Ester and Ruzya Read online

  People rarely choose change when other options are available. By the mid to late thirties, Polish Jews no longer saw an alternative. Their decisions stemmed from despair, and their main hope was to survive. Contrary to the often-cited view of Jews politely and naively accepting their doom in Europe, the truth in Poland, at any rate, was that Jews had lost their illusions. Moderate Jewish political parties were edged out by the radicals: on the one hand the Bund, which wooed supporters with its increasingly forceful rhetoric of resistance, and on the other hand radicalized Zionist parties, which supplanted Jakub’s once-popular party, the General Zionists. Where the old Zionists devised extensive educational, cultural, and propaganda programs aimed at encouraging the Jews of the Diaspora to become interested in someday making their home in the place known to them as Erez Israel (and to the rest of the world as British-ruled Palestine), the new organizations were dedicated to transporting the maximum number of people there in the shortest possible period of time—no easy task, considering the increasingly heavy restrictions placed on immigration by the British authorities. Arab-Jewish tensions in Palestine by the end of the 1930s verged on war. Following the Arab revolt of 1936, the number of Jews allowed to enter the country dwindled every year.

  Not that there was any other place to go—even for those who were willing to risk leaving one country only to encounter anti-Semitism elsewhere. The most popular destination for émigrés of the pre–World War I period, the United States, had suspended its hospitality. With anti-Semitism there on the rise, as it always is in times of hardship, America issued a total of just thirty-three thousand visas to European Jews in the five years following Hitler’s ascent to power in Germany in 1933. Neighboring Soviet Russia was, for the new generation, a terra incognita: the mainstream papers reported on the famine and then the purges and show trials there, while the leftist press wrote of equal opportunities for all classes, religious and ethnic groups—but all of them may as well have been writing about a different planet and not about a country that literally could be reached by foot: the border had been sealed for over fifteen years, so Russia was not so much a neighboring country as the end of the world. That left dreams of Erez Israel.

  Thanks largely to the efforts of the “pioneering Zionist” parties, as they were known, a sort of Jewish autonomy was increasingly taking shape in Erez Israel, whose Jewish population reached about six hundred thousand by 1940. In Eastern Europe, meanwhile, the struggle focused on the distribution of immigration certificates: the quota was set by the British, but the coveted papers were handed out by the World Zionist Organization, which made its decisions in accordance with a convoluted set of criteria aimed at maintaining a semblance of political stability in both Erez Israel and the Diaspora. As a ranking member of the General Zionists, Jakub could have claimed a certificate whenever he chose. But Bella’s younger sister Helena, an agronomist, had gone to Erez Israel and returned to Warsaw disappointed: she had not found work. And who would hire a Polish-language teacher in Palestine? Jakub and Bella had decided to wait until Ester finished high school. Staying in Poland past that point was not an option—not unless they wanted their only daughter to claim a spot on the ghetto bench. Ester’s organization, Ha-Shomer ha-Zair (Hebrew for “Young Guard”), was one of the “pioneering Zionist” groups with a distinctly socialist political orientation. Jakub cringed at the leftist rhetoric but supported his daughter’s activities in the interests of the greater good: Zionism. Bella, who had resigned herself to her family’s Zionist path, could at least rejoice in her daughter’s choice of leftist politics. The group was a kind of heavily ideologized training camp for making aliyah—emigrating to Palestine. Shomrim, as its members were known, most of them middle-school and high-school students, were assigned to units of about twenty people each. After graduation these children of Jewish teachers, merchants, and factory workers lived together in their small communes, learning the skills necessary to work the Holy Land, where, once their immigration certificates finally arrived, they would go on to found kibbutzes.

  Ester herself, coming as she did from a relatively well-to-do family, assumed she would go to university rather than join a commune—a proposition that required money both in Poland, where she attended the private Hebrew gymnasium, and in Erez Israel. Still, the life of the Ha-Shomer ha-Zair, with its uniforms, its songs, its heroics, and its dreams, was supremely, overwhelmingly, consummately appealing. The uniforms? They were vaguely military in style, with neckerchiefs—the more or less generic uniform of scouts and “young guards” everywhere, with the ideological advantage of erasing class distinctions in dress and the practical advantage of making shopping trips and tailor visits with Bella superfluous. The songs? There was the one in Hebrew that said that “the Jordan River has two banks, this one is ours, and that one is ours too.” It was the anthem of a different, more militant Zionist organization, but it sounded good, so they sang it anyway. The heroics? One had to be willing to live for the organization and carry out its orders, no matter how difficult. The organization could, for example, choose to separate couples: that happened to an older girl Ester knew, Chaika Grossman, whose fiancé was dispatched to build the future in Erez Israel while she stayed behind to organize—for a total of twelve years, as it turned out. And the dream? It was a perfect dream, of a land unseen and a life barely imagined.

  Life, in other words, was elsewhere. The universal theme of teenage existence—the present as prologue—was magnified manifold by both the wretchedness of life as it was and the hurdles and uncertainties on the way to the imagined future.

  The dreams were all the more powerful for Ester because she had someone with whom to dream them. The star of Bialystok’s Shomrim was a boy named Isaj Drogoczinski. He came from an unconscionably poor family—he had had to stop schooling after seventh grade to go work at a leather factory—and he was fiercely articulate. By the age of sixteen he had become the group’s main ideologue; as Ester would later find out, he was also the author of most of the unsigned editorials in Unzer Lebn (“Our Life”), the leading Yiddish-language daily in Bialystok. He and Ester had become a couple when she was fourteen and he fifteen, sometime during the year following the summer of her unlucky Brok affair, and from that point on their future was never in doubt: “There was never a question in our minds that we would marry. He was, naturally, also planning to go to Palestine.”

  Jakub and Bella were less than thrilled with Ester’s early and firm choice of a match from such a poor, uneducated family, but they resigned themselves to the fact about a year into the relationship. That spring the leather factory where Isaj worked burned down, and the boy, luckier than some of the workers, ended up in the hospital with horrible burns all over his body. He was hospitalized for about two months, and Ester spent her days by his bedside the entire time, eventually moving Bella to start visiting him in the hospital as well. By the time he was released, half emaciated boy and half scar tissue, his place in the Goldberg household was no longer questioned.

  There is perhaps nothing so expansive as teenage romance with an ideological foundation. Isaj and Ester’s romantic moments were shot through with their politics. On the way to a Zionist summer camp in the Carpathians in 1939—the year Ester turned sixteen—they read the stories of Yosef Hayyim Brenner to each other; Ester had given Isaj the book. Brenner’s biography, which they knew by heart, was a study in the history of Eastern European Jewry. He had been born and studied at a yeshiva in Ukraine, become a Bund activist in Belarus, lived briefly in Bialystok, served in the Russian army, fled to London during the Russo-Japanese war, become a socialist Zionist, and emigrated to Palestine in 1909. There he wrote in Hebrew, describing the Jews’ blood-drenched existence in Russia, their sweat-soaked life in London, and still more bitterly, their humiliated position in Palestine. He was killed in the Arab riots of 1921. Like thousands of Eastern European Jews of their generation, Ester and Isaj adopted as their manifesto Brenner’s story “Hu amar la” (“He Told Her”), the monologue of a
Jewish youth addressing his mother on the eve of a pogrom. He tells her the time has come to stop relying on the anti-Semitic authorities for protection from the hoodlums and to wage “a war of the poor sons of Yankel against the powerful descendants of Chmielnicki.” Chmielnicki was, in the seventeenth century, the Ukrainian Cossack leader who presided over the massacre of more than one hundred thousand Jews. Yankel, a name Brenner picked to represent a generic Jew, happened to be Ester’s father’s Yiddish name. Isaj had been just as poor and as desperately angry as the narrator. Clearly, this was their story, and their future.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1925

  Moscow, for a five-year-old, is a cramped, stuffed apartment full of little things and little smells, surrounded by big places and big smells. This place, where her mother has brought Ruzya and her brother, Yasha, smells like the zoo, or perhaps like the circus. Ruzya has been inside the circus only once, but the big domed building is just around the corner from their house, and the smell, sweet and repulsive at the same time, drifts and catches her when she goes to the store with her mother or for a walk with her brother. But no, this smell is more like the zoo: it does not come in waves and does not mix with street odors like the smell from the circus; it sits still and heavy and resists letting you in at first, before grabbing you and sticking to you from all sides. And there are bars everywhere, on the windows and the doors, making it all look a little bit like a cage. This is definitely more like the zoo than like the circus.

  This is the Butyrki. The name sounds like the Russian word for “bottles,” but Ruzya knows that it is a place rather than a thing, and an important place. Her mother, Eva, has been coming here every week for a long, long time, and she has always taken a large bag of food with her. She says it is for Uncle Lev. Ruzya has never seen Uncle Lev. Of all the relatives she has vaguely heard about, Ruzya knows only a couple of cousins on her father’s side. Most relatives, she knows, belong to the family’s “other side,” a collection of people who are all somehow connected to her but whom she has never seen. These are Eva’s wealthier relatives. Ruzya knows that some of them are doctors, and all of them seem somehow more important, better, than her little family, which consists of her mother, Eva, her father, Moshe, and her older brother, Yasha, who is ten years old to her five.

  Uncle Lev is confusing: her mother keeps going to see him, but Ruzya gets the sense that he is one of the “better” set. That is what makes this visit unlike a trip to the zoo or even the circus. Ruzya has a distinct sense that it will be Uncle Lev who will be doing the looking. She and Yasha, dressed in their best suits—both a variation on silly sailors’ outfits—are being shown off. Even though Uncle Lev, as it turns out, is the one sitting in a cage.

  It takes a long time to get to his cage: first a woman checks their papers and opens a heavy door with a clanking lock to let them into a tiny corridor. Then Ruzya and Yasha have to stand in the corridor, smelling the smell and feeling a wet chill creep through their bones, while their mother goes into a little room with a man in uniform. Then more clanking doors.

  “Mama, what is Butyrki?” Ruzya asks, grabbing Eva’s hand so she can keep pace while her mother answers.

  “This is Butyrki,” says Eva. She often answers questions like this, without really giving an answer. Ruzya wishes she knew how to ask questions that made it clear what she wants to know. Mostly, though, she just tries to ask her father things.

  “Butyrki is a jail, stupid,” says Yasha, wedging himself between Ruzya and their mother. This is a scary answer, and Ruzya looks up at the uniformed man who is walking them down the corridor—but no, he does not seem angry with Yasha. Maybe it really is a jail.

  Uncle Lev is a tall man, meaty and beautiful like their mother, but at first he seems small, sitting at a large gray table in the middle of his cage. The uniformed man lets them into the cage and stands by the door, arms crossed on his chest, while they talk. Uncle Lev smiles a lot and hugs them, and touches their faces, saying they are so soft, so tender. He smells horrible, and his hands and his face are hard and prickly. But Ruzya decides she likes him, because he has a kind smile and he asks questions she likes answering.

  “Do you want to study?”

  “Yes!”

  “Do you want to learn to sing and dance?”

  “Yes!”

  “Can you sing a song for me?”

  Ruzya loves to sing, but Eva hates it when she does. Eva can sing beautifully. Adults, especially men, often ask her to, and she leans against a wall and makes music with her voice. Ruzya decides to impress Uncle Lev with one of the songs from Eva’s repertoire.

  “ ‘I once loved you / And love may still …’ ”

  Uncle Lev leans back in his gray chair and laughs happily, loudly, and Eva laughs along with him. Yasha snickers. No one seems annoyed. Ruzya is happy.

  She never saw Uncle Lev again. A member of the Socialist Party, he was exiled to the Urals following his lengthy internment at the Butyrki prison in Moscow. His punishment for holding the wrong set of political beliefs—he was not a Bolshevik—was mild by Soviet standards, a function of the relatively benign period when he was arrested and who knows what sort of good luck. He and his wife were allowed to live in the big city of Sverdlovsk (formerly and now again known as Yekaterinburg) and to work. What they did for a living, Ruzya does not remember—or may never have known—but they apparently made more money than their childless family required, so every month Uncle Lev sent his sister money so that her children might have music and language lessons.

  Yasha danced with their father’s confident grace and sang with their mother’s ease. Ruzya, big-boned like their mother but short, moved with a heavy uncertainty that infuriated dance teachers. Her attempts at singing caused instructors to declare her unteachable. In language lessons, though, she proved she had a steel-trap memory and a learner’s logic. German—the most popularly studied foreign language at the time—came so easily she hardly thought of it as either a calling or a worthy hobby. She envied Yasha his music lessons.

  Ruzya attended a remarkable school in the center of Moscow, the enclave of the educated if not always the privileged. She was born in Ukraine, in the old Pale of Settlement, but her family, like so many others, moved to the big city almost as soon as the new regime allowed Jews finally to choose where they lived. She was too young to remember her old home, but it had been in a small town with a single main street where horses moved in clouds of dust. Ruzya’s new home, in Moscow, was a semibasement apartment, its windows just level with the sidewalk. First Kolobovsky Lane was not exactly a central avenue—just a crooked side street with a slight incline, lined with old three- and four-story apartment buildings—but it was only steps away from the most important places in the new Russia, so the sidewalks outside Ruzya’s windows were always crowded. The Kremlin, recently reestablished as the seat of power—after the revolution the capital was moved back to Moscow from St. Petersburg—was no more than a twenty-minute walk. The headquarters of the secret police was even closer, as were the old luxurious hotels where the country’s new rulers had taken up residence. Thousands of people in Moscow at the time were starting their lives anew, with new roles in the new society. They moved into the city, forcing its old residents to make room, quite literally, by giving up their apartments to the newcomers. The four-room apartment Ruzya’s family shared with a lone, quiet elderly woman had a couple of years earlier also belonged to someone. But so had everyone else’s home: this was a time that had no past.

  Eva and Moshe adapted to the big city no worse than anyone else. They were not your usual shtetl Jews but educated people—he an accountant, she a nurse—and they found work easily. They did not have a lot, but neither did anyone they knew, so, even as they grew accustomed to a permanent gnawing hunger, they did not think of themselves as poor: they simply thought of the epoch as cruel. There were those who had more—Eva’s relatives, who had lived in Moscow for years—but they rarely saw these people, and in First Kolobovsky Lane everyo
ne’s clothes showed signs of wear and everyone’s stomach was concave.

  Life was difficult, but it had always been so for Eva and Moshe—not because of poverty or hunger but because, Moshe had come to believe, his wife had not been born to be happy. She had survived several major illnesses, she had lost a baby girl—Yasha’s twin, the first Ruzya—at birth, she had been robbed of her beauty by a thyroid disorder, and she seemed to carry the pain around with her: it came out in constant explosions, major and minor. Perhaps because her health was so precarious she never felt fully settled anywhere, and their apartment, even as over the years it filled with children and belongings, never ceased to feel like a place that was occupied temporarily and accidentally. Moshe was afflicted with a clarity of vision that made him aware of all the cracks in their existence, but he felt as helpless to do anything about them as he was to stop loving Eva desperately and fully. Had anyone asked him, he never would have complained, for he had what he was sure no other man could have: a daughter, his own little girl, who was smarter, prettier, and kinder than any other. He had given her an unusual name in honor of his beloved stepmother, who was Polish. Little Ruzya’s every step felt like his personal accomplishment, and the fact that she was attending school in Moscow made Moshe a successful man.