1. Trouble With Point 5
I remember the time, about ten years ago, that Boris Sonkin and I met with minister Fedorov. It was not necessary for us both to go—usually, journalists paid such visits unaccompanied—but Goncharov, the department head at our newspaper Socialist Industry, insisted that I attend too.
“Come on, Morozov! Sonkin doesn’t have an identification card from our paper. It’s not proper to send him to the minister without it . . . you’d better go with him.”
I was up to my neck in work and tried to get out of it. For the nth time I reminded him that Sonkin needed a card of his own. “The poor fellow has been slaving for us for months. Life will be a lot easier for him with that little ticket.”
In a sense Sonkin was my protégé. It just so happened that the first time he came to our office he landed in my lap, although we had never previously met. At the time he submitted a very good article, and I quickly had it published. From then on I handled everything he wrote. This helped me in the competition among the various editorial units of our newspaper, and my own units benefited from it as well. So there was nothing unusual in my request for an ID for Sonkin. Permanent free-lancers are usually given editorial passes. But Goncharov had invented all kinds of excuses to delay the matter. He didn’t refuse outright but procrastinated or disingenuously promised to talk to the chief editor that very day. Finally, when I pinned him to the wall, Goncharov admitted the truth. “Morozov, you are really dense. Take a good look at how many Jews you see around our paper. You know damn well how our bosses feel about them! Request an ID for Sonkin? No!—I can’t bother my boss with that kind of business now.”
“When can you?” I persisted.
“When?” He looked at me. “We’ll see. I’m not the boss here You have to understand me. On the whole, I have nothing against the Jews, personally. As a matter of fact, in our party rules it says that we’re internationalists. And your Sonkin is a good and aggressive journalist; he should work with us. But the ID will have to wait.”
In those days, because of my lack of experience, these words revolted me. In time, I grew accustomed to them. Actually, Goncharov hadn’t said anything out of the ordinary, or offensive. My cautious boss had the usual prejudice against Jews, but it was a fairly mild prejudice as prejudices go. After all, he had permitted Sonkin to do work for us. Later on, after many years in the Moscow publishing world, I became immune to this sort of thing.
Periodically, for instance, there were openings at our newspaper, or one of my colleagues from another newspaper would be looking for a job or offering one. “Listen, pal,” I would get a call. “We have a vacancy in our department. Can you think of anyone?” If I answered yes, the next sequence of questions would begin with, “What about this fellow’s Point 5?”
Everybody in the Soviet Union knows that Point 5 in the questionnaire a citizen has to fill out on any number of occasions pertains to nationality. Obviously, the question was not what nationality the man was, but whether or not he was a Jew. If you answered that not everything was as it should be with Point 5, the result was refusal. “Sorry, old man, this guy wouldn’t be right for us. You know what our bosses are like; Point 5-ers aren’t welcome.”
But if the applicant happened fortunately to be an “Aryan,” then the second question followed: is he a party member? If not, serious doubts of another kind ensued: “You see, ours is a central newspaper. . . .”
Third question: does he drink?
These questions came first, before such trifles as the man’s professional qualifications. Eventually, however, the question would be: how well does he write? And then: how much experience does he have? Where has he been published? To pass this test was far from easy, especially if one had failed at any of the first three questions. Only if the man’s resume was truly impressive might his qualifications outweigh his deficiencies. “Well, it’s a pity that he isn’t a party member,” one might then hear, “but I’ll see what I can do, I’ll talk to the boss.” But the chances were slim.
One day I decided to resign from my job at Socialist Industry, where I was a special correspondent in the newly founded department of socialist competition. The department was headed by one Komarovsky, an excellent journalist and the author of an interesting book entitled A Month in the Director’s Armchair. Prior to that, Komarovsky had worked as a correspondent for a newspaper in Perm. He had recently come to Moscow and had few friends in the capital, so when he learned of my decision to resign he asked me, “Morozov, please find a replacement for yourself. You know a lot of people in Moscow.” I quickly found someone who had been at one of the trade-union papers and was happy to have the opportunity to work for the Central Press. He had been published in Socialist Industry previously and his work was pretty good. He was about my age and we were casual friends.
I introduced him to Komarovsky and this was the start of a real mess. The candidate turned out to be a Jew. What a betrayal! I had never given a thought to the nationality of this pleasant, bespectacled, strong man. Russian, Jew, Ethiopian—what’s the difference? The important thing was that he was a real professional. Back then, I was still convinced that this qualification was enough.
So I introduced this fellow to Komarovsky, and left on a business trip, feeling certain that my candidate would pass any test with flying colors. But this was not to happen. “You understand,” he told me later, “I was called in by Komarovsky. ‘Well,’ said Komarovsky, ‘now we’ll meet the editorial board. I’ll introduce you. Here, fill out the application.’”
“I filled it out,” he continued. “Komarovsky started reading it and I noticed that his face was contorting. Next, he bolted out of the room, but I still wasn’t worried. I knew that the editorial board at your newspaper meets at twelve noon, and I had plenty of time, about fifteen minutes. Then, after a while, Komarovsky returned and said with some embarrassment: ‘Forgive me, I just found out from the chief editor that he has strong personal ideas about the position for which I had you in mind; either he wants to use someone from his own staff, or someone else, I have no idea. . . . In other words, the situation is not clear. Let’s wait a while. When things settle down, I’ll call you.’ Of course there was nothing to clear up. Your Komarovsky read my application and when he came to Point 5, which says that I’m a Jew, the game was up.”
“Are you really a Jew?” I asked foolishly.
“What the hell do you think?” he exclaimed.
“To tell you the truth, I didn’t think anything.”
“Well from now on, my friend, you’d better start thinking about it,” he said with irony. “I’m afraid Komarovsky may make you regret this.”
But Komarovsky did nothing of the sort. Instead, he stopped by my office and said apologetically, “Morozov, you understand, of course, that I’m not an anti-Semite. But,” he laughed nervously, “it would have been awkward for me to recommend your friend. The problem is . . . well . . . I think you understand yourself now what it is.”
I, too, felt ill at ease. And then I took a good look at the man and for the first time realized what a more astute person would have perceived immediately—Komarovsky himself was a Jew, and even looked like one. It was clear that for him to recommend another Jew to work in his office was simply taboo, even if he had really wanted to.
There were no written regulations about this. But, generally speaking, Soviet citizens gradually learn to distinguish on their own between what is acceptable and what is not. A person who, from birth, belongs to the wrong “case” is particularly aware of this. He knows that to get a job in the Central Press, a Jew has to be far more clever, far more gifted, than a Russian—and also that he must not accept no for an answer.
And this is not all. I personally observed the first steps of Volodya Kramer, a gifted journalist working at Socialist Industry. His editors constantly cut his material and demanded rewrites. Kramer rewrote and rewrote, then took his article to his tormentors, where it was again rejected and new changes were demanded. Many people in Kramer’s shoes would have been broken, would have said the hell with it and given up, gone across the street from the publishing house and gotten drunk. (Those were still the good old days, and newspapermen often had a few shots during working hours.) No matter how many times Kramer was knocked down, however, he would inevitably rise again and resume his work.
In the end, his persistence paid off, and they stopped persecuting him. After all, what fun is it for a man’s tormentors if he doesn’t complain, or beg for mercy? Since that time, Kramer has worked for years at Socialist Industry, and has even been promoted to assistant department head.
To an innocent observer, Kramer’s success could be pointed to as an example of how Jews can prosper in Soviet society. But all during those hard times I sat in the same room with him, and knew better than anyone the price at which his final victory was achieved.
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2. We Are Internationalists
Anti-Semites in the USSR like to harp on the numbers of Jews with successful careers. As the popular folk song goes, “Jews, Jews everywhere. . . .”
It’s difficult to challenge this statement; harder still to agree with it. To begin with, statistical information is needed, which in the USSR is unavailable. The true figures would undoubtedly offer abundant food for thought. But of course Soviet citizens are not permitted to have adequate information. Statistics are dangerous! They could unravel false dogmas built up over decades; they could expose the reality that our society has developed quite differently from the way our government, even today, in the time of glasnost, proclaims.
But what about the Jews? Are many of them successful? Those who have achieved something are certainly noticeable. They are, indeed, persons of great energy and ambition, hard-working, and practically unsinkable. But those not endowed with such qualities face the very real possibility of never achieving their goals. Even in school they will be harassed and cut down; their nicest chums will deride them or even beat them up.
My school friend Valery suffered all kinds of injustices, simply on account of having inherited the looks not of his Ukrainian father but of his Jewish mother. Fun-loving Soviet kids in red ties pushed him down a steep hole, covered him with snow, and would have trampled him to death had not a passerby appeared in time. They didn’t kill him, but from that time on he stuttered.
Pioneers, are you prepared to fulfill our ideals? Ever ready! How do you like these energetic, clear-eyed pioneers? These Soviet children brought up in the spirit of proletarian internationalism? Children singing beautiful songs, of friendship among nations, of the shining future. And then, tired of singing, they start trampling on their defenseless friends, ready to kill them just because they are not Aryans.
One of the countless Soviet slogans proclaims: “Children are our future!” I often met representatives of this future who had become our present—former pioneers who became, first, members of the Komsomol (All-Union Lenin Young Communist League) and after that party members, and then fathers of children in their turn. Their unrecognized anti-Semitism, formed in childhood, became an important part of their psychology and character. How strange, I would think, beholding them, no one ever indoctrinated them with racist theories; how then did they become racists? Why do they look askance not only at Jews but at other nationalities as well? Is it because of traditional Russian xenophobia? But in czarist Russia, suspicion of foreigners didn’t drop from the sky, it was the result of years and years of conscious political inculcation. Perhaps, then, this is also the case today: alongside the official propaganda of friendship among nations exists the concealed preaching of racism. Our kind of government absolutely requires national antagonisms. All kinds of scapegoats are needed to serve as alibis for our countless mishaps and troubles.
At any rate, at all levels of Soviet society one encounters numerous examples of anti-Semitism, chauvinism, overt racism, in short, everything diametrically opposed to Communist principles (“We Are Internationalists!”).
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A young Moscow journalist successfully free-lanced for our department when I was at the magazine Soviet Trade Unions. His articles were often noted as among the best we published. Everything was fine, until he was betrayed by the same trouble with his Point 5.
It happened like this. One day at work I was stopped by Larisa Kuzmina, the editor of our department. “Listen, Morozov,” she said, “is your boss about to hire another Jew? What’s the matter with him? Don’t we have enough Jews as it is?”
This barrage took me completely by surprise. Basically, Larisa Kuzmina was a decent woman, a “good guy.” She was no stranger to dirty jokes, and sometimes indulged herself in some pretty rough stories. You could hit her up for a few rubles until payday. Before the new anti-alcohol law, at our usual office party she was among the first to raise a glass, followed by song.
A long time ago, Larisa Kuzmina had received a Ph.D. and now, along with her journalistic duties, she managed also to teach at the school of the trade-union “movement.” Most important of all, she was the deputy secretary in charge of ideology in the party committee of our magazine. And so our leading ideologue now said emphatically, “What do we need Jews for? We are up to our necks in them already.” I was somewhat amazed, but I really didn’t take it all that seriously. “The woman is emotional; she blows her top,” I thought. But she was being much more logical than I imagined.
At one meeting, when neither my boss nor I was present, Larisa Kuzmina offered an impassioned criticism of the materials submitted by the undesirable young journalist. And not only was his work criticized, but also his personal snobbery. Her friends and colleagues at the meeting attacked him in concert: “He’s too damn prolific.” (In anyone else, of course, this trait would hardly have been considered a crime: to write as prolifically as he did was not given to many at our magazine.) Then the chorus of critics, well-briefed by Larisa Kuzmina, started querying the authenticity of his articles: “Does he plagiarize, maybe?”
It’s possible that Larisa Kuzmina had conspired beforehand with the chief editor of our magazine, Mudrov, for after this malevolent meeting Mudrov remarked to me calmly, “You should have heard what people were saying at our meeting. The whole editorial staff agrees that you have to be careful with this writer. Is it really in our interest to work with him?”
Mudrov washed his hands of the whole matter; the ball was now in the court of the collective. But he cut the guy’s fees so drastically that the poor fellow was forced to resign.
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3. Is One’s Own Rope Necessary?
Another episode connected with Larisa Kuzmina comes to mind. But before I tell you about it, let me mention an anecdote.
It goes like this. A foreigner visiting a Soviet plant is surprised by the workers’ obedience and orderliness. “Do they never argue about anything?” asks the visitor. “Is there no limit to their obedience?”
“No limit at all,” the party boss replies. “They will do anything they are ordered to do.” “I can’t believe it,” says the foreigner. “I’ll show you right away that it’s true,” answers the party boss. He gathers the workers together during the lunch break and delivers an impassioned speech: for the sake of future generations, everyone present will have to be hanged. “This is a messy business, comrades,” he explains. “Therefore, tomorrow I want you to come to work an hour earlier, so we can settle everything. Is that understood, comrades?”
Everything is clear, but one of the workers raises his hand.
“What do you want to know, Ivanov?” asks the party boss.
“What about the rope?” says Ivanov. “For hanging . . . do we have to bring our own rope?”
One might think this anecdote would no longer be appropriate in today’s Soviet Union. But vestiges of the seemingly defunct Stalin period are still with us and, from time to time, surface in our relatively liberal society.
Let’s return to the editorial office and Larisa Kuzmina. A campaign to get all of us to subscribe to various journals was coming to an end. We had fulfilled our quota for Pravda, which was anyway compulsory for nearly all journalists. Then one day Larisa Kuzmina stormed into the office. “Who hasn’t subscribed yet to the party journals?” she demanded. Readers for these dull journals were hard to find. Only a few strange types or the very cautious subscribed to them, just in case.
A few nonconformists shyly asked Larisa Kuzmina, “Is subscription compulsory?” “Every journalist must subscribe to magazines like Communist or Party Life,” came the answer. But some politically immature comrades continued to wonder, “Was this ever compulsory before?” “It’s compulsory now,” snapped Larisa Kuzmina. “I just had a call from the regional party committee. They demand it.”
From the regional party committee itself! Our bosses! In this case you are helpless. Some people at our place complained, but what could they do? I overheard two of our correspondents discussing the details.
“Larisa Kuzmina demands either that you sign up in the office or that you bring her a receipt proving that you subscribed elsewhere.”
“That’s going too far! We’ll sign up. But to bring a receipt is insulting.”
I listened to this in disbelief. Here were two intelligent and decent people. What were they talking about? It’s hard to believe the Soviet people have been indoctrinated to this extent, broken in such a way. “What’s the matter, guys?” I asked. “Are you wondering about the rope? Whether they’ll supply it or you’ll have to bring your own?”
They laughed in embarrassment. A few days later, half an hour before the party meeting, I bumped into Larisa Kuzmina in the typing office. There the workers kept tea, sugar, and boiling water, purchased with petty cash. We made ourselves two cups of tea and exchanged a few pleasantries. As I said, when not involved in official or party matters, Larisa Kuzmina was a very decent person, even witty and pleasant. A little later, still smiling from our chat, she asked me, “By the way, did you subscribe to the party magazines?”
“No,” I said. “I’ll get them from the library if need be.”
“All right,” she said, still smiling, “then I’ll give you hell at the meeting.”
“You do that,” I said, smiling back.
In the event, as I suspected, she did nothing.
But I don’t want to create a false impression: although in this small conflict I behaved somewhat differently from my colleagues, on the whole I was no better and no worse than anybody else. A system that formed us for its own benefit obviously had not prepared us for displays of individualism. And so, along with everyone else, I, too, sometimes became deeply implicated in problems to which the question applied: “Is one’s own rope necessary?”
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4. Solzhenitsyn the Zionist
Anti-Semitism in the office of Socialist Industry and Soviet Trade Unions was sporadic, and rather childish. But at the magazine Our Contemporary, where I also worked for a time, things were entirely different. There, anti-Semitism took on a programmatic character. There, Jews were not eased out of jobs; they were simply not hired. The process was much better organized. After all, Our Contemporary was a substantial literary publication, an organ of the Writers’ Union of Russia, no less.
In the editorial offices and among the free-lance writers were a great many Slavophiles. To me, their ideas seemed peculiar, one-sided. But arguing with these people was fun; they knew by heart their Dostoevsky, their Tolstoy, and many other authors, and they attacked you with the full weight of their considerable erudition.
To them, the history of Russia was the history of a deadly struggle with international Jewry. With a certain amount of effort, I could be led to concede the element of truth in their proposition that the microbe of socialism, which had infected the healthy body of Russia, had come from the West, and that the guilty party was a Jew, Karl Marx. But I became really ill at ease when they began to attack, as Zionist tools, men who in the Communist pantheon were worshipped as forerunners of Bolshevism (and who were not Jews at all): “Those bastards—Belinsky, Dobrolyubov, Chernishevsky. Those revolutionary democrats!” They would argue over what percentage of Lenin’s blood was Jewish, and whether or not the amount was historically significant.
I will not mention the names of these people because their opinions did not always conform to the official line, even though they were, and are, useful to the state ideology. Their social and literary activities attract a certain segment of the population and guide them in a direction beneficial to the government. And it is helpful to divert people’s attention, to focus their dissatisfaction not on the principal perpetrators, the Communist party, but on those good old scapegoats, the Jews.
Whenever the Slavophile is reasonable, he is impregnable to Soviet propaganda; his considerable learning makes him a hard skeptic. But this skepticism vanishes when his idiosyncrasy is tapped. It is enough to mention that some public figure is a Jew, and the person so mentioned is compromised in the Slavophile’s sight forever. “Pasternak is a Jew!” That half-truth (although he was born a Jew, Pasternak in his work identified with Christianity) was enough to dispose of the outstanding poet of our time. Or connect any event with the Zionists, and it immediately acquires a completely different meaning. “This whole Prague Spring in 1968 was created by the Zionists. The whole mess was organized by the Czech Writers’ Union; the majority of them are Jews, just like in our own.”
“Well, then, everything is clear.”
Once I heard an absolutely absurd remark: “Solzhenitsyn behaves the way he does because he is a Jew.” Of course, knowledgeable people would laugh this off, but one shouldn’t underestimate how uninformed and therefore how easily influenced the Soviet citizen can be. At that time, I had read very little by Solzhenitsyn, just a few things in the official magazines and his letter to the Writers’ Union which had been circulated in samizdat. I had also heard a small portion of The Gulag Archipelago read over Western radio. But even this passing acquaintance with his work was enough to teach me to respect the man and see that this wild characterization was false on every conceivable front. What on earth was the difference, anyway, whether he was a Jew, a Russian, or a Ukrainian?
“You don’t understand a damned thing,” said my Slavophile friends, condescendingly. “You are really dense.” And they repeated verbatim the words of my boss, Goncharov, at Socialist Industry.
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5. What We Don’t Like A bout Them
At that time, a fellow writer at Our Contemporary tried to enlighten me. She gave me a samizdat article that discussed our various problems. It was there, by the way, that Solzhenitsyn was branded a Jew and a Zionist, and as a result an argument ensued between us. It wasn’t the first time that we had had a bit of a fight, but now I told her unceremoniously, “I’ll bet this was composed by the KGB to discredit Solzhenitsyn in the eyes of anti-Semites like you.”
She replied jokingly, “And you, apparently, are a dissident?”
“You yourself are a dissident,” I blurted out. I would not have dared to snap back at her in such a manner if it were not for her candor.
Another young writer who wished to convince me of all the evils of Zionism showed me a book by Vasily Shulgin, a fomer member of the Duma in czarist Russia. This book, published in Paris in 1934 (I believe), is entitled What We Don’t Like About Them. It contains the program of a convinced anti-Semite. Shulgin was a great deal more open and honest than my colleagues at Our Contemporary, writing very graphically about the reasons for his own anti-Semitism and for that of the Russian people at large.
I particularly remember one of his examples. Take a look at our émigré newspapers, writes Shulgin, or words to that effect. In one you’ll find mistakes, sloppiness, the devil knows what: this is the product of our Russians. In another, everything is neat, clear, organized, in its place: this indicates that it was produced by Jews. Things were exactly like this before the Revolution, too, Shulgin continues, and not only in the publishing business but in everything, because the Jews are more qualified and more aggressive. It’s clear that in fair competition they will always outdo the Russians. It is precisely for this reason, he concludes, that the Pale of Settlement was introduced in Russia, and Jews were generally kept in one place. Just give the bastards a break, and they will pull any kind of stunt.
What is there to say? It’s nice to deal with an honest man, and in a way it’s a pity that our censors do not permit Shulgin’s modern-day counterparts to be so outspoken. A public airing might expose the origins of anti-Semitism, not to mention its ugly hatefulness, for all to see.
A man I knew once told me that he personally had nothing against the Jews, but how could he get ahead? One had to belong to some group, and since he wasn’t a Jew, his only solution was to become an anti-Semite. “Take a look at how Jews help each other,” he said to me, “if we don’t unite against them, they won’t let us get to first base.”
All this reminds me of a well-known anecdote: tourists in hell are shown three huge iron cauldrons containing sinners. Two of the cauldrons lack a lid. “This one doesn’t have to be closed,” explains the guide, “because Russians are stewing in it. If one of them tries to escape, another grabs him by his feet and yanks him back.” “Here we have a second cauldron,” continues the guide. “It’s not only open, it even has a ladder. Chinese are inside; order and discipline flourish. They boil for a while, then one of them gets out, climbs down the ladder, adds some more coal to the fire, and returns to the cauldron.” “The lid of the third cauldron is tightly sealed,” the guide says finally, “and there is a good reason for this, because there are Jews inside. If one of them gets out, he’ll take all the others with him.”
It’s difficult for Soviet citizens to learn this kind of solidarity. On the contrary, everyone pulls in his own direction. Not only are we bombarded by official propaganda, but now the Slavophiles are trying to foist their theories on us. All right, let the lovers of such hellish conditions have their way. I, personally, will pass.
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6. Because His Last Name Is Kolodny
Our group of Moscow journalists was supposed to fly from Moscow to West Germany on October 10, 1986. (For me this was to be a fateful journey, marking my flight to the West.) But on the morning of the 8th, nobody was sure whether or not we’d be permitted to leave. At lunch, I stopped by the office of the head of the group, Miss Petrikova, who worked at the Progress publishing house. A co-worker took me aside. “Better wait here, our boss is raising hell.”
Well, he was human even though he was the boss. About ten people worked in that room and the telephone was constantly ringing: “Get Petrikova!” And you could sympathize with our tourists, too; they were nervous. They’d been literally sitting on their luggage for days, and might have to unpack again. But finally, after lunch, Petrikova appeared and proclaimed: “We are going. Tomorrow morning is our first meeting.”
On the morning of the 9th, we paid for our visas. At noon, we were briefed in the House of Journalists. Petrikova went through the roll call: “Ivanov!” Ivanov stood up and identified himself. The next name Petrikova called out was Kolodny. No answer. She paused, and spoke his first name: Lev. No answer. She raised her eyes from the list. “Where are you hiding?” Kolodny didn’t speak up. “He’ll probably get here any minute,” said Petrikova. All the rest were present. But Kolodny never showed up.
This fellow was no ordinary newspaperman. He was a well-known Moscow journalist who had published many books, and for many years had been the head of the reporters’ section at the Moscow branch of the Union of Journalists of the USSR. “Can you imagine, even Kolodny is coming with us,” people in our tour group had been saying to one another with self-satisfaction. But he didn’t go with us; he wasn’t allowed to leave, and he found out only one day before departure.
But why? What was the reason? “Don’t ask stupid questions,” a member of our group admonished me. “Kolodny is not going because of his name—Kolodny. Your name is Morozov, a typically Russian name, and you are allowed to go.” Everything was clear: again Point 5. We, the internationalists!
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I think the time has come to divulge my own secret: the fact is that I’m only half-Russian. My father is a Jew, Boris Yakovlevich Rishin. No, he didn’t want to go to Israel, and he sincerely criticized those who did. What’s more, he disliked anecdotes of “questionable” political import and even interrupted me whenever I tried to tell him one. All his life, he worked hard as the assistant principal of a school. He always got up early, before anyone else, and left work later than anyone. He would come home from work so weary that he couldn’t eat: “I had better lie down for a while. Where is my nitroglycerin?” His portrait hung on the honor roll at the headquarters of the regional party committee of Krasnogvardeysky District. He limped slightly in very cold weather; he had been wounded during World War II, and was demobilized as an invalid although later the wounded leg gave him almost no trouble. Both he and my mother, who was also a teacher, were loved by their pupils. At times, I would be stopped in the street by his former students, fat bald men who would ask me: “How are your parents doing? How is their health? Give them my best.” Sometimes they would come to visit my parents, and on Teachers’ Day they brought them flowers.
My father, in short, is an average Soviet citizen, but he too is a Point 5-er, and he suffers from certain unpleasant consequences of this status. I remember the following story from my childhood. I was fourteen years old, and we were about to visit my father’s mother. My other grandmother—on my mother’s side—had spent more than half of her life in Moscow but managed to remain a Tver peasant with a typical provincial dialect, constantly using idiomatic expressions. Similarly, my grandmother on my father’s side, in spite of her many years in Moscow, had remained a typical Jewish woman in appearance, speech, and mannerisms. I wanted to invite one of my girlfriends from school to join us on our trip but my mother was against it: “Your father doesn’t want the students at school to know that he is a Jew.”
My father doesn’t look very Jewish, but like so many other people, both his and my contemporaries, he naturally took adequate measures to protect himself. And I did this myself.
Of course, for me it was much easier. I felt Russian in my heart. I was brought up in a typical Russian environment. My Tver grandmother had me baptized in the Russian Orthodox religion, and for a while, when I was living with my mother’s parents and even a bit later, I wore a cross. Later on, as a grown man, when I was leaving to go and work in the Baltic republics, I had this cross sewn into the lapel of my jacket. These seemingly petty details stay with you all your life. Little by little, compulsory atheism melts away from one’s heart and although God may still be unacceptable, the cross, the icon in grandmother’s room, her well-thumbed New Testament, the stale-tasting church bread, become indelible parts of one’s soul.
My own contacts with “international Zionism” were very frail, based only on my father’s non-Aryan status. True, sometimes I cautiously sympathized with Jews and gave anti-Semites a bit of an argument. There were quite a few Jews among my friends. But very few of them knew I was half-Jewish myself. Most considered me to be a 100-percent Russian; a decent Russian, not an anti-Semite. And I, too, liked to think of myself in exactly the same way. It was much safer.
God endowed me neither with an optimistic, uncomplaining temperament nor with a soldier’s strength. As a result, I denied the truth, or simply refused to acknowledge it for many years. Or perhaps (to be more charitable to myself) I was dissembling, until the day came when dissembling would no longer be necessary.
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