Ester and Ruzya Page 18

  My grandmother, living as she did in the Soviet Union, remained oblivious to the debate about the role of the Judenrat: such a discussion was impossible in a country that repressed any discussion of concentration camps, domestic or foreign, contemporary or historical. From the stories told by the three women—Regina Wojskowska, Knazew, and Chaika Grossman—she imagined her own history of her father, and told us, proudly, that he was a civic leader, a member of the Judenrat who aided the resistance effort. Having lived in the United States, where the dichotomy between Jewish heroes and Jewish traitors has been established as historical fact, I heard my grandmother selectively editing out the Judenrat in favor of the resistance. Until I found Chaika Grossman’s book, that is.

  JANUARY 2000, TEL-AVIV

  “Your great-grandfather was not a collaborator!” a thin, very dark, and very animated woman is shouting at me at a café in central Tel-Aviv. Yellow and blue and aggressively fashionable, it is an odd place for a meeting for this sort of interview, but I gather that Sara Brenner, historian of record on the Bialystok ghetto, schedules all of her meetings here because the place is owned by her son and ex-husband. “Not even Chaika Grossman thought so anymore. I went to see her in the late eighties, and she told me that if she had her book to write over again, she would have done it differently. Jakub Goldberg was not a collaborator!” I know. My great-grandfather was a public official, a civic-minded man engaged in that most hopeless of pursuits, the inevitability and futility of which made me want to write this book: the search for a decent compromise.

  In Israel, I learn a few more details. That in February 1943, after the first confrontation between the resistance fighters and the Nazis during the second large-scale Nazi “action,” Judenrat leader Barasz stopped helping the underground; it is, of course, possible that so did Jakub Goldberg. I also learn that Barasz halted his aid because he believed the underground endangered the lives of the larger ghetto population, which he continued to hope to save almost until the end.

  In all, I learn that, while twenty-year-old Ester risked her own life and her mother’s to refuse collaborating with the Soviet secret police, her father played a role that caused Ester’s former comrades to brand him as a collaborator. While his daughter acted in his name, he probably acted in hers. He hoped to survive to see her and his wife again. She was willing to risk death because she believed Jakub was dead, killed by the NKVD, which was now trying to draft her. She was wrong: for most of her ordeal, her father was still alive; more than that, had the NKVD had time to sentence him and deport him to internal Russia, he might have lived through the war. Had she known, could she have used this as justification to sign on as an informant? Hardly. There is no such thing as a decent compromise.

  PART FIVE

  SECRETS

  1943–1953

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  AUGUST 1943

  1. Surname: Solodovnik. 2. Name: Ruzya. 3. Patronymic: Moshevna. 4. Date and place of birth: March 3, 1920, Pereslavl, Ukraine. 5. Ethnicity: Jewish. 6. Party affiliation: Komsomol member. 7. Family status: Widowed.

  This is who she is now. Two years ago, when she left Moscow, she was a history student, a girl in love.

  8. Education: Higher.

  Somehow amidst the madness of Ashkhabad heat and her husband going off to war and her baby being born she took care of some final coursework and secured her diploma. She also rejoined the Komsomol: wartime policies made it easy. All of that, like so much of the past couple of years, is not even a memory but a faint knowledge. So this is who she is now: a war widow, a single mother, a college graduate, a job applicant, very tired.

  9. Specialization: History teacher. 10. Foreign languages: German, English, French.

  It almost hurts her to write “history teacher” on this job application form. These are the words with which her diploma, she fears, has condemned her to a life of lying. Ruzya has not applied for a single job teaching history, and she is not applying for one now, but she is afraid that someone—she is not sure who—will tell her she must follow through on the choice she made as a teenager. She would rather do anything than teach history. She cannot tell quite how this happened, but as surely and incredibly as her tiny pea of a daughter has started to walk and say “mama,” Ruzya has acquired an understanding, and this understanding means that teaching history in a Soviet school is, always and inevitably, lying. What other options does she have? She can read fluently in three foreign languages, but surely no one is going to pay her for that. And she has to feed her baby, her pale little girl with the huge gray eyes and the black-black hair she inherited not from Samuil, her father, but from her grandfather Moshe. Which is why Ruzya is here, at the Head Directorate of Literature, or Glavlit, applying for a job. She has to be an adult now.

  Returning to Moscow was not in itself an adult decision: Samuil’s family, the Minkins, wanted to come back now that the front line seemed to be moving steadily westward, and she had simply gone along. In February the Germans were finally turned around at Stalingrad, and six months later, though there were still German troops on Soviet territory, no one seemed to fear any longer that Moscow could fall. Still, not a lot of people were in a hurry to go back to Moscow, but Batsheva and Lev wanted to leave the place where they had learned of their son’s death. Ruzya never considered the possibility of staying behind: they were her family now—she had a child with these people. It was not until they were on the train, surrounded for the first time in months by unfamiliar faces, that Ruzya realized she was going back to Moscow to begin the rest of her life—as a war widow, a single mother, an adult.

  She has done all the adult things since she got back to Moscow a couple of weeks ago. As soon as she more or less settled in with Samuil’s parents and sister in their two rooms in the communal apartment on the Garden Ring—it seemed to make sense, since her parents were still in the Urals and she was so used to living with the Minkins now—she started thinking about getting work. She had only the vaguest of ideas about how this might be done, so she pretended she was someone who knew how to look for work. That someone looked through her address book for names of people who she thought would have connections.

  She waited for a time when not too many people were around the apartment. The telephone sat in the vast entryway to what was once a rich man’s flat, on a tall table, tiny but sturdy enough to support the phone in all its black-metal technological heft. To use it, one had to sidle up to the table, perhaps step up on a little footstool placed there by one of the shorter women neighbors, and shout into the receiver for all the apartment to hear. So on an afternoon when all the men were out at work and all the women were out procuring food and anything else that may be procured, she called Asya, a school friend who had married a general many years her senior and—living as she does in the general’s luxurious, which is to say large and separate, apartment—fits Ruzya’s image of a person who may know important people with access to jobs. Asya works as a translator in the Ministry of the Armed Forces, and Ruzya has taught German to military interpreters—there might be a link, a lead. She shouted that she was Ruzya, that she was back, that her husband had been killed, that she had a child and was looking for work, that maybe she could use her knowledge of languages.

  The phone rang a few days later: Asya’s mother. She remembered Ruzya well. She might be able to help. Could Ruzya come to see her at her office, at Glavlit, the Head Directorate on Affairs of Literature and Publishing, on Zubovskaya Ploshad?

  Ruzya walked here today through a Moscow that frightens her, a city of buildings half destroyed and settled into this state like rotting teeth, of hungry children with screwdrivers sharpened into knives, of residents returning to find that their apartments have been squatted by others or repossessed by the city—a city that knows no end of misery and no compassion. She has to learn to match this city’s ways. She should think not about lying to children but about making more money than a schoolteacher can. Maybe then she can make her baby safe.

  Asya’s
mother is a sweetly bossy woman. She sat her down, asked her brusquely whether she knew “what we do here.” Ruzya mumbled something vague about safeguarding secrets. The older woman smiled and said, “That’s very important work, you know, censorship, especially in wartime.” Ruzya agreed.

  She took quick reading-comprehension tests in the three languages: a couple of paragraphs from a magazine article in each. Though speaking foreign languages has never been Ruzya’s strong suit—the lack of a musical ear has been a handicap—she has always been an unusually perceptive and sensitive reader, developing a feel for a language even before she had accumulated much vocabulary. She must have done well, because Asya’s mother has now handed her this application form.

  11. Names and addresses of living relatives.

  She lists her parents and the twins as living in evacuation in Sukhoy Log in the Urals. In fact her father has written that Boris, one of the twins, ran away nearly a year ago and is apparently serving on a warship in the Black Sea. He is fourteen, and she has such a hard time believing this has happened, and such a vague recollection of the details, that, for the purposes of the application, she puts him back with their parents. Yasha is still serving as a pilot, active duty, at the front. She hands the application form back to the woman, who gestures for Ruzya to keep sitting and leaves the room.

  Asya’s mother returns not ten minutes later. “They’ll be working with your application for a while more, but if everything checks out, as I’m sure it will, you should be reporting for work Monday at the main post office on Myasnitskaya. Your job title will be political editor.” She smiles a satisfied, congratulatory smile.

  MARCH 1944

  She did not know how alone she felt until her father called. They are back from the Urals. With all of her friends still either at the front or wherever they were evacuated, her father’s voice is the first sign that something might return from Ruzya’s life before the war. She has no patience for the bus or the tram, and so she walks, almost runs, now dragging the child behind her, now picking her up in her arms, back the way she ran two and a half years ago, the day the war began, up the ten-lane-wide Garden Ring, across Gorky Street, barely looking to see if cars are coming, and into the maze of little streets to their building, where her father is already looking up at the sidewalk through the little basement window. He embraces her—drapes his long arms along her back and hangs over her, then draws back and brushes her face with his hands.

  “Ruzen’ka, baby.” He pulls his eyes reluctantly from her to look at the child. “Yolochka,” he states, attaching the name to a little person he has never seen. “I’m your grandpa. Let’s go sit down.”

  They go inside, and she realizes that they must have been home for a couple of days—the apartment has been cleaned, the furniture moved, some of the stashed-away linens and vases and the clock pulled out of their swaddles in the wardrobe. So he waited until everyone was gone to have her all to himself. She will see the rest of the family later, and there will be joy and tension like there always is, but now he wanted there to be love only. Kissing her father on the head as he sits with her daughter in his lap, she inhales the tobacco smoke caught in his curly hair.

  “Well, tell me”—with a nod of the head he directs her to sit—“everything.”

  “Well, I’m living with the Minkins, but that you know.”

  He nods.

  “I’m working.”

  “Good. Where?”

  “At Glavlit.”

  “My good girl. What are you doing?”

  “I work in the department of incoming literature. I read in three languages, all the newspapers, magazines, books, that come in.” His smile is becoming tense. “Not private correspondence, just printed matter.”

  “And what do you do after you read it?”

  “I stamp it. I have three stamps: ‘cleared,’ ‘for internal use,’ and ‘not cleared.’ And sometimes I have to cross something out.”

  “Do you stamp many things ‘cleared’?” her father asks seriously.

  “No, well, very rarely, but not so much ‘not cleared,’ often ‘for internal use.’ ”

  “Ruzen’ka, this is very low work. You are the gendarme who shouts, ‘Stop him and never let go!’ ” There is no indignation in his voice, just sadness and, she thinks, surprise.

  “Yes. But we have to eat. And if I weren’t doing it, someone else would be. And I couldn’t teach school, Papa, I couldn’t teach history and look those children in the eye.”

  He smiles with only the corners of his mouth and turns to the child, who has been sitting quietly in his lap, frozen in something like shyness but studying Moshe’s large veined hands with deep fascination. “Yolochka. What a pretty round face you have. What big gray eyes. I hear you can talk. Will you talk to Grandpa?”

  Moshe never mentioned her job again. Ruzya knew she would never have to face his open disapproval or argue with him about why she had to keep the job. None of this made it any easier to remember, as she did constantly, his sad surprised look and the tender tones of his voice when he called her a gendarme.

  Ruzya and Ester returned to Moscow just as they had left it: at almost the same time, under similar circumstances—and still as strangers to each other. Ester also traveled with her husband’s parents: Boris himself had gone ahead to make arrangements for their travel. Evacuees were not yet allowed to travel back freely: railroads were still reserved primarily for military traffic, and in any case, travel in the Soviet Union was always heavily regulated. But the elder Gessens were fed up with life on the collective farm, and Arnold, Boris’s father, had never been the kind of man who was willing to let bureaucrats, laws, or even war stop him. Boris, who had found his love in Biysk and so was not as eager to leave, still complied with his father’s wishes and traveled to Moscow to bribe those who might issue travel permits for his parents, his sister, and his new wife. Being an injured war veteran, Boris was entitled to a travel permit. Getting one was a lengthy procedure, to which he had not bothered to submit in order to travel the short distance from the collective farm to see Ester in Biysk, but he did it now.

  Ester, left behind to wait for her permit to arrive from Moscow, was making preparations for her new life—she and Bella were trying, and failing, to scrape up enough money to guarantee Ester some measure of independence. Ester was full of apprehension, which proved well founded. Three months later, she broke the pact she and Bella had made—never to be separated again—and spent five days in a train compartment with the Gessens: it was understood now that Bella would go to Moscow as soon as travel restrictions eased up. Boris’s mother, Miriam, who had been raised to be a socialite but grew into the tired housewife of a dictatorial husband, was fascinating and kind company. Boris’s sister and father mostly made Ester uncomfortable, though neither of them said a bad word to her. In Moscow, she found Boris already settled in at the Gessens’ home—two adjacent rooms in a cramped communal apartment on Gorky Street—comfortable, confident, slightly impatient to take up his role as husband and head of household.

  That, of course, he was not. His father, sixty-three-year-old Arnold, a journalist, entrepreneur, and consummate survivor, was a domestic tyrant whom Boris faithfully imitated in situations the older man did not control. Arnold controlled the household finances—a fact he mentioned every time Ester, who did not have a ration card, put something in her mouth. Sick of watching his wife returning her piece of bread to the common plate, Boris declared his small family unit’s independence: they would be poor but proud. They could not move out, of course, but they could buy their own food and eat it when they pleased. Inside his little family, though, he demanded to be king, which meant, among other things, having his socks washed by his wife. His wife, taken genuinely by surprise by his expectations, retorted—regularly—that as long as he neglected to wash his feet, she would refuse to launder his socks.

  Not that Ester ever entertained the possibility of becoming Miriam to Boris’s Arnold, or of being a housewife at all.
Within three months of returning to Moscow she became a full-time student at the university, which was just resuming classes at the Moscow campus. After her first semester, one of her professors convinced Ester to transfer from Romance languages to the classics faculty—the most challenging and prestigious in the philology department. That meant, in essence, starting over, but Ester agreed. Just then she found out that she was, quite soon and quite suddenly, having a baby—my father, born December 25, 1944. She never even considered taking time off from her studies.

  FEBRUARY 1945

  The way Ester has been fretting all day, it is a good thing that Boris is not the jealous type. His only remark—that one might think she was expecting a lover, not her mother—was made by way of observation. She has to admit she is more excited now than she was a year and a half ago, when she was traveling from Biysk to join Boris in Moscow. Over the course of these eighteen months she has often thought that, had she known she would not see her mother for so long, she might have thought harder about going. Each time she has reminded herself that, by taking her out of Biysk and away from Major Gurov, Boris probably saved her life.