkwardness, began on the beaches, in artistic salons, in rooms misted with cigarette smoke where young medical students gathered. The first attempts to talk about the world as if it now also belonged to them had a parodic quality. They were overly demonstrative, the outsider’s uneasy connoisseurship, trying to create the impression that “we Jews” have occupied such armchairs forever, that there is not a restaurant, a wagon-lit, a lift that could surprise us, that we have the right to admire ourselves in the plate glass mirrors of civilization. This is where Mandelstam’s famous “yearning for world culture” originates — it is nothing to do with the literary movement Acmeism, a short-lived Russian phenomenon. Mandelstam clutched to the memory of world culture as he did to the life buoy of friendship, but his longing for conversation as equals was more ancient and more pained.

  In Proust’s novel the young writer Bloch describes going to Venice to “sip iced drinks with the pretty ladies,” and he says of the resort hotel: “As I cannot endure to be kept waiting among all the false splendor of these great caravansaries, and the Hungarian band would make me ill, you must tell the ‘lighft-boy’ to make them shut up, and to let you know at once.” In a letter written in 1909, eighteen-year-old Mandelstam also makes colossal efforts to write in keeping with the European tone of his addressee, the poet Vyacheslav Ivanov:

  I have strange taste: I love flashes of electricity over the surface of Lake Geneva, respectful footmen, the silent flights of lifts, the marble entrance halls to hotels, and English girls playing Mozart to one or two listeners in a dimly lit salon. I love bourgeois, European comfort and I have a sentimental attachment to it, as well as a physical one. Perhaps my weak health is to blame for this? I never ask myself if it’s a good thing.

  This is a touching and convincing imitation of what will later be the theme of Nabokov’s openi
ng chapters in Speak, Memory: the comforting presence (and, later, the utter absence) of Swiss hotels, English collapsible tubs, and gleaming Pullman cars. Yet something almost imperceptible in the intonation gives the impression of a tiny gap between the author and his bourgeois comfort. Mandelstam’s family fell into rapid decline and this was his last visit abroad, and to Europe. He would remind himself of it all his life, up until the point when his memory is compressed into his late, great poems in the 1930s.

  In the year after the Revolution, in the St. Petersburg Writers’ House an evening of new poetry was announced. Somewhere in the Writers’ House there was a bust of the poet Nadson, who had died young. He had been incredibly famous at the end of the nineteenth century and was now all but forgotten, twenty years later. His friend, the elderly Maria Dmitrievna Vatson, said of the bust to Anna Akhmatova, “I want to get him out of there, because he might get hurt otherwise.”

  I am so scared of hurting these people, even more so because I feel it in myself, this sense of hurt, a blood link and a proximity with each of them, all those who hid their Jewishness like an embarrassing defect, or paraded it like a cockade in full view of everyone. Very soon even that choice became a fictitious one: whatever a Jew did — with his seed, his immortal soul, his corrupting flesh — he could not alter the contract drawn up with the external world, as the twentieth century demonstrated. Even the right to weakness (to treason and denial) would be withdrawn with the other rights, as even atheists and converts were drawn into the extermination camps.

  On April 20, 1933, Thomas Mann wrote in his diary: “I could have a certain amount of understanding for the rebellion against the Jewish element . . .” He was writing about the recently introduced law forbidding Jews to work for the Civil Service, the first of dozens of carefully planned restrictions intended to set into motion the engine of regression in the Jewish element, their thorough and meticulous distancing from civilization, and its capacity to make life bearable. Step by step their existence was reduced to the bare biological minimum. Among all the various prohibitions (visiting swimming pools, public parks, stations, concert halls, traveling around Germany, buying newspapers, meat, milk, tobacco, owning woolen goods or pets) there was one stipulation: after August 1938 every Jew whose name did not unambiguously indicate Jewish heritage had to add “Israel” or “Sarra” to his or her name: Maria Sarra Stepanova, for example.

  At the beginning of the 1950s my twelve-year-old mother walked to her old Moscow school one morning, with its wide parade staircase, the polished banister rails rising in caressing curves. From above, on the top landing, Vitya, my mother’s neighbor, hung over the rails and shouted down: “Gureeevich! What’s your grandmother’s name?” Both my mother and Vitya knew full well that grandmother was called Sarra Abramovna — just Sarra alone was putting the knife in, but Sarra Abramovna . . . It was a doubled roar, like two rampant lions, shamelessly unambiguous, SARRAABRAMOVNA! It stood out like a sore thumb: living with a name like that was really just hysterically silly.

  Not-A-Chapter

  Sarra Ginzburg, 1905–1915

  1.

  Aleksandr to Sarra Ginzburg in Pochinky, December 24, 1905

  Next to grandmother on the photograph we used to call “Babushka on the Barricades” there is a person whose face will appear from time to time in the archive. His full name isn’t ever given in the correspondence. Grandmother’s girlfriends mockingly called him Sancho Pancho, in reference to Don Quixote’s companion with his undying devotion.

  This postcard has a stormy seascape on the front by the painter Aivazovsky, a picture that graced the walls of Russian living rooms and community halls for decades: the soapy-green underside of the sea, a huge wave cresting over the shattered remains of a mast to which the drowning seafarers are clutching. A boat is sinking in the distance. Above the picture someone has added by hand: Greetings from Nizhny!

  Sara,

  You wrote and told us to send word of how things are and what we are up to. I think it would be better if you came to see us as soon as possible. You’d see what we are up to for yourself and you could also join in the heated political discussions we are having here. Haven’t you had enough of being fattened up by your family? I’m slightly annoyed that my throat doesn’t hurt any more, I’d like someone to look after me again.

  Aleksandr

  What were they arguing about with the Socialist Revolutionaries that December? And who was arguing? Judging by Great-Grandmother’s circle of acquaintances, Sancho, like her other friends, was close to the Bolsheviks, and it seems likely they were discussing the necessity of revolutionary terrorism. Just before that, after the October Manifesto in 1905, the Socialist Revolutionary Party announced its own Combat Organization. The Bolsheviks insisted that an increase in terrorism and expropriation was essential; the SRs felt differently. But the Bolsheviks pressed ahead without them and between Autumn 1905 and Autumn 1906, 3611 civil servants were assassinated.

  Sarra used to go home from school for the holidays to Pochinky, to her father and sisters “to be fattened up.” She was a student in Nizhny Novgorod, at the best gymnasium in the town, and her friends also studied there. This particular new friend made the classic mistake in writing her name: Sara, instead of Sarra. But it seems she did travel to see him and stood next to him on the Barricades, with her black eye and her absurd bonnet in disarray on the side of her head. The day Aleksandr sent her this postcard there was rioting at the Sormovsky Factory and the snowy streets were blocked with whatever came to hand — wooden boxes, office cabinets. The Governor of Nizhny had already sent an urgent message to the capital: “Dangerous situation in the town. There could be trouble tomorrow. We have no troops.” On December 29, the date on the Pochinky postmark, the protesters were already shooting from cannons.

  2.

  Platon to Sarra Ginzburg (in prison), February 9, 1907

  A barefoot harpist with burning eyes and a mane of black hair sits on a deserted and melancholy shoreline. A text reads: N. Zikhel, Solace in Music.

  Hallo, Comrade Sarra! I’m no musician and a very poor singer, but music and poetry have always brought me great consolation and delight. I know from “Little Sarra” that you sing and love poetry so I’m sending this postcard to you in your fortress. I like the execution of the picture and I like its subject. This embodiment of beauty speaks to the bruised soul, and perhaps it will find a place in yours. I do believe, despite everything, that you won’t be held for long, and although we hardly live in a time of fairy tales, there is still hope! The leftists and the opposition have sustained a victory in the Duma. This speaks of a victory over those dark forces and perhaps we won’t have to wait long for the “dawn of enchanting happiness.”

  Comrade, have faith — dawn will break

  A dawn of enchanting joy,”

  Russia will shake itself awake

  And on the broken pieces of tyranny

  Your names will be shaped!”

  Pushkin*

  Tyranny = suffering in the name of Russia’s new dawn. The future is bright, comrade!

  Be of joyful faith, and bear your part bravely.

  I shake your hand. Platon.

  Two years had passed. Sarra Ginzburg had been arrested for handing out illegal literature and she was in prison in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. “Little Sarra” must be Great-Grandmother’s lifelong close friend, Sarra Sverdlova, who was also the sister of the ruthless Communist Yakov Sverdlov.

  Platon was the party nickname for a rather brilliant man, Ivan Adolfovich Teodorovich, the son and grandson of Polish political rebels, a professional revolutionary, Lenin’s friend and advisor, and a member of the Central Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Ten years after this he became the first Soviet People’s Commissar for Manufacturing, and then almost immediately left the Soviet People’s Commissariat as a protest against War Communism. Thirty years later, on
September 20, 1937, he was shot, after being sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court.

  The Second State Duma had just been elected, the first had lasted a mere seventy-two days. The second unhappy attempt at Russian parliament lasted for thirty days longer before being disbanded. There genuinely were a lot of leftists in the parliament, making up more than a third. It’s a strange experience to read the lists of deputies from that Second Duma: they include a huge number of peasants (169), 35 laborers, and only 6 manufacturers, 20 priests, 38 teachers, and even a single poet, Eduard Treimanis-Zvargul, who lived in Riga and wrote in Latvian. Comrade Platon had also put himself up for election, but hadn’t been elected.

  3.

  Aleksandr to Sarra Ginzburg, August 12, 1907. Portrait of a Woman.