This section would have followed Chapter 7: Vera and Alla—Long Lost Sisters.
Once again the grandmothers have gathered at the kitchen table to reflect. This time their memories flare up as they think about their own childhoods.
Baba Lyuba: You know the bit about Alla and Meri being sisters. That should have begiun not at the Institute in 1974 but with us back in Gorodok even before the 1917 Revolution.
Rosa: But we weren’t friends back in Gorodok.
Baba Lyuba: It’s always important to offer historical context. Friendship isn’t the issue. You and I lived in that down at the heels shtetl of 10,000. We lived life on the edge of the sword.
Rosa: Who cares if my Papa owned a grocery or that I went to gymnasium? What I do long for is Shabbos* and Yuntiv*. On those days we could seal ourselves off from the tsar and his decrees, from our neighbors and their hatred.
Baba Lyuba: Remember, I also went to gymnasium and I think everyone should know there were only ten girls total in secondary school. I was destined to leave that nothing shtetl. Rosa: Rae, you’re quiet, you’re not even offering us food.
Grandma Rae: Life on the edge of the sword. Lyuba, you have a way with words. I grew up in a big town, Ekatrinaslav*, and we thought we were safe since my Papa’s job was so important. He worked on the new electric trolleys. We were even allowed to live outside the Jewish quarter. I tried to forget but now I can’t seem to think about anything else but the morning we awoke to horse hooves and heard screaming. The neighbors were warning us of a pogrom*. Mama herded the three of us children into the wardrobe and arranged a down quilt to try and muffle any noise.
I don’t remember what I knew but I knew fear. I was seven years old and supposed to help keep my sister and brother calm. I felt frozen. They never reached us but so many were killed, so many were hurt. I turned away when I saw a bandaged eye or the mark of a sword’s slash. At shul-- so many had torn jackets*. The day after the pogrom, Mama said to Papa,”we’re leaving for America.” Papa didn’t want to go. What would he do—live off the charity of his brother-in-law in Newark-New Jersey-America? Mama stood up straight to her full 4’9” height, hands on her hips and said, I am going to my sister in America with the children. You can stay or you can come.”
And we all left.
Baba Lyuba: Okay, it’s a story everyone knows. Millions did what you did—just escaped. We stayed to change Russia.
Rosa: Or we stayed because we couldn’t think of what else to do, how to do otherwise. You were us until age seven, Rae. Lyuba, maybe you believed the Revolutionary talk but in our family we were like Rae. We were huddled together to see what the Revolution would bring for the Jews.
Rae: Now we do need to eat. This is the meat and potatoes part of the story so we’ll eat essig flaish with roasted potatoes. Sit and enjoy. Enough talk about the dark days.
Baba Lyuba: We have even darker days we can talk about Rae, but that’s for another time.
Among the 10,000 inhabitants of Gorodok, a small, down-at-the-heels shtetl in Belarus near Minsk were Alla’s maternal grandparents, Rosa and Matus. Matus’s father owned a large house with orchards and gardens. After surviving the Great War, he married Musia and they intended to remain in Gorodok and raise a family. Rosa’s family had a grocery in Gorodok. Matus and Rosa were from religious families that encouraged education and more education. Alla’s grandmother Rosa, like Meri’s grandmother Lyuba, also attended Gymnasium at a time when only ten girls were enrolled in the secondary school.
Living in the Pale: Life on the Edge of the Sword
For most, Fiddler on the Roof is the quintessential story of Russian Jews under the tsars. The Sholom Aleichem story and Jerry Bock play overflow with Jewish humor and Jewish angst under the tsars. The precariousness of Jewish existence is introduced with the fiddler on the roof and expressed yet again in the the rabbi’s heartfelt prayer: “May God bless and keep the Tsar... far away from us!” That prayer was never fulfilled for Jews. The tsars, beginning with Catherine the Great in 1794 and continuing until Nicholas II in 1917, kept Jews confined to a small area of the newly expanded Russia, known as the Pale of Settlement and formerly the Polish kingdom. It lay at the westernmost edge of the Russian Empire. The Jewish population peaked at 5,000,000 and the borders of the Pale expanded and contracted depending on the whims of the tsars and their advisers. For each and every Jew who lived in the Pale, the question loomed. “how do I live?”
There was no question about whether or not to practice Judaism, whether to observe the Sabbath, whether to keep kosher, whether or not to marry a fellow Jew if you were planning on living your life in the Jewish village, the shtetl. The village had its norms and if you wanted to live there, you followed the norms. Theology was not at issue. Your behavior allowed you to belong. Not belonging had serious consequences. If one transgressed community norms, he could be put in herem, or ostracized and banned from the community. Where would you go? This was not America of the rugged individualist. This was Imperial Russia where individuals survived only if they stayed in their place and were surrounded by community. Even the tsar had his entourage and his priests and his advisers. Russia was life in a jungle where the strong preyed on the weak and the weak survived by their camouflage, their pack, and their wits.
Most Jews were poor during the 120 year lifespan of the Pale until its death in 1917 . Some were better off. How do I live? was not a question about lifestyle but about remaining alive. The restrictions and punitive legislation against the Jews waxed and waned over the years.
In hindsight, it seems ludicrous that tsars spent so much of their energies on dealing with the “Jewish problem”. Jews had to wonder why tsar after tsar had to oppress them when all they wanted was to live their lives in peace. That’s the way it was. What could you expect as a Jew in the Pale? In addition to a web of rules limiting land ownership, the key to wealth in the nineteenth century, Jews could rarely enter a Russian university blocking upward mobility through education. Of course, Jews had their own educational system in the Pale that ensured every Jew would at least be literate, but university education was the ticket out of the Pale.
The cruelest of the decrees, the Rekrutschina came in 1827. The attack from Tsar Nicholas I targeted Jewish boys, aged twelve. Even before their Bar Mitzvah, Jewish boys could be drafted into the Russian army for up to twenty-five years. The purpose was not to arm twelve year old Jewish boys and teach them how to fight, but to separate them from their family, their traditions, and try to create Jewish amnesia. Jewish parents were wild with fear. They were back in the land of Egypt where the Pharaoh had declared all Jewish males were to be thrown into the Nile. There was no Moses to save their boys, there were no baskets, no Princess to rescue their sons from the Nile.
There were loopholes in the law and Jewish families stretched for the loopholes like brass rings. If you were an only son, you would be spared. The tsars weren’t blind to the evasions and they imposed conscription quotas on communities and rewarded those who brought in the recruits. Within the Jewish communities there was often someone desperate enough, angry enough to defy the Jewish norms. He was known as the “khapper”, the kidnapper. He was no imaginary bogeyman, but a true demon in the minds of Jewish parents. Once your son was in the Russian army, he was gone--forever.
All Russian tsars from Catherine in the 1790s to Nicholas II (1917) pondered and acted on the “Jewish Question.” Their question was whether to use the carrot or the stick. Alexander II tried the carrot. Like his ancestors, Alexander II believed in the trinity of Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationalism. But he removed some of the restrictions on Jews hoping they would discard their Jewishness and assimilate into Russia with its newly emancipated serfs. Many Jews rushed the open door and by 1873 a significant number of Jews had moved to cities like St. Petersburg, enrolled their children in Russian schools and “Russified.”
The shots that killed Alexander II in 1881 killed liberalization. Passover 1881 was marked by an outbreak of vicious government sanctioned pogroms followed in October by more and more legal restrictions against Jews. The May Laws tightened restrictions on where Jews could live in the Pale of Settlement and their right to own property. Meri’s, Alla’s and our grandparents were born into a world where it was unfortunate to be Jewish. You had only a 3% chance of attending university. By 1891 most Jews were deported from Moscow. No more than 5% of doctors in the Imperial Army could be Jews. These highly restrictive and discriminatory measures even elicited a denunciation from U.S. President Benjamin Harrison in a Congressional address on December 9, 1891.
President Harrison would not change the policy of Alexander III and the restrictive legislation continued. In 1882, despite constituting a majority in many areas of the Pale of Settlement, Jews were not allowed to participate in local elections. In 1883 a new ukaze, or edict, was issued - “The Law Concerning the Names”. If a Jew took on a Christian name, he or she would be subject to criminal punishment. Jews had to use their birth names in all forms of official and unofficial identification. The tsar’s policy now was that assimilation was impossible.
There was no relief for the Jews from Nicholas II, who succeeded his father in 1894. He continued the same repressive measures including casting a blind eye to if not actually encouraging pogroms. Now there were 5.5 million Jews living in an area of 362,000 square miles (4% of the Russian Empire). 40% of those Jews lived on charity. Like Tevye and his family in Fiddler on the Roof many Russian Jews felt compelled to flee following a particularly brutal pogrom. Until 1917 these laws remained. Because of this oppression, between 1881-1920, more than two million Jews left the Russian Empire.
No longer could repression solve the “Jewish Question” and no longer would Jews shrug their shoulders when pogroms erupted heralded by the terrifying thunder of horses’ hooves, then screams from bloodied neighbors and, finally, the inconsolable wailing of the bereaved. No more would Jews hide when spring meant Russian newspaper headlines screamed that Jews were baking matzah with the blood of a Christian boy. Ridiculous, but the Russian peasants had no cause to doubt their priests or their little father, the tsar of all Russias. Now when the Russian police nailed up the latest ukase from the tsar, Jews acted not as one community with prayer their only recourse, but with all manner of protests and subterfuge.
The once homogeneous community began to fracture. Some Jews began to dissent and rebel from the strictures of their own community as well as against the tsar and his autocratic rule. Many left for the US. Far fewer immigrated to Palestine. Divergent philosophies beckoned.
Each one of our ancestors had to decide: which path? History was unfolding and no one could turn the page ahead to ensure his or her action was the right one. The authors’ great grandparents were typical of Russian Jews who chose to leave. Meri and Alla’s great grandparents typify the range of pre-Revolutionary era Russian Jews who remained.
Among the 10,000 inhabitants of Gorodok, a small, down-at-the-heels shtetl in Belarus near Minsk were Alla’s maternal grandparents, Rosa and Matus. Matus’s father owned a large house with orchards and gardens. After surviving the Great War, he married Musia and they intended to remain in Gorodok and raise a family. Rosa’s family had a grocery in Gorodok. Matus and Rosa were from religious families that encouraged education and more education. Alla’s grandmother Rosa, like Meri’s grandmother Lyuba, also attended Gymnasium at a time when only ten girls were enrolled in the secondary school.
Alla’s paternal grandmother, Gita, grew up in a religious family in Lithuania. Abram, Alla’s paternal grandfather, however, was raised in a non religious big Jewish family. Her grandfather Abram was barred from higher education and became a watchmaker. Abram was focused on learning as much as possible and pushing Alla’s father Naum toward education. Gita and Abram’s marriage was a practical match. He was “old and rich” and she was from a very poor family.
The Russian Revolution: Is it good for the Jews?
“Dem yidns simkhe is mit a bisl shrek.” “A Jew’s joy is not without fright.”
March 15, 1917: The news flashed across the globe. Nicholas II had abdicated! The Provisional Government under Prince Kerensky remained in power following the February Revolution. For Jews this was a cause for true celebration. Kerensky was a true liberal. Hadn’t he challenged the tsarist military to remove all restrictions against Jews? Hadn’t he also challenged the Tsar and his ministers to eliminate their benighted prejudices against Jews and move into the enlightened twentieth century?
Unfortunately, the Jews’ celebration and rapid fire creation of political parties to participate in the new democracy was futile. By October 1917 another revolution rolled through St. Petersburg and continued through Russia lifting the Bolsheviks on the rising tide of power. At first glance, the roster of Jewish names in the Bolshevik party could be reassuring-there was Lev Davidovich Bronshtain (Leon Trotsky) heading the Red Army. Yakov Sverdlov, Kamenev, and Zinoviev all held key positions. But these Jews had repudiated their faith and their heritage and were even antagonistic to the establishment of a Jewish section in the Communist Party.
The Russians did not stand, hands folded behind their backs, and watch the Bolsheviks entrench themselves. From the beginning, there was opposition which coalesced into the “Whites.” And how did the Whites build up their support against the godless Bolsheviks? They trotted out the old banners of anti-semitism rallying the Russian people. The rallying cry among the White troops became “Strike at the Jews and Save Russia!”
“Bless yourselves, beat the Jews, overthrow the People’s Commissars!” read the Russian Orthodox clergy to their flocks on Sundays.
Between the vicious pogroms and the hoof beats of Red Armies and White Armies galloping through Jewish settlements, what choice was there? Most Jews just tried to survive. For some surveying the choices, the godless Bolsheviks seemed the better gamble. After all, they were encouraging Jews to join, Jews could rise to prominence. Most of the Russian intellegentsia had fled and the Bolsheviks were in search of literate members. By 1917, 1175 Jews were listed as Bolshevik Party members. As the Civil War continued, Jews also realized that the Red Army was their protector and they joined the Red Army to avenge the 30,000 Jewish deaths at the hands of the Whites or to ensure protection for their families.
When the Revolution began, Alla’s great-grandparents were not in the forefront or even in the background. Like most Russians, they were confused when the tsar abdicated, unsure during Kerensky’s tenure and befuddled by the rhetoric of the Bolsheviks in October 1917. Gilia was grateful to have lived to see Russia withdraw from the Great War, but he had no idea what lay ahead. Like most Jews of the Pale, Alla’s great grandparents and grandparents were apolitical. They wanted to be left to live their lives. They were alert to the subtle changes in the political climate and with the exception of one uncle exiled to Siberia, they rode out the tempest intact as a family.
From Lenin to Stalin, from hope to fear
Alla’s parents were born after the Revolution when the Communist regime was consolidating its power. Her dad, Naum was born in 1922 in Penza. The Civil War had ended in 1921 and Lenin was in control. There were severe shortages and the chaos of the Civil War was still swirling.
In 1928 when Alla’s mother, Bella, was born in Leningrad, Stalin had assumed power. He was beginning to eliminate those he called his enemies and there was a sense that the utopia and hope of 1917 was slipping out of reach. Stalin contrived to establish himself as Lenin’s legitimate heir in the public eye and among the Communist Party members. To that end, he had suggested Petrograd’s new name, Leningrad, only four days after Lenin’s death in 1924. Bella was born into a world where political struggle was a very deadly game. To her parents, Leningrad represented a chance for advancement for their children. Rosa’s family had moved there in 1925 so that her brothers could get a higher education. Rosa married Matus in Gorodok in a traditional Jewish wedding and they, too, moved to Leningrad to join the rest of her family. The Soviet doctrine that the family no longer mattered, the state was the family, meant very little to Alla’s family. No matter what Stalin said or did, family came first.
By the 1930s Naum’s family also established themselves in Leningrad, a town closed to most Jews in tsarist times. Abram, Gita, and Naum settled in Pyat Uglov, a Jewish neighborhood close to the Grand Choral Synagogue in Leningrad. Like families, religion was of no value to the Soviet State, but they did allow the Grand Choral Synagogue, to remain in Leningrad. All other Jewish communal buildings were repurposed. Naum’s family lived in an old and deteriorating apartment building. It had been gerrymandered after the revolution to accommodate multiple families in its seven rooms. Each family was assigned one room and shared the kitchen and bathroom. Gita’s father was able somehow to leave Russia around 1925 and went to England. From there he immigrated to South Africa and was able to take his children Rivka and Aron with him. Gita and her sister Anna were left behind as Stalin closed the exit doors.
By the time Lenin died in 1924 he had experimented with a mixed economy allowing some private farming and small enterprises through the New Economic Plan. It was working and the newly formed USSR was recovering when he died. Lenin had made no plans for his successor except to warn his comrades in Last Will and Testament about Stalin. After suppressing the will and consolidating his power in 1929, Stalin instituted a strict Five Year Economic Plan as well as a series of purges and planned famines which he controlled through strict censorship and the liberal use of the secret police. For Jews like Alla’s great grandfather Gilia in Gorodok, Stalin’s rule became a reign of terror. Alla’s great grandfather was labeled a kulak, a rich peasant, lost everything and became a permanent enemy of the state. The family was forced to move to the city to survive. Alla’s great uncle was sent to Uhta in the far North to a prison camp for ten years. Like many families, hers did not mention this. It would spoil their anketa, their biography. It is estimated that 14.5 million Russians were killed during the dekulakization,the pazkulachanaya,and subsequent famine. Throughout the thirties Stalin continued to turn on his own people beginning with the assassination of Leningrad party chief, Kirov and continuing with the Great Purge that eliminated most of the Soviet Army’s best generals as well as a host of party higher ups, intellectuals, and anyone labeled an enemy of the state. Stalin was cannibalizing his country. As Hitler geared up for war, Stalin signed a non aggression pact with him and ignored his own spies who warned Stalin that Hitler intended to turn against Stalin once he had conquered western Europe.
World War II: The Great Patriotic War
Double Jeopardy: Jewish and Living in Leningrad
World War II, the Great Patriotic War, arrived in the Soviet Union in June 1941 with the USSR only partially prepared. Soldiers were quickly mobilized including 500,000 Jewish men, 3% of the Red Army. Entire factories and populations moved to the interior. Approximately 900,000 Jews were among those those who moved east as the Nazi forces moved east in June 1941. In October 1941 most of the Soviet government was moved to Kuibyshev. For Alla’s family the Great Patriotic War was the defining era. Her dad was drafted in 1941 and sent to study at the military communication school. By 1942 he was ready for front line duty and served in the Pulkovo Regiment to the south of Leningrad defending his city.. The Germans besieged his city on Sept. 9, 1941. Naum knew his father was left in the city working in a factory trying to provide ammunition, boots, belts,and bags to the Red Army. His mother Gita and little sister had not been evacuated and they, too, remained in the darkened and hungry city. No one anticipated how devastating the siege would be. Naum’s family was starving like all other Leningraders. Each night while other soldiers slept, Naum walked many kilometers north into the blackness of the city feeling his way to his family and bringing with him his soldier’s ration to share with his family. They survived and that small piece of bread each day made the difference. Naum earned many medals for his participation in the defense of Leningrad, the liberation of Eastern Europe and the final battle in Berlin. There are no medals for saving your family but Naum demonstrated his love of his family and was amply rewarded by their survival.
The siege cost the lives of 1.5 million civilians and soldiers in Leningrad. No one can forget the siege. Although Stalin would not permit a mass evacuation of Leningrad, 1.4 million women and children were allowed to leave. Many died en route. Alla’s grandmother Rosa and her mother Bella were evacuated and arrived first in Stalingrad with the engineering agency. When Stalingrad became too dangerous with the German attack in July 1942, Rosa and her 14 year old daughter Bella moved to Saratov in southern Russia where Rosa worked long hours in a secret military factory producing ammunition. Once the siege ended in Leningrad in 1944, they returned home to a devastated but not demoralized city. The Great Patriotic War bled Russia of 26.6 million citizens, 1.5 million of whom were Jews.
Alla’s four grandparents and parents had survived The Great Patriotic War and they all returned home to Leningrad . To survive was not only lucky but miraculous. Like all the world’s citizens in 1945 the task was to move forward in life, transform the horror of war into memories and allow the new monuments to speak about the past. For Leningrad, the war memories were never forgotten. On buildings pockmarked with German shells, the Russians placed a sign, ____.
The Soviet government made a decision not to allude to the Holocaust in history books, films, novels, or commemorations and only make mention of the “victims of Fascism”. It was not until recently that Soviet History was revised. In 2008 the Russian embassy interviewed Russians and published a book about Russians in Scandinavia. There is a chapter about Naum Belenkij, “a soldier,a hero, and war veteran.”
Naum’s final days in the war were spent in Berlin. The surrender of the Nazis meant the end of hostilities and in the euphoria of May 1945, Naum crossed into the American sector carrying cigarettes and vodka rations to trade for American chocolate. It would have been possible to defect at that moment, but it did not occur to Naum to leave his family.
From Stalin to Khrushchev, from fear to hope
Like many young veterans everywhere, Naum accepted his medals for bravery and placed them carefully in their case to be removed only for Victory Day when he displayed them proudly on his jacket. He was headed to dental school along with his sister. In 1947 he met Bella who was studying to be a dental technician as well as Meri’s mother Fira who was also studying dentistry. Naum and Bella fell in love and married in 1948 under the Jewish wedding canopy by a rabbi—not a common practice for Jews in the USSR. They were aware of the rampant anti-semitism and held the Jewish marriage ceremony in secret. The worst outbreak of post-war anti-semitism was yet to come in 1952 and 1953 before Stalin’s death. Still, Naum and Bella were defiant in their own way, marrying the way their ancestors had married and also avoiding membership in the Communist Party.
Naum was a civilian for only five years. In 1950 he was called back into the Soviet military as a doctor although he was trained as a dentist. He was posted in Pilau (Baltiysk in 1946), the westernmost point of the newly enlarged USSR. The USSR maintained a large naval base on the northern part of the Vistula Spit. He and Bella moved together to Kaliningrad (formerly Konigsberg) and raised their young family there in primitive conditions. Bella was a frontier wife who had to grow vegetables, fish for dinner, bake bread, cook, clean, and care for the children. Bella returned to Leningrad in August 1952 to give birth to Gera and again in March 1957 to deliver Alla. Not only was the medical care in Leningrad better, Bella also had her family as support. By 1960 Naum was decommisioned and the family returned home to Pyat Uglov in Leningrad.
In 1959 the Jewish population of Leningrad was 168,646 Jews or 5.1% of the population of the city. From the time Khrushchev had assumed power, there was a liberalization of religious practice in Leningrad. Jews could pray in the synagogue, bake matzot for Passover, hold courses in Hebrew. In 1961 after Naum and his family had returned, the specter of anti-Jewish trials reminiscent of the Stalin era reemerged in Leningrad. Pechersky, Dynkin, and Kaganov, members of the Leningrad religious Jewish community, were charged with maintaining contacts with the embassy of a capitalist state, i.e. Israel. They were convicted and similar trials repeated the same script with different defendants in 1968.
By the time Alla was four, her parents were working day and evening to provide for their children. Both parents worked in a State dental clinic, Naum as a dentist and Bella as a dental technician. Evenings, they converted their apartment in Pyat Uglov into a private dental clinic where they treated patients na levo , on the side.
Knowledge of her family history and Jewish History came to Alla in short installments. Until she was an adult and freed from the Soviet regime, she could not join her family history to that of her fellow Jews or to the history of Russia.