My Father, Herman Bernstein, in his professional life a dignified journalist and editor, was in his spare time a very easy mark for the fly-by-night publishing firms which, in the 200’s, produced numerous imitations of “Who’s Who in America.” And when one of these firms sent him a questionnaire asking for his favorite hobby, after pondering “people” and “travel,” he wrote in the word “Russia.”

My own opinion, even at that time, was that “hobby” was a feeble description for an activity which consumed so many of my father’s waking hours. “Second vocation” would have been a more accurate term. After all, he had been born in Russia, and he had earned much of his income, off and on, because of his knowledge of the language and the country. He had traveled widely in Russia and Europe as a correspondent for such American newspapers as the New York Herald and the New York Times. He had interviewed Leo Tolstoy at the great man’s famous homestead, Yasnaya Polyana, and for six months, in the course of an assignment for the Herald, he had lived in a freight car in Siberia with General Graves’ expeditionary force. He had been refused admittance to Russia by the Tsarist Government before World War I, and by the Soviet Government after it. He had translated many plays and stories by Russian authors, and written many articles about Russian affairs.

Whether because of these far-ranging activities, or perhaps because he and his hobby were finally listed in countless “Who’s Who’s,” my father soon found himself the bewildered magnet for a growing collection of Russian friends. They swarmed to him like moths to an electric light bulb. No matter where we moved, they found him out. They would head for our house the moment they landed in New York. Frequently he would learn of their imminent arrival during their restless days on Ellis Island, and this was particularly expensive because he was constantly having to put up bonds, write letters of recommendation or introduction, and travel to Washington to make personal appeals for special cases. The thick, hearty, Russian voices were always on the telephone, and my entire Russian vocabulary today consists of the four words that mean, “Mr. Bernstein is not at home.”

There were writers with inside stories on the Russo-Japanese War, the execution of the Tsar’s family, and the condition of the Jews in Poland. There were singers who once had been the toast of Moscow and Odessa, painters who had starved in garrets from Minsk to Pinsk. And there were many bluff, hearty men who came for a glass of tea, bringing their suitcases along.

How my father really felt about all these people I could never quite figure out. Occasionally he would go to great lengths to avoid them and the responsibilities they blithely thrust upon him. Most of the time, he was genuinely hospitable. They would come in, their voices warm and husky in their throats, their heads brimming with ambitious plans, their hearts burning with tales of injustice, and he would bring them into the parlor. We had French doors between the parlor and the dining-room in our apartment in New York, and these he would close carefully. The rest of us would sit in the dining-room, while through the doors would seep a steady flow of muffled Russian. In these sessions, my father seemed to do little of the talking.

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On special occasions, the Russians became, for a time, part of our family group. But sooner or later money problems would come up, and then my mother would become angry. She liked the writers and actors and singers, and loved to advise with them on their family problems. But she felt that they were too eager to dip into the family treasury. After years of experience, she developed a sixth warning sense that told her when a Russian was about to ask for a loan. At the precise psychological moment, she would engage in pointed conversations with my father. Her favorite theme involved a neat comparison of the total number of people in Russia with the total number of dollars in my father’s bank account, with obvious mathematical conclusions.

As for my sisters and me, the Russians were simply a natural part of a life which, made our family different from any other we knew. We were rather proud of them. Often I would round up some of the other children on our block to wait outside the house for the bearded, preoccupied, exotic individuals who would walk unerringly to our door.

One of my father’s Russian friends was the nephew of Leo Tolstoy. He came to New York a few months after his uncle died, in 19110. This was before my time, but I have heard the story often. His name was Kuzminsky. He was the son of Senator Kuzminsky, who had married Tolstoy’s sister, and his brother was one of the first Russian aviators. Kuzminsky had a balalaika which he played with considerable skill, while singing Russian gypsy melodies. His mission in America was to sell Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s estate, to an American millionaire. One day he showed my father a list of millionaires whom he intended to approach. The list included John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, Charles Schwab, Jacob H. Schiff, Daniel Guggenheim and Adolph Lewisohn.

My father told him to forget about Schiff, Guggenheim and Lewisohn, because as Jews they would be forbidden by the Tsarist Government to buy land in the province of Tula, which was outside the Pale of Jewish Settlement. As for the others, my father did not believe they would be interested, either. But Kuzminsky was not discouraged, and wrote to all the millionaires, telling them that they could immortalize themselves by buying his famous uncle’s estate.

Schwab, Rockefeller and Morgan were not interested. Kuzminsky become gloomy. But one day he came rushing to our house in a delirium of excitement to tell my father that Andrew Carnegie had invited him to call the following week. He asked my father to come along as an interpreter to clinch the deal.

They arrived at Carnegie’s home on Fifth Avenue at nine o’clock in the evening. The millionaire was very cordial. He listened to Kuzminsky’s offer of immortality, and then told my father:

Please say to him that the honor of being immortalized through the purchase of Yasnaya Polyana does not belong to an American. That honor surely belongs to the Russian people. I am a great admirer of Tolstoy, but I think it would be very improper for me to deprive the Russian people of a national shrine.

At first Kuzminsky was shocked into silence by this answer. Then he explained that Yasnaya Polyana would probably continue to be a Russian shrine, but Mr. Carnegie would be doing a noble thing if he would buy and endow it.

“What could I do with Yasnaya Polyana?” Carnegie asked.

“Oh,” said Kuzminsky, “you could establish a Tolstoy museum there, or a Tolstoy university. It would be the finest investment an American millionaire could make. It would make your name immortal!”

“A Tolstoy university?” said Mr. Carnegie. “What would happen to the students in a Tolstoy university? If they tried to follow the teachings of Tolstoy, his theory of nonresistance, his pacifism, his religious doctrines, they would be sent to Siberia. It would be a university without students. No, I don’t want that on my conscience.”

That was the end of Kuzminsky’s efforts to sell Yasnaya Polyana. He was living at the Waldorf Astoria, and he stayed in his room, playing his balalaika plaintively. He had a song which he had composed:

Sin ya senatora,
Brat aviatora,
Plemyanik Tolstova—
I bolshe ni slova.

Which reads in free translation something like this:

I’m the son of a senator,
The brother of an aviator,
The nephew of Tolstoy—
And nothing more.

After a few days he left the hotel, giving instructions that his bill was to be sent to him in care of my father, and we never heard from him again.

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We had a farm in the Berkshires, and one Russian family came for a week-end and stayed for the whole summer. I do not mention their name because the head of the family learned to play pinochle that summer, and began to cheat at it. My mother used to enjoy an occasional evening of cards and played with him “for fun.” Then our visitor suggested that the game be made more interesting by the introduction of a few pennies on the table. In an entire evening, the stakes seldom amounted to more than twenty-five cents, but he strove desperately to win them. His cheating was not very clever, for he insisted on keeping score and, being a poor arithmetician, spent too much time fixing the score pad. The second time she noticed it, my mother decided to confer with my father. They wrestled with their consciences and concluded it would be easier all around if she simply let him win.

About a week later, a cousin of ours, a very blunt fellow, came up to spend a few days with us. After twenty minutes of playing, he noticed the fumbling at the score pad. For an hour he kept quiet, while his round face grew steadily redder. At last, he shouted, “You’re a funny duck, my friend!” and snatched the score pad away. The Russian left the house, irreparably wounded, and refused to play pinochle for five days.

The next summer we entertained the Golinkins. Mr. Golinkin looked like a tall Stalin, with a heavy face and a thick mustache. He was a silent, unhappy man who dreamed of establishing an opera company in Palestine. His wife was a coloratura soprano with a voice that could travel across the Housatonic Valley and echo back from Mount Everett, a total distance of eight miles. She sang and spoke only in Russian, never bothering to learn a word of English. She was short and plump, and even in the country smeared her face several times a day with layers of cream, powder, rouge and mascara. My friends from the village would bicycle surreptitiously past our home in hopes of seeing her. She awakened in us the ideas we discussed behind the barn about burlesque shows in New York and high life in Paris. She was, of course, a thoroughly moral woman.

My father had been obliged to put up a large bond to admit them into the United States, and he was continually trying to prevent their becoming public charges. Like most of his Russians they were penniless and, like many, they did not intend to stay permanently in this country. They were interested only in raising money for the opera venture in Palestine. To keep them from starvation, my father proposed that Mrs. Golinkin give my sister Dorothy singing lessons.

Dorothy has a sweet minor voice, hardly of operatic quality or volume. But Mrs. Golinkin threw herself into the assignment, convinced that she could transform Dorothy into a concert artiste. Playing a loud piano accompaniment and pointing to the various parts of the body from which Dorothy’s sounds should come, she coached my sister rigorously. From time to time, she would grunt disapprovingly and stop playing. This was a warning that she intended to demonstrate in more than mere sign language. Opening her mouth and hunching up her tongue, she would run through the scale, winding up with a piercing high note that would bring me in from the meadow. Often I would stand in the doorway behind Mrs. Golinkin, point my thumbs at my ears and waggle my hands at Dorothy. This would irritate my sister, who was self-conscious about the lessons anyway. Her voice would go completely flat, and Mrs. Golinkin would then run through the scale for her, shrieking her high notes. One day Mrs. Golinkin turned around abruptly and caught me. She leaped from her stool and went to the kitchen to talk with my mother. In a soprano barrage of Russian, she told her story. My mother said, “Mrs. Golinkin is very insulted. She says you are ridiculing her art. She was a very great diva in Russia, and now that she is penniless you are waggling your hands at her. She says she and her husband will go to New York right away.

The Golinkins did not carry out the threat. Next day, Mrs. Golinkin came down on time for Dorothy’s singing lesson, and I could hear her running through the scales all the way to the brook across the meadows. Some months later, they left the country and may very well, for all I know, have established an opera company in Tel Aviv.

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In 1930 President Hoover appointed my father United States Minister to Albania. In Tirana we were sure that none of my father’s Russians would find us. We were, of course, quite wrong. From Belgrade came a Russian journalist who had been a member of Kerensky’s cabinet before the Bolsheviks took over. From Paris came Russian actors to explore the possibilities of the Albanian stage. But the Russian visitor who gave us the most trouble was different from all the others. He was no artist, but a business man who had gone to the United States some years earlier. He was not poor at all—on the contrary, he had made a fortune in business, and was now on a de luxe world tour. Finally, he could speak a kind of English. He had visited Palestine, and then Egypt, where he had taken many reels of moozies depicting the pyramids, the spinces, and the mumsies. From Alexandria he had flown to Rome, and from Rome to Tirana.

The trouble he gave us was with our maid, Thea. She was a buxom, outgiving Austrian girl in her forties, and, looking back, I think she may have been somewhat anti-Semitic. At any rate, it was Thea’s job to keep the upper floors clean, make the beds, change the linens, and carry out all the other heavy duties of an upstairs maid.

On the last day of the Russian’s visit, while we were at tea, Thea came flouncing downstairs and stood in the doorway, beckoning vigorously to my mother.

“Madam,” she said in a hoarse whisper, “I must tell you this. That man who is staying with you—”

“You mean our guest?” asked my mother.

“Ja, that man. I do not like to tell you this. But he offered me money.”

“Well,” said my mother, rather pleased, “this is his last day here. He is leaving this evening. He was merely trying to tip you.”

“Nein, nein, that is not what I mean. He offered me money for other services.” Her expression was fraught with wordless significance.

My mother was thoroughly shocked. She immediately called my father out of the living room and told him what Thea had said. When they returned to the living room, where our Russian guest was devouring a fifth slice of cinnamon toast and a third cup of tea, they refused to engage in any further conversation with him.

“I think it is time to take you to Durazzo,” my father said.

The Russian protested that it was only an hour by car to Durazzo and the ship was not scheduled to leave there for another five hours. But my father was hard as adamant. “It is time for you to go,” he said sternly. Within fifteen minutes we had him in the car. My father and I went along to make sure that he did not attempt to cause any further trouble.

Some weeks later, Thea—for whose virtue we had so abruptly canceled a friendship—informed us that she was giving us notice. She denied that she had taken another job, explaining that she was opening a new business of her own. Within a day after she left us, we heard that Thea had established the cleanest bordello in Tirana. Over its doorway, neatly printed, was the legend:

Thea Schmidt, Proprietor. Formerly with the United States Legation.