Emil Pitkin

Gorodok, a suburb of Vitebsk in Belarus, and Gorodok, which means Little Town, is really what it’s called. [Gorodok in the original Russian translates as Little Town.] Once again, the train from Leningrad has brought me and Mama and my little sister to the dacha. [A dacha is a Russian country home.] Dovechaye the balagola [Balagola is Yiddish for driver, or coachman.] brings us there from the train station in his simple open carriage, his proletka. Dovechaye – that’s what his double name Dovid Shaye sounded like when you said it fast – he always picks us up, drives us into town, buys the return tickets for us. He has a big and ruddy face. We love him. At the dacha, he’s like family to us.

Nearly the entire ground floor, with its enormous veranda, is ours. On the veranda sits Uncle Shimon, reading Sholem Aleichem [The king of Yiddish humor and author of Tevye the Dairyman, the inspiration for Fiddler on the Roof.] aloud in Yiddish. Through the open door, beyond the entrance, we can see the blades of grass trembling lightly. Tevye, what a merry Tevye!, sends sparks into the air above the veranda. Everyone is laughing, everyone is in high spirits. Only the grownups sometimes let out a sigh. But Uncle Shimon reads on; he does it very well. He’s from Odessa, [City in Ukraine, one third Jewish before the Holocaust.] an Odessite, he works as a packer in a bookstore in the Moldavanka neighborhood. Aunt Leah, [https://yvng.yadvashem.org/nameDetails.html?language=en&itemId=5624416&ind=1.] Mama’s oldest sister, is his wife; they have a daughter, Klara, [https://yvng.yadvashem.org/nameDetails.html?language=en&itemId=5624417&ind=1.] and a son who’s my namesake. [https://yvng.yadvashem.org/nameDetails.html?language=en&itemId=5624418&ind=1.] They live at 30 Myasoedovskaya, which means meat-eater street. The apartment a floor below them is occupied by Zach, who is boisterous, short, and very fat. He’s this way, I imagined, because he ate so much meat on this meat-eater street. I saw Tevye in Zach’s image.

“And if in our time someone must live a life of misery, for this are we Jews in this wide world, as it is written, the Chosen People…no wonder the whole world envies us” flourished Tevye-Zach. Uncle Shimon is laughing so hard, the tears are running from his eyes, deep and little and bright “like wet black currants.” [The simile is from Leo Tolstoy.] This was last year.

We always have house guests. Two years ago, the husband of Papa’s youngest sister stayed with us. He kept sucking in air through his nose, quickly and intensely, and he never told any interesting stories. I wonder who will come today?

We have been here for six days. At breakfast my sister Lusya starts choking – a chicken bone got lodged in her throat. I grab her little hand and together with Mama we rush to the doctor’s. We get out by the path through the gates of the country house, and here a miraculously appearing Dovichaye with his carriage and horse picks us up. He drives the horses hard. At the first turn, where neighbor Mihel’s summer cabin sits on the left, a woman stops us and says:

“There’s a war.”

Dovechaye put us on the Leningrad-bound train that very day. The landlord of the dacha, he’s in a festive humor, he’s urging us to stay. “Everything will settle down. You are under my protection,” Ivan Danilovich assured us. Mama left the bed linen behind. “It will be in safekeeping here. You won’t have to drag it out here next year.”

In Leningrad we had always lived on Vasilyevsky Island, [Leningrad is a city of canals and islands. Vasilyevsky Island is the largest.] first on the Tenth, then the Fifth, and now on the Twelfth Line. [The streets on Vasilyevsky Island were ordered by number, and called “lines.”] On the corner of the Fifth Line and Bolshoi Prospect, unscathed by time, stood a handsome school building with a granite plinth. It still stands. There is a two-story house around the corner, across from the Academy of Arts. You run into the courtyard, cut a hard right, climb up to the second floor, give the copper doorbell a few pulls, and then a door will open onto a kitchen breathing with magical aromas and then into the Vilken family’s elegant rooms. Their son, Egon, is my classmate – he’s one of the Triple-Es, all of us from class section 6A. The other, Emir Potolitsin, lived close by, above the library on Bolshoi Ave.

Outside the library, the three Es from 6A nonchalantly watched the tracer rounds burning up in the afternoon sky. It was September 8th, 1941, the day of the first assault on the city by the German warplanes. A few days later my father – he was 34 back then – locked up his wet-salted rawhide storehouses and joined the People’s Militia. [A paramilitary force composed of civilian volunteers, established in 1941 to protect the home front.] A letter that roved for more than two months arrived from Odessa in Ukraine: Uncle Shimon had been drafted along with his son, my namesake; another cousin, Izya Rikhter from Tiraspol in Moldova was taken too; as were the husbands of two of my mother’s sisters, both of them Odessites. Eighteen-year-old Lyova – the son of my father’s brother – was already on the front lines; so were two other cousins, and that uncle who managed without a handkerchief.

The population of our large family could contribute twelve men to the war. Two of them weren’t drafted to fight on the front lines: one a military scientist from Leningrad, just graduated from the Leningrad Institute of Technology’s Munitions Department, the other a brilliant weapons inventor, graduate of the Bauman Moscow Higher Technical School [An engineering powerhouse equivalent in quality and prestige to MIT or Caltech.] named Aron Rikhter, nicknamed Arele, the son of Mama’s brother Avrum-Shika Rikhter from Tiraspol. From small-town Tiraspol, Aron became a capital-city Muscovite in the dorms and never went back.

Not two, not three, but a full hundred percent of our family able to take up arms fought in the trenches against Hitler. Six of them died. Uncle Shimon didn’t come home. Nor did his son, my namesake, nor Yasha Furman. They weren’t even twenty years old. Simple arithmetic can’t express the measure of grief from every death. A soldier isn’t alone: there is the mother, the brother, the aunt…and were people mown down by Nazism only on the front lines? After the war ends, Mama will be hit by the news that three of her sisters and their children were murdered in Odessa, her brother and his family were murdered in Tiraspol, and a sister and her husband and four children were murdered in the Sharovka shtetl, [A predominantly Jewish village or settlement.] where Mama was born; where her father, my grandfather, Reb Moishe Rikhter, who held the same religious rank as Karl Marx’s father, [Actually, Rabbi Marx was Karl’s grandfather.] was born and lived almost one hundred years. Twenty-one lives from our family, among the country’s twenty million, were incinerated by the war.

And was it only people? The war destroyed the Jewish shtetl as a social structure and a way of life. The shtetl was not resurrected after the war, and the grave of Reb Moishe of Sharovka was leveled to the ground.

Hunger raged in Leningrad: the Germans encircled the city and laid siege. [The 900-day total siege would kill almost a million Leningraders from starvation.] Papa’s battle position was on the city’s outskirts by Forel’s Psychiatric Hospital, single kilometers behind the front lines. When the horse-drawn cart with soiled soldiers’ clothes made its way to the laundry across the city, Papa could stop by home for a couple of hours. Air-raid sirens blaring, we’d sit together on the sixth floor without bothering to descend into the bomb shelter – our family was united at least. Papa would bring a big army biscuit. It was delicious, and made from real bread. I also got a pack of “Zvezdochki”: I was still learning to smoke, wheezing and coughing and choking a little. Papa would also bring a letter from the company commander for his family. In the midst of war, it would have taken weeks to arrive by post. So I’d set out to the Vyborg district where the commander’s family lived with letter in hand. My steps were easy and light because I was thirteen and also for another reason: I simply concluded that I wasn’t going to be killed. Where the signs said “this side of street most dangerous under artillery fire,” I took the other side.

The shells thudded in the distance. Like a hammer, the metronome beat over the city, the ever-present rhythm of the loudspeakers that announced the line had not gone dead. [1,500 loudspeakers were installed in the city. For many months, between radio broadcasts and air-raid sirens, a rhythmic tick issued from the loudspeakers, proof for the city’s beleaguered and starving residents that the vital radio transmissions were on break, not permanently disrupted.] The air-raid sirens wailed without end. I kept on walking to the building on Karl Marx Prospect with the dully echoing stairwell. And then – back to the Twelfth Line. In the evenings for some reason, especially in September, when it began, one-pound “zazhigalki” – which means “incendiary bombs” – rained down on our house. I’d run up to the roof, and with the other boys we’d throw them off into the courtyard. Mama cried and pleaded and tried to forbid me from going up. “I’ll stay away from the ledge,” I promised, and I meant it – I was afraid of heights. From the roof I could see the roller coaster ablaze in the distance. Mesmerized, we watched the inferno. The roller coaster is near the zoo, across the Neva river. The red-orange glow filled half the sky.

One time in December, en route to Erisman Hospital where my wounded father was laid up, I saw a man lying in the snow under the arch outside our courtyard, wrapped up in a sheet and with a buttock carved out. To the left of the entrance, corpses are stacked outside the main building of the hospital. Inside the lobby – same picture. Nobody had taken them away yet. There are a lot of beds in the ward filled with men. It’s lunchtime. They’ve brought out cream of wheat on a flat plate. Papa gave me a few spoonfuls. I told him that I feel full as it is. The meal gave off a strong stink of kerosene.

In the beginning of March of 1942 we were preparing to cross the frozen Lake Ladoga to evacuate from Leningrad. [Over half a million Leningraders found salvation by traversing the frozen Lake Ladoga, bordering the city, to the east into the rear of Russia, outside the German encirclement and outside the range of German planes.] Papa’s legs were like logs that could not bend. Scurvy. After his discharge from the hospital, and after receiving his “white ticket,” which honorably discharged him from military service, we took him to see a doctor. We’d searched him out thanks to a plaque over his door on Sredny Prospect between the Fourth and Third Lines. Elderly, spare; I haven’t forgotten his name: Ioan. He dug in his heels over the fee: money and things were unacceptable to him. Either chocolate or canned goods, paid in advance. We agreed to a half slab of chocolate.

Our home was rich in china. Figurines, sculpted by French, German, and Scandinavian masters – father acquired them systematically, over a long time – as well as crystal vases, small bowls, glasses, eclectic in form, color, and size. Unnaturally estranged from life, just like these objets d’art, Mama’s pearl necklace and jewelry lay untouched. Even before the war Mama rarely wore them – she said it was so that people wouldn’t feel jealous.

On Friday nights a cozy clamor used to fill our home, explosions of laughter and “l’chaims” offered up by every voice, sometimes the singing of the violin. The fiddle made merry and wept in the hands of Shmil Desyatnik, whom everybody called Shmil Mahles, after his mother’s maiden name. The table is heavy with fine china; you feel full just looking at it. This winter, we didn’t need much china. We ate soup cooked from last year’s pig leather, preserved with warehouse salt and once gifted us by dad’s coworker from the factory, we ate it out of pre-revolutionary Kuznetsov china, beside a burzhuika [Standalone potbelly stove, associated with the Russian Civil War and Siege of Leningrad. It was a more efficient heating apparatus than a traditional fireplace or stove. Portable, it could be placed in the middle of the room.] potbelly stove whose flue was inserted into the tiled Dutch oven.

Mama couldn’t barter our valuables or our money for food. Only one time, brought to complete desperation over the sight of my sister Lusya’s emaciated, unrecognizable body, made only of ribs it seemed, she found a certain Vaynshtok in business with a certain Vaskin, and procured from them some sprats [Similar to sardines, often eaten at celebratory gatherings, amply salted.] and five slabs of “Golden Anchor” dark chocolate. That was back in December ’41. She tried to foist the most food onto me, with the argument that “boys are more likely to die.”

We would bring home 375 grams of bread from the bakery on Sredny Prospect [This means 7 slices a day for the family and nothing else.]. We carried it like a bowl filled with holy water. One time, Grandpa Yihiel came over. After the evening prayers, honoring custom, he dipped a morsel of bread in salt and ate it. I began to cry: it seemed to me that the piece was too big. Grandfather starved to death in March of ’42. Not long before then, Grandma Haika perished from hunger too. “I shall not die until I lay eyes upon my youngest,” she said half in prayer, half in delirium. As soon as Papa was brought home from the hospital, Grandma was brought to see him. I seated her in my child’s sled, covered her with a blanket and drove her from her home on Grazhdanskaya Street, via Demidov Lane, past the camouflaged Peter the Great, [To guard Leningrad’s landmark from targeted destruction.] over the snow-covered embankment, across the Lieutenant Schmidt Bridge, nearly in the middle of which yawned a bomb crater. Grandma was shriveled and could now fit in Lusya’s childhood bed with the side netting. For a few days she looked on at her darling boy; in the beginning of February she expired. We drove her to the synagogue on the same sled. That sled was worn with toil: our pail and kettle, dipped through a hole cut in the Neva River’s ice and filled with water – the sled carried them during a ferocious freeze around New Year’s Day, 1942; they carried our household treasures to the Maly Prospect market, and carried wood splintered off of old sheds while there was some, until we started feeding the stove with our furniture.

We crossed the wet ice of Lake Ladoga at night. Over on the bolshaia zemlia, the mainland, there were gentle people and…sushki, which are sweet, ring-shaped biscuits that every child knows. Whitish-pinkish sushki, what remained of them from before the War. An unimaginable mountain of sushki, and all of it for us. Of food there is plenty. We were reminded not to eat everything at once so that we wouldn’t get sick.

A month later, we made it to Cheboksary, the capital of the Chuvashia region, in a freight car heated by a burzhuika potbelly stove, a thousand miles away from Leningrad and the front lines. From one end of town, where Papa’s office was situated, a road ran up and down along the high riverbank of the Volga to the other, where in a two-story wooden house I worked at my first job. I was a fourteen-year-old employee with the title of statistician. Naum Moiseevich Frenkel, [An exceptionally Jewish name.] the boss who oversaw Chuvashia’s tanning and leather industry, was quick to appreciate my father’s expertise, and sent him to manage the tiny enterprises in the cities of Shumerlya, Kanash, and Batyrevo. I also worked at Shumerlya as an inventory associate at the butter factory. I was owed twenty kilograms of buttermilk a month.

We were resettled at a landlady’s, a fair-skinned, young-looking blonde. Laughing brightly, she told us that like everybody else in her little town she didn’t know that Jews were people – “Jew” was what they called goats around there.

The year 1944 marched on. The siege broken, my father was sent back to Leningrad in August to restore his business. We’re back on the Twelfth Line, but in the neighboring house: ours was hit by a thousand-pound bomb two days after we evacuated in 1942. No bombs fell on the house across from the Academy of Arts, but there’s no point in walking over there. The letter that I wrote to Egon was returned to Chuvashia, where we lived in the early days of our evacuation, with a scrap of paper pasted on the envelope and two words written on it: “Addressee deceased.” [He is buried with his mother in the Piskaryovskoe Cemetery in St. Petersburg along with 600,000 victims of the Siege of Leningrad. https://xn----7sbb6acutmle6l.xn–p1ai/regions/78/69110041/. They both died during the unending winter of 1942.]

I’ve lost two school years; I’m feverishly making them up. In the spring of ’46, inside the St. Peter’s School [Also known as Peterschule.] on Nevsky Prospect, I take correspondence exams for the last three grades of school. I can go to any college I want. I sit for entrance exams for the Institute of Precision Mechanics and Optics.

Mothers don’t have to worry anymore; mine went away for the summer to Vinkovtsy in Ukraine, where I was born. Life is heavenly. I can’t put my finger on it, but life was good. You can even say that it felt easy, although I didn’t sleep much: I crammed three grades of school into one year. And I had to travel to the far side of the city every morning, like I used to in old times to the commander’s family, except these days I’m taking the #18 tram line, crammed with young men back from the war, to the Military Mechanical College. Maybe I felt light because I didn’t have to hear the leaden ticks of the metronome? Or because the war was over? And the streets were thronged with people?

There is jubilation on Nevsky Prospect. [The Fifth Avenue of Leningrad.] Stalin and Churchill’s calm voices project over the radio. The war is behind us. At seventeen years old you’re not old enough to make generalizations, but still: however enormous the tragedy, the war ended with the triumph of Man. He crushed the enemy, but it wasn’t only that. We overpowered the ideology of the Nazi, his worldview, his mind cloaked in twilight. The victory standard was raised by the brotherhood of the whole world, moved and imperiled by a common danger.

When men were sent to the front lines, it didn’t occur to anybody to institute discrimination against them. In the trenches, in the fight against the enemy’s rearguard, in the Siege of Leningrad, in the resettlement of evacuees into the country’s hinterland, in the supreme efforts by engineers, scientists, ordinary workers, everybody – nobody was “chosen” for mistreatment, there was no “Chosen People,” my family wasn’t singled out. But really, the Twenty-One were fate’s chosen ones, a great and bitter honor for us who survived, an indulgence paid to be saved from the monstrous face of chauvinism. This is how we felt then.

My parents and I could barely squeeze inside the Vyborg Palace of Culture to hear Ilya Ehrenburg [Soviet Jewish poet and humanist.] speak. His lecture, “The Victory of Man,” sounded to me like an incantation. I don’t know what will happen next, but I’m sure it will be for the better. No doubts, no fear – we can solve anything, life’s big problems and its little trifles.

They’re selling cigarettes again on the corner of the Eighth Line and Sredny Prospect, single sticks for now; cans are piled again behind the corner grocer’s shopwindows, curiously only red-and-white labels with crabs; we exchange our ration cards [Food was traded for ration cards in Leningrad until 2 years after the war, 1947.] for something other than bread on Brodksy Street; we sweeten our tea with sugar substitute – you can finally get your hands on some.

Nothing that’s difficult weighs on us anymore. We talk about about upcoming vacations. We lug home from a consignment store, the one on Nevsky, across fromthe Art Cinema, a big couch complete with mirror and two side tables, 11,000 rubles in total. Mama carefully lays out our embroidered lace napkins – such is the style now. The newspapers print the list of winners of the Stalin Prize, the highest honor in our country; one of them, for the development of a new kind of weapon, [The Nudelman-Rikhter autocannon.] is awarded to Aron Abramovich Rikhter, our cousin Arele.

The next summer we vacation in Gorodok again. I took a trip to Vitebsk. Ruins, vacant windows among the remains of walls [This image and those that follow depict Marc Chagall’s Solitude, painted in 1933, hanging now in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.]. Above the city, a bright sun, sparkling in a broken piece of glass somewhere under the roof. And there’s an angel, or maybe a saintly-pure maiden, for some reason always facing away from you, soaring in the sky above sharp-tipped clouds. On earth – a little she-goat out of Mama’s stories; within reach, a fiddle. Nearby, in his tallis [Jewish prayer shawl.] and his troubles, sits a rebbe – an old man, resembling Shmil Mahles, holding a Torah. [The sacred scrolls of the Jews.] He has reasons for his sorrows: the homes are destroyed, and the inhabitants have disappeared into the earth. It’s as if Marc Chagall could see what would be left of his Vitebsk.

Once again, we come back to Volkovo Village and take the rattling carriage from the train station. Little Town is coming back to life; whoever is still alive comes back. The Germans killed Dovechaye the coachman. The landlord Ivan Danilovich’s wife welcomes us to the country house. Ivan Danilovich served the Germans as the rural head in charge of Little Town, and achieved much distinction by killing Jews. He started with Mihel, his neighbor.