Ester and Ruzya Read online

  “Yes,” Vasily piped in enthusiastically. “We’ll show you Moscow too.”

  That was two weeks ago. Since then these three, together and separately, have been by Ester’s side almost constantly. Semyon is intense and always holding forth on something or other—Ester can only occasionally understand what, exactly; Vasily swoons, blushing intermittently, and, in contrast to Semyon, grows less coherent with each passing day; and Anatoly is cool, collected, remote, and usually the first to leave their nighttime gatherings. As it turns out, all three are fourth-year students who were present at Ester’s literature exam as observers in preparation for their teaching practice. In their capacity as mentors they negotiated with Ester’s examiners before each test, so she sailed through her remaining two orals—by wordlessly pointing out countries, capitals, seas, and continents on a map for her geography exam and by writing dates on the blackboard by way of answering the history questions. The last and most important of the exams, the Russian essay, is the one from which Ester asked to be excused back when she first wrote to the college. So she did not go. Now she has a couple of idle days before the college posts the final admission results—not that she has any doubt she has made it, what with fives in all her subjects. She is trying to read Russian in the afternoons—one of her temporary dorm roommates, another applicant, has said, “How I envy you the opportunity to read Pushkin for the first time,” and Ester has devoted herself to this task, though it far exceeds her mastery of the language—and in the evenings she is out with the three mentors.

  But this afternoon as she lies on her bed with a book and a stubby black pencil, a sweaty and now genuinely disheveled Semyon barges in, with no apparent regard for whether Ester is dressed or whether any of her three roommates might be present (in fact, they are not, but two are out on dates wearing Ester’s dresses, which leaves her in a housedress and rather embarrassed by Semyon’s sudden appearance).

  “I’ve just sat in on the admissions committee meeting!”

  “What happened?” It does not occur to Ester that whatever outrage Semyon has witnessed may have any connection to her.

  “They’ve decided not to admit you.”

  She stares at him.

  “There is a deputy dean named Zozulya—he just wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Very nice she has done so well on her exams, but she still didn’t take all of them,’ and so forth. ‘Let her take a year to study Russian, then she can come back and stand for her exams again, and surely we will admit her.’ Pretty much everyone else there tried to argue your case, but he had veto power and, technically, an incontrovertible argument.”

  The word incontrovertible reduces Ester to tears: helpless, suffocating, ugly, and endless tears.

  “Don’t you think we are going to let this drop,” Semyon declares, provoking, quite predictably, more tears. “We will write a complaint to the Committee for Higher Schooling, and the decision will be overturned. It must be overturned!”

  There is no time less appropriate for oratorial fervor than when a woman is crying. Semyon’s overblown confidence only convinces Ester that all hope is lost. Suddenly the prospect of returning to Bialystok seems barely better than death, compounded as it is by the expense of her ticket to Moscow and her stay here—money her parents could have spent on helping relatives in the German-occupied territories. She cries and cries.

  The following morning the Lobby of Three showed up in Ester’s room all business and no tears, three completed—even typed—letters in their hands. One was signed by the college Komsomol committee, another by the editors of Komsomolia, and the third was to be signed by Ester herself. All three made the same argument, spectacular in its demagogic flare. Essentially, they argued, Ester had come to Moscow to apply to university because the Soviet Union offered the sort of equal opportunity she had never seen in the old Poland, where Jews were relegated to the ghetto bench. But instead of being welcomed with open arms, she was once again turned away because of her ethnic origin! For had she been born in an ethnic Russian family in Poland, she would have learned the language of her ancestors. But because her parents were Jews and spoke to her in Yiddish, she could not write an essay in Russian and was therefore denied a fine Soviet education. The argument appealed to Ester: it made her desperate personal fight—she has to go to college this year!—seem principled rather than selfish. She signed, the trio delivered the letters to the Committee for Higher Schooling and reported back that they would have to come for the answer in two days’ time.

  The day has arrived. It is post-exam-high-anxiety season, and the courtyard of the Committee for Higher Schooling is filled with screaming mothers and their sulking offspring. The mothers wave their letters of appeal in the air like flags, and shout their arguments to no one in particular. Each has a child—more often a son—who is brilliant and was given an unfair grade. “He has had all fives his whole life!” “He must be given a chance to retake the exam!” “The spelling of this word is variable!” “This problem wasn’t in the school program!” Even Semyon stalls slightly at this scene: the simple task of pushing their way through to the building entrance appears impossible.

  Suddenly one of the doors opens and a graying doorman in an old military uniform sets one foot outside. The crowd hushes momentarily. “Is there an Ester Goldberg here?” he shouts out.

  “Yes!” screams Semyon.

  The sea of applicants and their mothers parts silently to let the four of them through. The doorman separates Ester from her support group, nodding to the young men to stay put, and takes her upstairs to the office of Comrade Kaftanov, the committee chairman himself. Kaftanov is a stocky man also dressed in something vaguely military, in accordance with the old postrevolutionary fashion. He says hello and, without adding another word, takes Ester by the hand and leads her out to the balcony off his office. This building in central Moscow must have been a wealthy merchant’s house before the revolution, and the massive semicircular balcony with a squat stone railing speaks to the former owner’s royal aspirations.

  “I want to tell you all something,” Kaftanov blares, and the crowd outside falls silent once again. “The Committee for Higher Schooling will interfere in the affairs of a learning institution only under extraordinary circumstances. Here we have one such case.” He nods in Ester’s direction. “This girl grew up in the old Poland.” He proceeds to repeat, almost word for word, Semyon’s interpretation of Ester’s story. “Clearly, what happened at the Institute of History, Philosophy and Literature smacks of a prerevolutionary sort of anti-Semitism, which cannot and will not be tolerated in the Soviet Union!” The crowd actually, incredibly, applauds.

  Kaftanov leads Ester back into his office, hands her a typed letter to the IFLI authorities, and wishes her luck. Now the four of them run to the college administration with the letter, then to the central telegraph office to fire off a jubilant telegram, and finally to the railroad station to buy Ester’s ticket home for tomorrow, for a quick trip to pick up her things. In the evening they walk endlessly, round and round on the city’s central green boulevard ring, reciting poetry, eating ice cream, and every so often quoting Comrade Kaftanov, each time sounding more overwrought than the last. Life is beautiful, and life is just.

  There is a line with which my grandmother Ester likes to finish some of her stories. She always pronounces it with a note of wistful amazement: “There really was no anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union at that time.” This is one of the few points on which she and Ruzya are in complete agreement. To be more precise, though, there was no state-enforced anti-Semitism of the sort that prevailed before the revolution and that came into being again during and after World War II. Still, in the interwar years the regime succeeded in annihilating the institutions of Jewish culture and criminalizing the use of Hebrew—but this fit a pattern of destroying all non-Bolshevik groups, an effort to root out any potential source of resistance to Soviet officialdom. Eventually, as tolerance for difference of any sort shrank, individual Jews, too, came to represent a
threat and, as a result, became targets. But before World War II, the rhetoric of what was known as internationalism ruled. To a girl coming from Poland, this seemed like a miracle. Ester was endlessly amazed that none of her new acquaintances even asked her about her ethnic origin. (In all likelihood, this was because, never having seen a foreigner in the flesh, they assumed that Ester’s Semitic features were typical of Poles.)

  I have seen no photographs of my grandmother from that time, but there are later pictures, taken around the time the war ended. She is all thinness: hands with thin fingers holding her baby, a long thin nose on a pale face framed by long tight curls. A hat cocked not so much coquettishly as consciously, for the photographic occasion. She looks like a starlet. Back in 1940 she had perhaps more youthful plumpness, less of an air of sophistication and more of unequivocal enthusiasm. She had, after all, found the Promised Land, the land of no anti-Semitism.

  During winter break, in January 1941, Ester returned to Bialystok for the first time and found a city filled with terror. The fear had moved in while Ester was still there, but the change struck her only after she had been away. The relationship between the Red Army saviors and their saved had long since lost its sheen. The arrests had begun almost immediately after the Soviets entered; the deportations soon followed. Decades later, researchers of Soviet crimes would come to the conclusion that Polish citizens made up one of the most numerous groups among the victims of Stalinist repression. Though the Soviet Union never declared war on Poland, in 1939 the Red Army captured 240,000 Polish military men. Some of them were soon handed over to the Germans, some were released, and 15,000 were executed.

  Arrests of civilians followed. A week after Soviet troops occupied Eastern Poland, the Politburo adopted a resolution calling for the abolition of all Polish institutions of governance and the establishment of Soviet order in the occupied territories. They rushed to bring the newly annexed lands into uniformity with the rest of their country, where arrests, executions, and purges had been systematically carried out over the previous two decades. The resolution translated into the arrests of officials at all levels, businessmen and other representatives of the bourgeoisie, and political activists of all sorts. Two-thirds of all those arrested in the Soviet Union between September 1939 and June 1941 were Polish citizens. About 108,000 Polish citizens—more than the entire population of Bialystok—were accused of “counterrevolutionary activity,” terrorism, espionage, and the like, and sentenced to prison terms; 18,000 were executed. Most of the arrested were men. Starting in February 1940, members of their families, as well as a variety of other civilians, were summarily deported to Siberia and other northern regions of Russia. About 320,000 Polish citizens were forced to labor there under secret-police oversight.

  By the time of Ester’s visit, Bialystok was a city of gaps and ghosts: everywhere she looked, people and entire families were missing. The city’s population had nearly quadrupled in 1939, when the border with the Nazi-occupied territories, where Jews were already being herded into ghettos, was still open, and a steady stream of Jewish refugees had flowed across it. Now these people were gone, deported by the Soviets, who first attempted to hand them back to the Germans, but when the German authorities declined, sent them to work in lumber production in the Far North. Among the deportees were Ester’s uncle Zalman and his family, who had come from Warsaw to stay in Jakub’s home. They were taken away one night in the summer, along with over seven thousand other refugees from the Bialystok area. Uncle Zalman died. Years later his son came through Moscow on his way to Poland from the Far North. He stayed with Ester, but told her little about what he had experienced: the only thing he wanted to think about was getting out of the Soviet Union.

  All told, in 1940, between 211 and 215 trains carrying refugees turned deportees traveled the route from the occupied territories to the Russian Far North. Many of them froze or starved to death. The Jews among those who reached their final destination also found that many shops refused to serve Jews during regular hours, setting aside a special time when they were allowed to enter. Their police supervisors complained in reports that “they have never done physical labor” and concluded that “Jews can never be taught to work.” So much for the utter lack of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union.

  The winter of her visit, Ester found Jakub, now working as a bookkeeper at a nationalized shoe factory, preoccupied with the weekly task of putting together food parcels for Uncle Zalman and his family in Russia and for the innumerable relatives now living in the Warsaw Ghetto, and coolly certain that it was a matter of time—in all likelihood, not very much time—before the Soviets came to arrest him. Indeed, though he had not been elected to the last prewar municipal council, he still served on the kehilla, the Jewish council, which made him a sort of representative of the old authorities. Even worse, he had been a very active member of a non-Communist political party. The men of Bialystok—the Jews, the politicos, the small-business men (the local tycoons had long since been arrested)—had by now grown accustomed to this state of waiting. Those of them who had grown children focused on getting the children out of Bialystok. Most had figured out that the only way to escape was to run behind the firing line, to Moscow, the seat of the evil that was plaguing the occupied territories. The best way to secure a pass on the railroad to the Soviet mainland was to be a recent high-school graduate traveling for college entrance exams. The young people of Bialystok were glued to their textbooks, studying for exams that would get them into Moscow colleges. Friends, and especially the parents of friends, envied what they assumed had been Ester’s extraordinarily prescient planning in this regard.

  Isaj was getting ready to go to Moscow too. His family’s good fortune, which began with the arrival of the Soviets, had continued. His extraordinary aptitude and knowledge had been noticed at the teaching school, and he had been allowed to transfer to a teachers’ college without earning a high school diploma. Now he would be able to transfer to a college in Moscow, and Ester had already made arrangements for him to join her at IFLI in the next academic year. He was studying Russian and writing to Ester daily, sometimes two or three times a day, often trying to insert a Russian word here and there, and always trying to ape what he perceived to be the Soviet style. For a while he even folded his letters in triangles—a habit he must have noted among the Red Army soldiers—until Ester’s roommates sent him a joke poem teasing him about his “fashionable” envelopes.

  Isaj’s letters were written in Yiddish on small pieces of bluish and brownish paper, ink-stained in places. My grandmother Ester kept these letters without rereading them, in a small drawer of an old rolltop desk. She did not mean to keep them secret: they were simply part of another life. She even grew convinced she had forgotten Yiddish. I talked her into reading some of the letters to me, translating as she went.

  My dear,

  I have received your letter. Its every word literally made me shiver. I was so happy that you are so close to me, despite the physical distance.…

  I have started reading the book by Brenner which you gave me. This same book you and I were reading together that time when we were going to the camp at Brok. Do you remember that? It’s been less than two years, but what a colossal difference in what I find in this book now! Back then I was more taken with his story about a shopkeeper in London who is saving money to move to Erez Israel to settle there. To open a shop there. Tusia, please excuse my language, but now when I was reading this story I thought it stank. All of this is so old, so foreign to me. Every story is so far from real life, so pale and forced. The author reminds me of yeshiva students I used to encounter at the city library.

  Maybe my earlier impressions of the book were influenced by the situation in the world in which I lived when I read it then. The atmosphere in the book is soaked in the awareness of property, profit-seeking. I had the impression that all the characters, aside from how they portray themselves, have another dimension that shows through, that I don’t like.

  Est
er, what do you say to all this?… Write me about your impressions, too, and I repeat how I strive to be with you. Write me, my dear.

  This was one of the letters written at the beginning of Ester’s stay in Moscow. Another, one of the last letters my grandmother received from her fiancé, was inspired by one she had written, describing, with her characteristically excessive candor, one or more of the suitors who followed her everywhere in Moscow. She never so much as kissed any of them, but this was a fact that Isaj, stuck in the provincial hell of Bialystok, could hardly have trusted.

  It’s not every girl who will tell things like that to a guy she is planning to marry. This is why I never touched on this subject the entire time you were here in Bialystok, though I don’t know if I was right not to. But you see, I believe everything you write, including what you say about your flirtations or longer or shorter affairs. Of course, I feel a certain resistance to this. I didn’t tell you, but now I have to admit that I find this, as they say in Russian, obidno, hurtful. I am writing this letter bit by bit because I keep stopping to think about this.

  Do you remember, when you were leaving for Moscow for the first time, I asked you if you think that life in the big city may not pull you away from me. You said a very decisive “no.” When you were in Bialystok again for vacation, I asked you again, and again you said no—but with much less certainty, or so it seemed to me. How would you answer that question now?

  Maybe everything I am writing has a shtetl flavor to it. I feel it myself, and I am ashamed.

  I am going to finish, primarily because electricity will be turned off in a few minutes. I received the psychology book yesterday. I am very grateful to you for it. I was reading it today and literally jumping up for joy.… Well, I wanted to add something else, but I can’t because the lights are already off.