about suffering they were never wrong, the old masters
We’ve gradually gotten into some slight storytelling mode over the last two days—I expect today to be considerably enhanced by the arrival, last night, of a repaired hearing aid for my grandfather. The social atmosphere is so dense, though, that it's difficult to write about it until it's compacted a bit.
Okay, it's compacted. My god, but not very much.
***
A friend of mine, an American, is reading a book on Chernobyl, a recent ethnography that cites people as saying, more or less, yeah a nuclear meltdown is bad, but it’s nothing compared to the famine of the ‘30s. The American friend asked where it was I came from in the Soviet Union, exactly, and responded to my Moscow with, “at least you’re not from the Ukraine!” And, well, at least I’m not; and certainly not from the ‘30s. Two days ago my grandfather of his own accord stumbled, in a story, onto his 1930s, which did take place in the Ukraine. My mother and I raised our eyebrows at each other; I’d told her abut the American friend. I think when you grow up with the dim assumption of horrible tragedy befalling everyone who is older than you, even as you yourself get only the milk and cookies of history, it's always a little funny to find out that other people don't have assumptions like that, and might even at some point find out about those tragedies for the first time – gaining, thereby, often a much more accurate, much less dim, understanding of them, but not really assimilating them as basic background.
In 1932 my grandfather's family managed to get into a Jewish collective farm in Crimea. His father had a cousin there who got them in. Not as bad as the Ukraine, but also "not sweet." He and his older brother Kolya decided it wasn't the place for them -- "I needed a profession! What was I going to do there?" -- so they escaped to Har'kov', a largely Russian industrial city in Ukraine, and joined a factory of some sort associated with a school of some sort -- where they manufactured during the day and studied in the evening, supposedly. Places like this, factories, had rations, so if you could squeeze in somehow you might get at least enough food to live on. It's unclear how they did squeeze through, though from the sounds of it Kolya had excellent social skills, was always involved in some sort of life-saving enterprise -- unlike my grandfather, who was a bookworm and always wanted to be in school. My grandfather adored him, and still does. It was several years after he went missing at the front that the rumors they were getting—someone said he had been shot by his own men, not unknown treatment for Jews in Russian companies, someone else just that he had been shot—converged heavily enough on his death that they decided to assume it.
The factory had a long, dark barracks full of beds, and at the end of the room was an empty stove. It turned out that factory rations differed depending on the normal criteria that you'd expect: the ones with named for Stalin got food and wood; others got nothing or close to it. All the other boys in the plant were Russian except for the two of them ("Russian," of course, means "not Jewish" -- probably there were Ukranians as well), but nonetheless "our relations were very good."(1)
At that time Har'kov' was busy building a new section of the city (he named it, so I guess it's something one ought to know). At night the boys would take turns going out to the sections just being built and breaking down fences or whatever they could find that was breakable, to get wood for the empty stove. At this point my grandfather was around 15 or 16. He got into this part of the story because somehow he mentioned that when he applied to the Jewish mathematical school in the mid-30s, the examining teacher asked him what language he was more comfortable speaking, and he said Russian -- he'd been living with the Russian boys for two years already and hadn't been speaking Yiddish. But in the ‘20s he'd been in a Jewish school (a "7-year") where his literature teacher would take him to Ukranian schools to recite Yiddish poetry; he recited well. Then my uncle came in and the story was interrupted. "More tomorrow," my grandfather said.
I've heard parts of this story before -- I have it recorded from last time. It's not pretty, and it's not very coherent in the same way my grandmother's Holocaust escape isn't. Somehow when people talk about how they survived world-class tragedies it always sounds muddled. I have a feeling for why it is, but I can't quite get a hold of it. It's a number of things, I guess. One is a disjuncture of empathy, the way that a person you can normally get, somewhat even from the inside, could have lived through something you won't ever be able to really understand with your gut. Another is the difficulty of imagining a situation with radically different necessities and assumptions: we just don't talk about the actual necessities of survival, ever, in the normal course of things. What does it mean to live on half a loaf of bread and a plate of soup a day, and still be working in a factory and going out at night in the Russian winter to break down fences to burn? There are systems there too, patterns for survival, kinds of luck you have to have -- you have to not get sick in the middle of the famine, obviously, you have to not get a very bad splinter that gets infected when you're out stealing wood, I don't know, you have to not have a crisis in a crisis situation -- but they're so different from the patterns we're used to that it looks from the outside like chaos.
It's like when I was in Russia in 1992 and everything was falling apart, there was hyperinflation, and people were simply not getting paid for months and months at a time. What does it mean not to have been paid since January in June? One woman told me it meant "I can't buy butter for my son," which I, a butterlover born and bred, found a powerful description. But somehow they were still living -- there were other protocols for acquisition than salaries. A mother who was still getting her pension; a particularly active garden; friends who shared; a son -- in that, butter, case -- who was taking advantage of the onset of capitalism by buying beer cheap at the store and selling it dear at the train station, and who was, at sixteen, making more money than both his parents put together, much to their dismay because they were, in his contemptuous phrase, "Soviet people." But it's hard for me to think of these other protocols myself, I need them enumerated one by one.
And then there's just the way that it is a muddle, that the only way that people live through things like this is to muddle through. Everything depends on chance encounters -- my grandmother, abandoned on her way East in a park in some city into which the German army would shortly march, was spotted by someone who recognized her and decided to admit to it, even though it was probably not very convenient, and sent in the right direction. I wonder if part of the reason it's so difficult to understand is that it's difficult not to treat the ultimate survival of the people in front of you -- especially if they happen to be, as in the case of grandparents, the conditions of possibility for your own existence -- as a teleological necessity rather than a conglomeration of coincidences that were much more likely, statistically speaking, not to have happened. It's difficult to treat your relatives as unlikely; even more difficult to treat yourself so.
***
In the meantime I've gone for an hour-long "walk" with my grandfather, which means twice up and down the parking lot with him on my arm, mostly standing still to talk. He's deaf enough that he needs to look at you very closely when you are talking, and so I think he assumes that other people need to look at him very closely when he's talking, too, so basically he can't talk and walk at the same time, at least not while he's making eye contact. This time toward the end I figured out that if you don't look at him but look down or ahead, he actually will walk and talk at the same time, but you have to keep nudging him along.
The father's cousin in the Crimean collective farm was someone who had taken advantage of the New Economic Policy after the civil war, when they allowed limited private enterprise. He'd opened a store, bought a house, done well, but realized in time to save his life that the tide was turning and that the NEPmen, as they were known, were about to get dispossessed and then something, killed or sent to camps. After his house was expropriated and he was shoved into a little apartment with his wife and five children and parents in law, he sold the store and took his family to the Jewish collective farm in Crimea, returning a few years later to enroll others, including my grandfather’s family. By the time they got on the train to go there—he’d enrolled “a whole train-car full of people”—all they had on them to eat were some onions. Onions! At the first stop in Crimea the train was met with a delegation of Jews bearing food, a loaf of bread for each family—“five or six kilograms, a huge loaf of bread! Well we got to that loaf pretty quickly and ate it all”—and other things. Good living, Crimea, comparatively speaking.
After my grandfather and his brother ran away from there to Har'kov' and attached themselves to the factory with the empty stove, there were some very hard times -- "I don't remember at all what we ate. I just remember seeing my brother begging a man who was driving a truck of bread, 'Uncle, give us a piece of bread.' But of course he couldn't; he’d have to feed everyone; everyone was hungry." The factory was not called Stalin but "Hammer and Sickle," in Russian "Serp i Molot," which the people there called "Smert' i Golod," which translates to "Death and Hunger" but rhymes. Their parents were doing okay for a while, so well that they even started raising a pig -- "Well, they'd rejected God, the Soviets" -- but then there was nothing to feed the pig with so they killed it and sent Kolya and my grandfather a care package of grain of some sort and lard from the pig. They cooked the grain in water in a jar and ate it with the lard "instead of bread. It was awkward to eat it during the day when everyone could see, so we waited until they were all asleep. We finished the whole package in one night." And then he doesn't remember how they lived.
Finally, Kolya managed to get them enrolled in a factory called Stalin, and they ran away from the empty stove. At the factory named Stalin they got a daily ration of a certain weight of bread, usually a loaf and a little more. They ate the little extra and sold the loaf, and with the money bought tokens for the factory dining hall, and with what was left over bought things to send to their parents. Ah! and this is why when he took the test to get into a four-year school, where the teacher asked him if he preferred Russian or Yiddish, after he'd finished, the director of the school came in. It turned out that she had been in charge of the Death and Hunger factory-school, from which eventually all the boys had run away in their various directions, for which she'd gotten in trouble. So when she recognized my grandfather she said, "I don't need this hooligan in my school!" and that was that. Good thing too, actually: "What would I have eaten for four years?"
By this time his parents had joined them in Har'kov', with his little sister, who was going to school (she now lives about a half hour's drive away from here). He wanted to keep going to school so he joined up with another factory-school, and then got into the university nearby. He was taking his exam and the teacher was walking around to see how people were doing, and he noticed that my grandfather had done everything right except one problem, which he hadn't touched. What's the matter? I don't know what it means, my grandfather explained. "You see Anechka, our education was a haltura" -- the best translation I can think of is "a mess of half-assedness." The teacher explained what the symbols meant -- sine of what angle and so on -- and my grandfather got it. So he entered the university and got a stipend of forty rubles a month, which he handed over to his mother, and passed all his exams but never went to half the lectures because he'd skip months of class at a time to help his father, who was working as a painter, to support the family.
This is the one point in the story where he expresses real regrets: if he’d lived in the dormitory, if he’d—he doesn’t put it this way—abandoned his parents, he’d have been able to attend all the lectures. He really wasted his university years, going around working for his family. I find it interesting that the one thing he finds extraordinary enough to regret is the one thing that to me seems completely obvious: everything else, the famine, the war, the antisemitism, these are all historically specific occurrences. Your reaction to them depends on the specific conditions and possibilities that you found yourself in or managed to find out. But staying out of school to help make money to support your family seems to be a universal characteristic of impoverishment, whether your poverty is specific to you or, as in their case, just a fact of living in that society. To me it’s the least remarkable thing about the whole story.
Then a job in western Ukraine, then my grandmother, and then, two weeks after they "formalized" their marriage, the war. When he came back from the war in 1946, with four wounds and a mound of medals, nobody would hire him. He looked for work for six months before a friend introduced him to someone high up in the educational bureaucracy -- "a shining individual" -- who told him to go to such and such a school and to say that he had sent him, and that had told him that they were in need of a math teacher. "He knew they were scum, of course." He went and found two people there, the director, a Party member, and another older administrator, another "shining individual," nonpartied, who later told him that after he had introduced himself and been asked to wait outside, the director turned to him and said, "What do we need this Jew for?" But had hired him after all, upon being shamed by the shining individual, reminded of the service at the front and, probably more importantly, of the importance of the man who had recommended him. And so also because of this scum, we are alive.
All the time we've been standing out in the parking lot, various people have been passing by; some exchange "Shalom" with us, others stop and chat in Russian. As we get to these last paragraphs, standing already near the door, a swarthy guy in a yarmulka walks in and out of the house a few times, taking out the garbage, carrying things to his car. I smile and nod at him the way we have been at everyone, but he just stares at me and walks a little closer to us each time he passes. Stares on the way out, stares on the way back in, and stares on the way back out again. On his last trip out the guy in the yarmulka is still staring, walking an arm's length away, making a sucking sound with his teeth that sounds like halfway between a catcall and a spit; then sits in his car revving it for so long that we can smell the gas on the walk up to the house. And of course I think, as I nudge my grandfather along to get out of the glare and out of the gas, Fucking Jews.
(1) During the ritual questioning about my life “on the personal front” yesterday, we finally arrived, after the various information about profession and heritage, at the question of whether the relevant parents were cognizant of my being Jewish. To my insistence that “In America they don’t give a spit” [that’s a literal translation], my grandfather recalled with glee the time when he’d asked my brother how many of his college friends were Jewish and my brother had replied, “I don’t know.” Can you imagine? A country where you wouldn’t know if your friends were Jewish! It was a marvel. Of course my brother was lying; but it was in the service of a point.
Okay, it's compacted. My god, but not very much.
***
A friend of mine, an American, is reading a book on Chernobyl, a recent ethnography that cites people as saying, more or less, yeah a nuclear meltdown is bad, but it’s nothing compared to the famine of the ‘30s. The American friend asked where it was I came from in the Soviet Union, exactly, and responded to my Moscow with, “at least you’re not from the Ukraine!” And, well, at least I’m not; and certainly not from the ‘30s. Two days ago my grandfather of his own accord stumbled, in a story, onto his 1930s, which did take place in the Ukraine. My mother and I raised our eyebrows at each other; I’d told her abut the American friend. I think when you grow up with the dim assumption of horrible tragedy befalling everyone who is older than you, even as you yourself get only the milk and cookies of history, it's always a little funny to find out that other people don't have assumptions like that, and might even at some point find out about those tragedies for the first time – gaining, thereby, often a much more accurate, much less dim, understanding of them, but not really assimilating them as basic background.
In 1932 my grandfather's family managed to get into a Jewish collective farm in Crimea. His father had a cousin there who got them in. Not as bad as the Ukraine, but also "not sweet." He and his older brother Kolya decided it wasn't the place for them -- "I needed a profession! What was I going to do there?" -- so they escaped to Har'kov', a largely Russian industrial city in Ukraine, and joined a factory of some sort associated with a school of some sort -- where they manufactured during the day and studied in the evening, supposedly. Places like this, factories, had rations, so if you could squeeze in somehow you might get at least enough food to live on. It's unclear how they did squeeze through, though from the sounds of it Kolya had excellent social skills, was always involved in some sort of life-saving enterprise -- unlike my grandfather, who was a bookworm and always wanted to be in school. My grandfather adored him, and still does. It was several years after he went missing at the front that the rumors they were getting—someone said he had been shot by his own men, not unknown treatment for Jews in Russian companies, someone else just that he had been shot—converged heavily enough on his death that they decided to assume it.
The factory had a long, dark barracks full of beds, and at the end of the room was an empty stove. It turned out that factory rations differed depending on the normal criteria that you'd expect: the ones with named for Stalin got food and wood; others got nothing or close to it. All the other boys in the plant were Russian except for the two of them ("Russian," of course, means "not Jewish" -- probably there were Ukranians as well), but nonetheless "our relations were very good."(1)
At that time Har'kov' was busy building a new section of the city (he named it, so I guess it's something one ought to know). At night the boys would take turns going out to the sections just being built and breaking down fences or whatever they could find that was breakable, to get wood for the empty stove. At this point my grandfather was around 15 or 16. He got into this part of the story because somehow he mentioned that when he applied to the Jewish mathematical school in the mid-30s, the examining teacher asked him what language he was more comfortable speaking, and he said Russian -- he'd been living with the Russian boys for two years already and hadn't been speaking Yiddish. But in the ‘20s he'd been in a Jewish school (a "7-year") where his literature teacher would take him to Ukranian schools to recite Yiddish poetry; he recited well. Then my uncle came in and the story was interrupted. "More tomorrow," my grandfather said.
I've heard parts of this story before -- I have it recorded from last time. It's not pretty, and it's not very coherent in the same way my grandmother's Holocaust escape isn't. Somehow when people talk about how they survived world-class tragedies it always sounds muddled. I have a feeling for why it is, but I can't quite get a hold of it. It's a number of things, I guess. One is a disjuncture of empathy, the way that a person you can normally get, somewhat even from the inside, could have lived through something you won't ever be able to really understand with your gut. Another is the difficulty of imagining a situation with radically different necessities and assumptions: we just don't talk about the actual necessities of survival, ever, in the normal course of things. What does it mean to live on half a loaf of bread and a plate of soup a day, and still be working in a factory and going out at night in the Russian winter to break down fences to burn? There are systems there too, patterns for survival, kinds of luck you have to have -- you have to not get sick in the middle of the famine, obviously, you have to not get a very bad splinter that gets infected when you're out stealing wood, I don't know, you have to not have a crisis in a crisis situation -- but they're so different from the patterns we're used to that it looks from the outside like chaos.
It's like when I was in Russia in 1992 and everything was falling apart, there was hyperinflation, and people were simply not getting paid for months and months at a time. What does it mean not to have been paid since January in June? One woman told me it meant "I can't buy butter for my son," which I, a butterlover born and bred, found a powerful description. But somehow they were still living -- there were other protocols for acquisition than salaries. A mother who was still getting her pension; a particularly active garden; friends who shared; a son -- in that, butter, case -- who was taking advantage of the onset of capitalism by buying beer cheap at the store and selling it dear at the train station, and who was, at sixteen, making more money than both his parents put together, much to their dismay because they were, in his contemptuous phrase, "Soviet people." But it's hard for me to think of these other protocols myself, I need them enumerated one by one.
And then there's just the way that it is a muddle, that the only way that people live through things like this is to muddle through. Everything depends on chance encounters -- my grandmother, abandoned on her way East in a park in some city into which the German army would shortly march, was spotted by someone who recognized her and decided to admit to it, even though it was probably not very convenient, and sent in the right direction. I wonder if part of the reason it's so difficult to understand is that it's difficult not to treat the ultimate survival of the people in front of you -- especially if they happen to be, as in the case of grandparents, the conditions of possibility for your own existence -- as a teleological necessity rather than a conglomeration of coincidences that were much more likely, statistically speaking, not to have happened. It's difficult to treat your relatives as unlikely; even more difficult to treat yourself so.
***
In the meantime I've gone for an hour-long "walk" with my grandfather, which means twice up and down the parking lot with him on my arm, mostly standing still to talk. He's deaf enough that he needs to look at you very closely when you are talking, and so I think he assumes that other people need to look at him very closely when he's talking, too, so basically he can't talk and walk at the same time, at least not while he's making eye contact. This time toward the end I figured out that if you don't look at him but look down or ahead, he actually will walk and talk at the same time, but you have to keep nudging him along.
The father's cousin in the Crimean collective farm was someone who had taken advantage of the New Economic Policy after the civil war, when they allowed limited private enterprise. He'd opened a store, bought a house, done well, but realized in time to save his life that the tide was turning and that the NEPmen, as they were known, were about to get dispossessed and then something, killed or sent to camps. After his house was expropriated and he was shoved into a little apartment with his wife and five children and parents in law, he sold the store and took his family to the Jewish collective farm in Crimea, returning a few years later to enroll others, including my grandfather’s family. By the time they got on the train to go there—he’d enrolled “a whole train-car full of people”—all they had on them to eat were some onions. Onions! At the first stop in Crimea the train was met with a delegation of Jews bearing food, a loaf of bread for each family—“five or six kilograms, a huge loaf of bread! Well we got to that loaf pretty quickly and ate it all”—and other things. Good living, Crimea, comparatively speaking.
After my grandfather and his brother ran away from there to Har'kov' and attached themselves to the factory with the empty stove, there were some very hard times -- "I don't remember at all what we ate. I just remember seeing my brother begging a man who was driving a truck of bread, 'Uncle, give us a piece of bread.' But of course he couldn't; he’d have to feed everyone; everyone was hungry." The factory was not called Stalin but "Hammer and Sickle," in Russian "Serp i Molot," which the people there called "Smert' i Golod," which translates to "Death and Hunger" but rhymes. Their parents were doing okay for a while, so well that they even started raising a pig -- "Well, they'd rejected God, the Soviets" -- but then there was nothing to feed the pig with so they killed it and sent Kolya and my grandfather a care package of grain of some sort and lard from the pig. They cooked the grain in water in a jar and ate it with the lard "instead of bread. It was awkward to eat it during the day when everyone could see, so we waited until they were all asleep. We finished the whole package in one night." And then he doesn't remember how they lived.
Finally, Kolya managed to get them enrolled in a factory called Stalin, and they ran away from the empty stove. At the factory named Stalin they got a daily ration of a certain weight of bread, usually a loaf and a little more. They ate the little extra and sold the loaf, and with the money bought tokens for the factory dining hall, and with what was left over bought things to send to their parents. Ah! and this is why when he took the test to get into a four-year school, where the teacher asked him if he preferred Russian or Yiddish, after he'd finished, the director of the school came in. It turned out that she had been in charge of the Death and Hunger factory-school, from which eventually all the boys had run away in their various directions, for which she'd gotten in trouble. So when she recognized my grandfather she said, "I don't need this hooligan in my school!" and that was that. Good thing too, actually: "What would I have eaten for four years?"
By this time his parents had joined them in Har'kov', with his little sister, who was going to school (she now lives about a half hour's drive away from here). He wanted to keep going to school so he joined up with another factory-school, and then got into the university nearby. He was taking his exam and the teacher was walking around to see how people were doing, and he noticed that my grandfather had done everything right except one problem, which he hadn't touched. What's the matter? I don't know what it means, my grandfather explained. "You see Anechka, our education was a haltura" -- the best translation I can think of is "a mess of half-assedness." The teacher explained what the symbols meant -- sine of what angle and so on -- and my grandfather got it. So he entered the university and got a stipend of forty rubles a month, which he handed over to his mother, and passed all his exams but never went to half the lectures because he'd skip months of class at a time to help his father, who was working as a painter, to support the family.
This is the one point in the story where he expresses real regrets: if he’d lived in the dormitory, if he’d—he doesn’t put it this way—abandoned his parents, he’d have been able to attend all the lectures. He really wasted his university years, going around working for his family. I find it interesting that the one thing he finds extraordinary enough to regret is the one thing that to me seems completely obvious: everything else, the famine, the war, the antisemitism, these are all historically specific occurrences. Your reaction to them depends on the specific conditions and possibilities that you found yourself in or managed to find out. But staying out of school to help make money to support your family seems to be a universal characteristic of impoverishment, whether your poverty is specific to you or, as in their case, just a fact of living in that society. To me it’s the least remarkable thing about the whole story.
Then a job in western Ukraine, then my grandmother, and then, two weeks after they "formalized" their marriage, the war. When he came back from the war in 1946, with four wounds and a mound of medals, nobody would hire him. He looked for work for six months before a friend introduced him to someone high up in the educational bureaucracy -- "a shining individual" -- who told him to go to such and such a school and to say that he had sent him, and that had told him that they were in need of a math teacher. "He knew they were scum, of course." He went and found two people there, the director, a Party member, and another older administrator, another "shining individual," nonpartied, who later told him that after he had introduced himself and been asked to wait outside, the director turned to him and said, "What do we need this Jew for?" But had hired him after all, upon being shamed by the shining individual, reminded of the service at the front and, probably more importantly, of the importance of the man who had recommended him. And so also because of this scum, we are alive.
All the time we've been standing out in the parking lot, various people have been passing by; some exchange "Shalom" with us, others stop and chat in Russian. As we get to these last paragraphs, standing already near the door, a swarthy guy in a yarmulka walks in and out of the house a few times, taking out the garbage, carrying things to his car. I smile and nod at him the way we have been at everyone, but he just stares at me and walks a little closer to us each time he passes. Stares on the way out, stares on the way back in, and stares on the way back out again. On his last trip out the guy in the yarmulka is still staring, walking an arm's length away, making a sucking sound with his teeth that sounds like halfway between a catcall and a spit; then sits in his car revving it for so long that we can smell the gas on the walk up to the house. And of course I think, as I nudge my grandfather along to get out of the glare and out of the gas, Fucking Jews.
(1) During the ritual questioning about my life “on the personal front” yesterday, we finally arrived, after the various information about profession and heritage, at the question of whether the relevant parents were cognizant of my being Jewish. To my insistence that “In America they don’t give a spit” [that’s a literal translation], my grandfather recalled with glee the time when he’d asked my brother how many of his college friends were Jewish and my brother had replied, “I don’t know.” Can you imagine? A country where you wouldn’t know if your friends were Jewish! It was a marvel. Of course my brother was lying; but it was in the service of a point.
posted by blahgstein at 2:34 AM
2 Comments:
hiphiphooray, blahgstein's back!
well, she was back...
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