In Memory of Memory

by Maria Stepanova

  “Most likely,” agreed Great-Grandmother Sarra, and turned away to view the next picture.

  *

  Pochinky’s main square is empty in this old picture. A cart is being pulled by two horses, a factory worker stands in a shop doorway where some bold chickens have gathered expectantly. It looks like a quiet backwater, a place at the far corner of the earth. The horse fair, when people gathered in the town, was a huge event and the town’s main source of entertainment. Pochinky was built of wood, it stood waist-deep in orchards and gardens. Everything was small in scale but designed to impress: the little local hills were respectfully referred to as “mountains”; a one-and-a-half-yard-long prehistoric tooth was once dredged out of the local river; the cathedral was tastefully built; and the town could boast a notary’s office and mutual savings association, part of a growing bureaucratic presence that also regulated army recruitment, drink, and tax collection. Abram Osipovich Ginzburg brought his sizable family up here, very far from the center of things, in the hinterlands.

  I found no traces of his life in this little town, which is now only a hamlet. A handful of memories of his son Solomon, Uncle Solya, who sold Singer sewing machines, the reluctant heir in the place of the cursed prodigal son, Iosif. Great-Great-Grandfather Abram, with his baobab tree of a beard, had sixteen children, garnered a good deal of wealth, saved Sarra from prison and exile, and died on June 22 in 1909. He has been forgotten by Pochinky.

  The merchants of the 1st Guild were not subject to corporal punishment. Among their other privileges was the permission to deal wholesale in Russian and foreign goods within Russia and abroad; to own shipping and to send their trading ships to foreign lands; to own factories and production plants, with the exception of distilleries and vineyards; to own shops, storage and cellars; to provide insurance; to carry out transfers of money and much else. There was one special provision for Jewish merchants: after 1857 membership of the 1st Guild meant the merchant’s whole family and even a servant were guaranteed permission to live in Russia outside of the Western Pale of Settlement in any town in the Russian Empire, including (with some conditions) the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Membership was an expensive matter: annual fees were never less than 500 rubles (one percent of declared capital over 50,000 rubles). The Jewish community in Nizhny Novgorod was still small at the end of the nineteenth century and in the tiny town of Pochinky Jews were downright exotic. Statistics compiled in 1881, four years before Sarra’s birth, show that in the whole district there were eleven people of the Jewish faith — I have a suspicion they all shared the surname Ginzburg.

  Great-Great-Grandfather didn’t live to see a time of mixed marriages and integration, when the children of the Priest Orfanov from the Cathedral of the Nativity of Christ would marry descendants of the Ginzburg family. His estate was divided equally between his children and Sarra’s inheritance was spent on her studies in Paris. She returned without a penny to her name, with “nothing more than a hatbox.” I close my eyes and I see her standing on the platform of the Brest Station in Moscow, holding her hatbox, a little independent woman who would walk alone all her life. If I screw up my eyes and really focus I can see the black Paris hat, with its long curling ostrich feather. The hat outlived its owner. It appears now and again in photos from my childhood.

  No matter how hard I concentrate, in my mind’s eye I can never see the texture and the sound of everyday life back then: tea in the Gethlings’ garden; her sister Vera clutching a book of Nadson’s poetry; the endless hours on the coach to Nizhny Novgorod; skirts damp with the dew and catching on the burdock; the little river; smoking a secret cigarette in the attic. Pochinky was home: where she came to rest, to cry her eyes out, to be fed up. Her little sister Rakhil once wrote in a letter that she’d just come back from the theater, they’d staged Ostrovsky, and then about forty people had come for dinner — but where did that happen? Surely not in child-size Pochinky, which never had a theater? Then again, it was the age of the amateur performance, home theater, Hamlet strutting the boards of the dacha terrace in black hose. The fine dust of the friendships and flirtations has settled for good, nothing can be made out now. All that is left is what Balzac calls the ruins of the bourgeoisie: “An ignoble detritus of pasteboard, plaster, and coloring.”

  In all this pasteboard detritus there is one other photograph I’ve loved since I was a child, although it makes a comic impression more than anything: the Ginzburg women are standing in a line, from the oldest to the youngest, one behind another, looking sidelong at the camera. In front are the powerful matriarchs with their wide behinds, heavy busts, helmets of hair, and the calm faces of heroines. Then, in order of decreasing magnitude, a series of ladies with a more ordinary appearance, in bustles and puffed sleeves, and at the end of the tail, erect, frowning, and dressed in a simple, dark dress, the almost fragile figure of Sarra behind her more majestic sisters. Lastly the miniature Rakhil, and she and Sarra radiate a misleading warmth: it feels to me as if I understand them better than the others.

  The medical report of Sarra’s childbirth, written up in 1916, offers a range of exhaustive detail — the process of acquiring information is almost unnaturally easy. Only I, in the whole world, now know that this was her first pregnancy, that she went into labor in the evening, that contractions lasted nineteen hours and forty minutes, that her tiny and still nameless baby girl weighed only 2,420 grams and was healthy the whole week they stayed in hospital.

  There is nothing more distancing than the documents of a dead person with their contradictions and lacunae, their dated habit of apparently meaning something. On the identity documents issued to Sarra Ginzburg in 1924, her birthplace is given as Saratov, but in later autobiographical writing it is Pochinky. There is no discrepancy in the dates — on both it is January 10, 1885 (January 22 in the new calendar). In her autobiography she calls her father a “minor” merchant, but her marriage certificate says he was in the 1st Guild. Perhaps these discrepancies are due to her fear that in a new Communist era it would be all too easy to find traces of her “inappropriate” bourgeois background in tiny Pochinky.

  She graduated from school at twenty-one, in 1906, and by 1907 she was in prison. She was in France from 1908 to 1914. She returned to Russia, took the state exams, which allowed her to practice medicine with her foreign diploma, and made the “Medical Faculty Promise,” with its delightful phrasing:

  I accept with the deepest gratitude the rights of a doctor, given to me by science, and understand all the importance of the duties placed upon me by this calling and I give my word that throughout my whole life I will never besmirch the honor of the association I am now joining. I promise to always help those who come to me in suffering, to the extent of my abilities, to keep sacred the family secrets entrusted to me, and not to abuse the trust placed in me.

  This is 1915, the year of her marriage. Her daughter Lyolya is born in 1916 in Saratov, the same year Sarra opens her medical practice.

  I have the bronze name plaque with its stout prerevolutionary lettering: ДОКТОРЪ С.А. ГИНЗБУРГЪ-ФРИДМАНЪ (Doctor S. A. Ginzburg-Fridman). It didn’t stay in place long: a year later there were spelling reforms and it became redundant. Then all normal life was turned upside down in the revolution. The plaque and a full box of unusable visiting cards were kept and brought to Moscow, like unfulfilled but unforgotten promises. So much back then was begun but never finished. In March 1917 Mikhael Fridman, Sarra’s husband, finally became a solicitor. It is hard to grasp just how much work that would have entailed. As well as an education in law, a solicitor in state practice had to go through an apprenticeship scheme and work for at least five years as a solicitor’s assistant, traveling many miles on state business, spending hours on the minutiae of regulatory law. The pages in Great-Grandfather’s passport, where they put stamps for any overnight stay in a place away from your registered home, are bright with the names of Russian towns.

 
This passport was issued by the Saratov Police Department (no expiry date, price 15 kopecks) on May 23, 1912. The owner is named: Mikhel Davidovich Fridman, the language of the document did not indulge any attempts at assimilation or the desire to be like everyone else. He was born on December 15, 1880, of medium height, Jewish faith. In the section about military service he is listed as having military training. He has black hair and no distinguishing features. A few pages later there is the registration of a marriage with the spinster Ginzburg by the “government” Rabbi, Arii Shulman, and later it is noted that “The Fridman couple have a daughter by the name of Olga.” Lower still on the same page, a note to the effect that the Board of Court Officials accepts him into their ranks. The next document referring to my great-grandfather’s affairs, in a similarly minimal style, is his death certificate.

  How large and intense and decorated their lives seem before events caught up with them. How very full they were of other events: of post-horses, telegrams, and plans opening out before them like a gift box. There’s a bright, clear period of about ten years from 1907 to 1917, but if you attempt to go back further than 1907, a torpid darkness falls and nothing can be made out. Misha’s father, David Yankelevich Fridman, was a doctor, or so my mother thought, but he appears nowhere in the Saratov or Nizhny archives. A David Fridman (tradesperson) appears once in a list of members of the Jewish community in Nizhny Novgorod, complied by the Rabbi Borukh Zakhoder in 1877. This Fridman is not significant enough to be counted as a full member of the community and is listed under: “Those who can’t be named either because they don’t give money for prayers, or because they are illiterate and not in trade, or because some of them are soldiers on leave who can be sent away from the town by the town administration, or those who are under age.” The unnamed David Yakovlevich could easily be the father of Mikhel. We are told nothing else about him. I have lots of photographs of David Fridman in his golden pince-nez, slowly aging and imperceptibly thinning about the face. The last picture, taken with a dog, is a studio shot from 1906, shortly before he died.

  He, too, like everyone else, had several children, scattering like berries across the roads of the new age: his sons Misha and Borya used to tell stories of their beloved nanny, who was round and quick to grumble, and they would tease by lifting her up on a high cupboard to quieten her. One of the many uncles married the young wet nurse, fascinated by her embonpoint and the blinding white of her uniform — women in this useful profession usually wore a smock robe decorated with rows of red beads. Then there were ferry trips along the Volga river, and a samovar heated with pine cones. Mikhel was not a particularly good student, but he passed the exams to become an apothecary’s apprentice. He had wanted to become a lawyer and in 1903 he resigned from the Association of Tradesmen “to gain a place in an institution of higher education and continue his education.” The document confirming his resignation is decorated with an official stamp: a pensive reindeer lifts its right leg as if it can’t quite decide whether to take a step forward.

  Mikhael Davidovich Fridman, who told his nephew to “live an interesting life,” died on November 11, 1923, of severe appendicitis in Botkin’s Hospital. His death certificate gives his profession as “employee.” In Sarra’s autobiography, which she wrote in the far too interesting year of 1938, she carefully avoids naming his legal work: her husband “worked as an economist in Central Mining Management.” He was only forty-three. Lyolya was barely seven. Just the year before they had moved to Moscow from Saratov, but there is no way of knowing when exactly, or why. At almost the same time, as if driven by some invisible gust of wind, another family moved to Moscow: the boy Lyonya, who will one day marry Lyolya, and his still young mother.

  *

  The ability to skip large chunks of time might be useful in the writing of novels, but it starts to frighten me when I realize I am doing it in life, and with real living people — that is, with dead people, of course, although there isn’t really any difference. Great-Grandmother Sarra’s youth, before Lyolya is born, feels like the beginning. Everything is ahead of her, anything could happen. After 1916 time begins folding itself up, tightening into the felt roll of collective fate. A hundred years later I began following in her footsteps, visiting her St. Petersburg addresses, buildings with rebuilt facades, missing apartments, and whole missing wings in poor areas of the city, lit by the setting sun and inhabited by flocks of Sunday soldiers. It always seemed that if I took just another turn to the right, then that would be enough, I could transform her life, restore it, make it fit to be seen again.

  In my own family history, I am interested more than anything in the period of ten to fifteen years after the revolution, when a way of life suddenly slowed, convulsed, and belly-flopped onto a new set of rails. These were the purblind years, the years when my great-grandparents died, or left the country or moved — that period of their lives is barely documented. They preferred not to keep diaries, and all the photographs that had been preserved are only partial, the tiny corners of a much larger picture, and something is going on in this unseen bigger picture that I don’t understand. Here’s a photograph of croquet at the log-built dacha; here are some hefty women doing exercises under banners with rhymes on; Sarra with her daughter Lyolya, who is looking sad and pinched, standing on a little hill by a stream, and by them some faces from the past, family whose names I don’t know. As her daughter grows up (school class group pictures, the little girls pressing themselves against their teacher; postcards from friends; the La Bayadère sheet music), the mother slowly fades out. She works in numerous medical institutions, there’s a tired love affair with a relative of her dead husband who owns a photo studio, postcards from her travels, pictures of holiday resorts where the gray sea rushes up to meet a gray skirt and then squirms back like a dog at a command.

  Sarra never disappeared altogether, and that was her great achievement. She sank into the comfortable life of a qualified medical professional, doing the rounds of sanatoriums and women’s clinics. Her daughter, too, was drawn into a constant purposeful activity. She had long decided to become a doctor like her mother, and the permanent bustle radiated a sprightly sense of inclusion, everyone working together. I can’t even attempt to guess what they thought about what was happening around them. There is no evidence, no basis for such guesswork. There are no preserved letters, and there never were any such letters, nor books from the home library (the usual Tolstoy, Chekhov “ex libris M. Fridman, Court Solicitor,” some early twentieth-century poetry) that might allow me to put together a collage of Soviet or anti-Soviet inclinations. When eighteen-year-old Lyolya decided to get married in 1934 her mother gave permission on the single condition that she first graduate from medical school. They could get married and they could live with Sarra, but they weren’t even allowed to think about having a family until Lyolya had her diploma in medicine. This white-hot near-religious belief in higher education was handed down through the generations and I remember it in my own childhood. We are Jews, I heard this at the age of seven. You cannot allow yourself the luxury of not having an education.

  Lyolya, pink-cheeked and responsible, complied obediently: according to the agreement, Lyonya and Lyolya’s child was to be born at the beginning of August 1941. But in early August they and Sarra were part of a convoy evacuated east, toward Siberia. The child sat tight in the womb, as if she understood this was not the time. After a few weeks of changing trains, dragging belongings, the fear of being left behind or being lost, they finally reached Yalutorovsk, the furthest point on the map of our family’s wanderings. This tiny town with its wooden duckboard pavements and blackened little buildings had barely ever changed, and even now is probably much the same. It had always been a place of Siberian exile: the Decembrists settled there in the 1820s after their failed uprising against the Tsar. My mother was born there on the third or fourth day after their arrival, on September 12, 1941. Her very earliest memories were of the neighbors chopping the head off their c
ockerel, and when the head fell on the grass the bird suddenly took to its wings and flew across the astounded yard.

  Yalutorovsk, in snow and in steam, with its milk production plants and nurseries, needed an experienced doctor, and it was one of Sarra’s finest moments (Oh, she’s a rock!) — she found her feet straightaway. In the general panic in Moscow in the first weeks of war no one knew what to do or where to go. Marina Tsvetaeva’s sixteen-year-old son Mur kept a terrifyingly detailed diary recording the daily changing shades of hope and despair: the hope it might be possible to sit it out, the fear of being buried in the rubble, the fear of flight, the fear of staying put, the endlessly torturous discussion of all the possible outcomes. It’s hard to believe now, but in the middle of July 1941 Tsvetaeva went off to a dacha with friends “to rest.” The dacha was outside Moscow, on the Kazan road, and the three middle-aged women and one lonely boy stayed out there, filling the time between lunch and dinner with discussion, waiting for news from town, like a scene from a Chekhov story. This sojourn turned out to be their last chance to catch breath. When mother and son briefly returned to Moscow they were caught up in the whirlpool of fleeing crowds trying to get on the last train or the last ferry, and they were the lucky ones. They left Moscow by themselves with no help from the Literary Fund, no money, almost no baggage, nothing that could be exchanged for food. We know how the story ends.

  Moscow wasn’t prepared for war or siege. In Spring 1941 a commission was set up to research the evacuation of Moscow’s population in case of war. They discussed possible ways to evacuate a million residents away from the front line. Stalin sent an angry riposte to their suggestions:

  I consider your suggestions on the “partial” evacuation of the population of Moscow in “a time of war” untimely. I want the commission for evacuation liquidated and all discussion of evacuation ceased. If and when it is necessary to prepare a plan for evacuation the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Council of People’s Commissars will inform you.