BlogKharkov, 1939.
“At last, we meet in person,” said Lyonya in a low voice, looking into Lisa’s eyes. “I heard a lot about you.”
It was the day when Sasha’s parents, Lisa and Lyonya, met for the first time.
We left Lyonya a decade earlier, telling the story about a school plot that he and his older brother, Isaak, ran to smuggle Lyonya, who was not yet of age to attend a school, to be in class with Isaak. The kids’ conspiracy was uncovered, of course, and although Lyonya was not allowed to attend public school, he was easily accepted to a local yeshiva.
We shouldn’t be surprised if the kids’ conspiracy was going to succeed. Kharkov, as well as any other Soviet city in the mid-1920s, was full of experiments – from the infamous experimental Soviet governing to the famous Avant-garde.
Experimental schools for children and adults were all around, and not all of those experiments were just hoaxes. Could it be that Lyonya’s yeshiva was also “experimental”? Very much so. In 1920, on Purim, the Bolsheviks announced that all Jewish community institutions had been liquidated and the executive committee for Jews took over their tasks – we can only imagine the ocean of revolutionary ideas in that committee …
Kharkov itself could be seen as a decades-long experiment. All of Sasha’s grandparents chose Kharkov as their home in the mid-1910s, being attracted by that city despite, or maybe because of, the controversial status and the history of the Kharkov’s Jewish community.
The whole Kharkov gubernia, located in Eastern Ukraine, was never included in The Pale of Settlement – those dedicated regions, where Jews were allowed to live in the Russian Empire. So, from the bureaucratic point of view, there were almost no – or should not have been – permanent Jewish residents in Kharkov. Well, even the official census at the beginning of the 20th century listed Kharkov as the third most Jewish populated city in Ukraine after Kiev and Odessa, and some historians believe that the factual numbers were significantly higher.
That was the first controversy. Another was the acceptance of Jewish students to higher schools. If no official permanent Jewish residents existed, there shouldn’t be formal quotes or restrictions, right? That loophole was widely used – Jews constituted, for example, about a third of the students’ body at the Imperial Kharkov University at the end of the 19th century. Mondrus family moved to Kharkov for that reason alone.
Everybody had their own reason to come. Lyonya’s parents, David and Rizal, came to Kharkov from Warsaw seeking the business opportunities in that already large and further developing modern city.
Lisa’s mother, Leeba Rosenblatt, and her uncle Natan were the last to come, escaping the Great War of 1914. They chose Kharkov for its cultural life.
Miraculously, there were no pogroms, no open hostility against the Jews, no anti-Semitic violence in Kharkov. It was an important reason by itself to come and stay there, and that, no doubt, contributed to Kharkov’s reputation as the future of modern Jewish community, to a larger extent than Kiev or Odessa.
Whatever hopes Sasha’s grandparents’ had for that promising place, they did not have enough peaceful time before the mess of the two Revolutions of 1917, the post-Brest-treaty German’s occupation of 1918 and two Civil Wars (Russian and Ukrainian) that lasted up to the end of 1919. Kharkov changed hands many times between Red Bolsheviks, White monarchists, Green peasants, German soldiers, Black anarchists, uncolored gangs, and several fractions of Blue and Yellow Ukrainian nationalists, fighting with each other and everybody else.
There was a running joke at the time – “You were fine as long as you displayed the proper colored flag in your window. The problem was knowing which color controlled the city that morning.”
A frightening time indeed – but as Sasha’s grandparents remembered, not really life-threatening in Kharkov, and everything else they had overcome. Lyonya told us how David once asked him, “Do you know what I brought to Rizal in the hospital twice a day when you were born? What she needed most?” Lyonya tried food and clothes and medicine. “No”, said David, “The firewood. The hospital had no heat.”
The Reds prevailed and Kharkov was proclaimed as the capital of Soviet Ukraine in 1919. The next two decades were a flourishing period in Kharkov’s history. Coincidentally, these were the years, when both Sasha’s parents, Lisa and Lyonya, were born and grew up there.
A lot of resources were directed to Kharkov as the capital, and that, little by little, made the quality of life better. Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP), that allowed some elements of the free market, helped even more.
David, a skilled women fashion leather-worker and shoemaker, was excited about the opportunity to open his own shop as soon as NEP was declared in the early-1920s. The designer’s items are always expensive, and David’s customers were mostly the “new NEP elite”, actresses and commissars’ wives and mistresses.
He did not recognize the hidden NEP trap – as the shop owner he lost his “proletariat” status and became “bourgeois”, which meant that his family was not allowed to live in the central area of the city anymore. It took them a couple of years to get back to the part with the best schools around – David’s major concern.
David’s shop, however, became so profitable that he was able to add a separate showroom on the main street. Even after the NEP had been abandoned and showroom had been closed, many of his customers followed him privately for years – “sometimes too many”, David complained.
Thirty years later, Lisa also was not happy that David, her father-in-law, was often too busy to make fashionable shoes for her. Sasha remembered one of her David made shoes in a turquoise color with usual for Lisa ultra-high heels. Those shoes were a huge source of envy for all her friends – it was not possible to buy anything like that in the 1950s neither in Novosibirsk, nor in Kharkov, nor in Moscow.
Sasha liked to watch his grandfather, David, working the leather on the thick slab of marble, cutting the curves, applying smelly rubber glue or sewing the pieces together on the very old Singer machine.
He worked in silence – David usually did not talk much, anyway – but suddenly he would tell Sasha a short story about his father
When, finally, the time came for Lyonya to go to school, David chose a good school with good teachers. It was one of the very few schools in Kharkov at that time, where most classes were taught in Ukrainian. Students were mostly children of the city and state administrators – Kharkov was the capital of Ukraine and they sent their kids to Ukranian school to make an example in that mostly Russian speaking city. That school was definitely good and it was not easy to get a spot there.
Lyonya told us many times that he never understood his father’s choice of his school: “There was another very good school at almost the same distance from our home, where education was in Russian. Some of my neighbors went there. There was nothing wrong with Ukrainian, it was just that everybody spoke only Russian or Yiddish, and the college exams were in Russian only. So, if you decide to go to college, as I did, you should learn everything in Russian, anyway!”
We assume that the unspoken reason for David could be the school’s signature pursuit: Lyonya’s school specialized in German language and German literature, and another – in Russian literature and theater. Lisa was in that Russian school, but Lyonya did not know it yet.
Fluent Ukrainian, however, came in handy many years later, when Lyonya was a college professor in Novosibirsk and several students from Western Ukraine happened to come there for their entrance exams. They claimed that they had never learned math and physics in Russian, and asked to take the exam in Ukrainian. Maybe it was true, or maybe they saw it as a very smart move, but Lyonya loved describing the kids’ faces, when they heard “No problem, any language – Russian, Ukrainian, German, English, even Yiddish, if you want.” Mentioning Yiddish, we believe, was an overkill.
Lyonya’s school years were rather successful. He spent only a week in his first grade before being transferred to the second one, too much annoyance of Isaak. He was always at the top of his class, but, he joked, what made him out of the ordinary in his classmates’ eyes was the fact that he had to use the city tram every morning – the school was not very close to his home.
After school hours were reserved for the various clubs and technical skills groups.
Excellent academic scores came with some perks, like free travel with the group of the other A-grade students to several Ukrainian cities, a couple of times specialized camps during the summer in the Carpathian Mountains or on the Black Sea, and invitations to watch the May or November parades from the podium, which was more than a big deal at that time – it was like a medal.
It became clear during the last school year that he would graduate with Honors, which meant a free choice of college without exams.
“And that’s when I started panicking”, wrote Lyonya, “In addition to Kharkov University, founded in the early 1800s, there were so many colleges to choose from and every major college had its own advantages. My father came up with an interesting solution. He combined a list of his customers’ occupations and we visited many of them. They loved to talk about themselves, their work, and the perspective of their domains in the future. There were doctors, engineers, administrators, artists – my father had a lot of customers. Engineering won. I chose the College of Mechanical Engineers, but it could be Electro-Technical, or Aviation, as well. It did not already matter at the time of graduation. It was 1939, and many of my friends and classmates were already summoned to serve in the Soviet Army.”
It seems that too many boys were born in the same year as Lenya. His Army service was delayed “until a special request”, which could come at any day for the next year. “It was very annoying waiting for that damn letter every day”, wrote Lenya, “But the good part was that during that delay I met Lisa.”
One of
Slutsky and Mondrus families lived on the same Rustavely Street and were friends for years. Fima told Lyonya about his older brother, future poet Boris Slutsky, who left for a college in Moscow a couple of years ago, and who, before that, dated Lisa’s cousin, Annechka.
“There are readings and musical evenings at their home,” he told Lyonya, “a gathering for those who are still in the city. Let’s go tonight.”
In addition to being socially shy, Lyonya was definitely not used to such events, at all. “No, no. It might not be polite of me to show up. And I do not know anybody there,” he objected.
“Oh, come on,” interrupted Fima. “You know me. And I know everybody there. I already told them about you. We are going tonight. Lisa is a nice girl, and her mother, Leeba, is even better.”
They entered the second-floor apartment, which was unlocked. Piano music and a loud conversation were heard from outside. There was no space on the rack next to the door, and Lyonya hanged his coat on the nail on the opposite wall.
Since that day that nail became “his nail” until he left for the Army service a year later.
He would usually come there earlier. When somebody from the “old guard” came and saw that “the nail” had been taken, they started yelling, half joking, “Look, that “A-student” is already here! Is he really studying?”
Most often it was Yura Antes, who became his closest friend for the next sixty years. Or Lilya Kogan, with whom Lenya had been in his school, not knowing that she belonged to that group, teasing him, “Hey, Lyonya, you need to start attending classes. You are risking failing your exams for the first time in your life!”
It was the same Lilya, who Fima and Lenya saw first as they entered the small kitchen. “Hi, Fima,” she said, and, noticing Lyonya, exclaimed “Lyonya! What a surprise!”
“We are classmates,” said Fima, “I thought I would never make him come.”
Through the door, Lyonya saw a girl playing the piano. She noticed the newcomers too and came out to meet them.
After a quick introduction, Lyonya looked into Lisa’s eyes. “At last, we meet in person,” he said in a low voice, “I heard a lot about you.”
And that will be another story.
[…] “At last, we meet in person,” said Lyonya in a low voice, looking Lisa in her eyes. “I heard a lot about you.” […]