“I heard a lot about you, too.”

“Kharkov, 1939.

That was the day when Lisa and Lyonya, Sasha’s parents, met for the very first time.

“At last, we meet in person,” said Lyonya in a low voice, looking Lisa in her eyes. “I heard a lot about you.”

“I heard a lot about you, too,” said Lisa, looking back at Lyonya. That evening Lyonya came together with Fima Slutsky, her old friend from school. It was Fima who told her a lot about his new college classmate and promised to bring him to one of the traditional gatherings in Lisa’s house.

It was one of those evenings when her friends were coming to read aloud, to play music, to discuss new books and plays, and just to talk about everything. These gatherings, more or less regular and traditional for Lisa’s friends, were initiated many years ago with the full support of Lisa’s mother, Leeba.

Leeba grew up in Lithuania, in Vilna and Panevezys, and was the youngest of the Rosenblatt sisters. Her Uncle Nathan, younger brother of her mother, Khisya, was a poet, writer, and musician. Once he even opened a small theater studio in his part of the Goltzman family house in Vilna. His place was always full of his students and friends, and Leeba with her sisters were often there, too. The group called themselves – Nathan’s Circle.

While Leeba’s older sisters, Miriam and Dana, were interested and participated in some conflicting movements within the Jewish community, much younger Leeba dreamed of being an actress. She started at Nathan’s studio and, at 17, already played small roles in the Panevezys amateur theater. A year later she performed in Vilna while taking drama courses in Art School.  

Just before the Great War, she and her Uncle Nathan traveled to Minsk, where one of Nathan’s friends needed a young actress for a leading role in a new play. It was about a hundred miles from Vilna and seemed to be a great opportunity for Leeba, but the timing was unfortunate, to say the least.

War struck eastward, and Russia activated a wide anti-spy campaign. Gendarmes were looking for any Germans, Czechs, and anyone else without permanent residentship in Minsk. Not able to go back to Vilna, Leeba with Nathan had to run east. They were lucky to move fast and to be among the first wave of escapees – mass forced deportations with mass abuse began very soon.

Numerous rumors were spreading about the fate of those, who accepted the evacuation refugee status. Leeba and Nathan decided not to take chances and chose their own destination. Leeba remembered how they struggled to decide between Odessa and Kharkov – Nathan had friends in both cities. It seems that Nathan had friends everywhere, thanks to Nathan’s Circle.

Leeba remembered that they chose Kharkov not because it was a modern city and twice closer than Odessa, but because of Potemkin massacre and pogroms in Odessa in 1905 that was still fresh in memory even a decade later. We all know about those times – Sergei Einstein immortalized Potemkin’s mutiny in his 1925 silent movie Battleship Potemkin that was named “The Greatest Film of All Time” in 1958.

So, Kharkov it was. With several Russsian and Jewish theaters and a couple of Natan’s friends, Kharkov proved to be the right choice. Leeba was on the stage again, using the stage name Lyubov Rosalskaya. She was a good actress, young and pretty and was admired by the audience.

For one particular theatergoer, Aaron Mondrus, she was not only the greatest actress but the loveliest woman in the world, nothing less.

Leeba and Natan lost contacts with the rest of the family during the wars and the Revolutions that followed. When Aaron proposed and Leeba agreed, Uncle Nathan was the only one to take the role of the Head Of The Family. Leeba remembered how Nathan yelled on her wedding night: “I have avoided marriage my whole life, never had children of my own, but I ended up being responsible for giving this girl’s hand to a stranger. Why me?”

For Nathan, Kharkov never really felt like home. When in Vilna, he was not supportive of the “Return to Zion” movement and, instead, promoted the idea of the equal right citizenship for Jews in Lithuania, or America, or South Africa, or even in Russia, which he did not trust at all. In Kharkov, which was one of the major centers of Zionism, he found that all his friends were deeply involved in Zionist clubs’ activities. Whatever changed his heart, Nathan and his friends left for Palestine soon after Leeba’s marriage.

Aaron Mondrus lived in the same place, which his father, Chayim, found for the family when they moved to Kharkov from Glukhov. It was a closed courtyard surrounded by several small cottages. It was the place where Aaron brought Leeba. It was the same place where Lisa was born. It was where the Mondrus family returned after the War and it was the same place, where Sasha was born. People moved from one apartment to another, leaving the place for kids, or grandkids. Some left, others came.

On Google Street View, the place still looks the same, but, somehow, smaller and older than Sasha remembers. It’s hard to see behind the green gates, yet Sasha felt nostalgic, anyway, imagining he was still looking outside from one of those windows.

Leeba stopped performing after her marriage and Lisa’s birth, but her and Aaron’s love for theater never disappeared.

There were plenty of theaters in Kharkov in the 1920s, not counting visiting troupes. Lisa remembered that for her parents to go to the theater was as common as for Aaron to go to work, just not every day. It was part of life. Preparations for the theater started far in advance, beginning with taking a hot bass, choosing Leeba’s dress and, later, Lisa’s dress, too – Leeba took theater seriously. The next concern was the weather. It meant a vast shoe selection, including spare shoes in case of bad weather.

And the final accord, just before leaving the house, everybody was looking for Leeba’s binoculars. Instead of using a fancy theater set, fashionable at the time, Leeba had a German-made military style pair – a “souvenir” from the Kharkov occupation by Germans in 1918.

We still have it in the family. Small, fitting the palm of the hand and showing years of usage – it is another artifact that linked us to our family history and to our relatives from the past.

Kharkov was the capital of Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s and 1930s, and cultural life flourished during that time. It was not only theaters. Artists’ studios and art schools of different calibers were aplenty. Literature and poets’ societies of all kinds multiplied. Many iconic artists began their careers in Kharkov, such giants as film director Alexander Dovzhenko, poet Pavlo Tychina, singers Leonid Utesov and Claudia Shulzhenko, composer Isaak Dunaevsky, or poet Boris Slutsky, just to name a few, and many, many others.

The Avant-garde formalist style in Kharkov’s architecture was symbolized by the first high-rise building in Soviet Russia – GOSPROM (State Industry Building), designed for the biggest public square in Europe.

To emphasize that Kharkov became the capital of Soviet Ukraine, a number of talented and known Ukrainians writers, poets, and artists were ordered (in the Soviet-style!) to live and work in Kharkov. To accommodate them, a dedicated building named СЛОВО (“SLOVO” – Russian meaning for WORD) was constructed in the shape of letter “C” in the mid-1920s. Many of those became the classics of Ukrainian culture. Tragically, in the same Soviet-style, many of them were executed during the Red Terror. That was later called the Executed Renaissance.

But Lisa and Lyonya, as the most of the country, did not know that side of the “happy” Soviet life. They lived in the Kharkov they knew. We understand why they loved it so much – it was their happy childhood within their happy, well-established families – whatever it meant at that time in the Soviet Union. It was their youth in the city that was overwhelmed with everyday achievements, both real and faked by the Soviet propaganda. It was the time of excitements with technological innovations and everyday life improvements. It was their dear happy friends next to them, and it was, probably, the only worry-free time they had in their whole life. What was not to love?

Lisa’s sister, Sonia, was born years later, but Lisa remembered that she never felt being a single child. She lived in the place where all her neighbors were close relatives and all the children around were her cousins. She lived with them, played with them, and went to kindergarten with them.

One of her first cousins, Annechka, a little older than Lisa, became her role model, closest friend, and confidant for life, which was, unfortunately, unexpectedly short for Annechka.

Leeba made sure that Lisa would have the best education possible. Growing up in Lithuania, Leeba never culturally trusted Kharkov over Vilna, and even less so Glukhov. When Sasha was a small boy and behaved in a way that Leeba – or Baba-Luba, as he called her – did not approve, she always told him something like “don’t ever do it again, you are not in Glukhov, thank goodness.” Lisa and Sonia told that Leeba often said something similar about some members of the huge Mondrus family, but never to or about Aaron, who, as she always said, was “the symbol of an intelligent man whose example everybody has to follow”.

Lisa went to a prestigious school that specialized in Russian literature and theater. When in third grade, she started piano classes in musical school. And when she was in her mid-school years and Sonia went to school too, Leeba volunteered to teach drama classes at Lisa’s school for a couple of years.

Leeba didn’t stop there. There was an unfinished large empty space below their second-floor apartment, part of which was occasionally used as a storage area. She decided to open an after-school theater club there, based on Lisa’s class. The school’s administration was glad to help – such a club was in direct line with the school motto. They called “subbotnik” to make that happen.

A Subbotnik, from Russsian “Subbota” for Saturday, was volunteer work on weekends – very common Soviet way to resolve unfunded or undermanned community’s projects. Subbotniks became especially popular after Lenin himself showed up on it once. There were paintings and poems about Lenin carrying a log at that subbotnik, and even a postage stamp was issued to commemorate that event in the mid-1950s. There was sincere enthusiasm to speed up rebuilding or finishing new developments in the 1920s and 1930s, but later, in post-war years, participation became much more obligatory and, in the traditional Soviet-style, it was easier to take a day off than skip subbotnik. 

Anyway, it was still the 1930s, and after a few subbotnik the empty space under Lisa’s apartment was transformed into a small theatrical studio, which cemented the friendship among the students who built and used it.

Leeba convinced a local theater to host a couple of amateur plays, were the students, including Lisa, were able to taste the real atmosphere of the theater. The play was a total success and provided good memories for Lisa.

The history repeated itself often enough. It seems that either unconsciously or deliberately Leeba tried to re-create an atmosphere for Lisa, similar to Nathan’s Circle – the one she grew up in. Should we call it “Leeba’s Circle”?

Whatever The Circle, it was Lisa’s long-time friends and relatives, who spent their time together. That was where Fima Slutsky brought Lyonya that evening. The group needed new blood.

The relationships within the group were far from what Lyonya had in his school years of classical German culture and language. He wrote, later: “At that time I was not only shy by nature but also was very inexperienced in such a musical-theatrical-poetical environment. Their Russian 53rd school was so different from my Ukrainian 56th. Very soon I did become one of them, but initial “otlichnick” (A+ student) nickname stuck. The nickname was not about my scores, which nobody had been interested in whatsoever, but about the lack of what they all had in common – freedom in conversations, openness in expressing opinions, and unsuppressed inner self.”

Lenya needed new friends and new air, too.

But that will be another story.