01 Jul Leib Averbukh (1900 – 1976). 3: Lessons in Common Sense. Shopping. Outings
Bena Shklyanaya and Leib Averbukh with Polina Shklyanoy and Emily Shklyanoy. Kiev. Year 1975.
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A New Word: Emigration.
In the beginning of the 1970s emigration became the leading topic of conversation. Leib’s nephew, Esther’s son, emigrated first and was able to locate Avrum’s children, Leib’s American nieces.
Leib suffered from an undiagnosed stomachache but planned to emigrate with my family and bring his sister-in-law Katya with him as a wife so as not to leave her behind, absolutely alone. He spent our last Soviet summer in Kiev feeding our impatience, “If the Soviet Union inexplicably opened a fortochka, better take advantage of it before it’s shut! It will never repeat this mistake.”
He tried to understand life in the West, “They tell us that votes are for sale over there – I wish somebody wanted my vote badly enough to pay five rubles for it.”
He loved opening the newspaper, pointing to different places and repeating, “Lie, lie, lie. One doesn’t have to read it to know that everything is a lie.” He could not have cheered our decision to emigrate more had I been his daughter. “It will take time, but you will become a different person. Don’t resist it.”
As the time was approaching to apply for permission to emigrate, Leib’s pain became severe. Various medical luminaries could not come up with a diagnosis. Finally, he told me to proceed without him.
I offered to wait, and for the first time his grumble was filled with tears, “Please leave, leave, leave! I’m seventy-five; it doesn’t matter where I die. You have young children. If you get stuck I will never forgive myself. Leave, leave, leave!”
Six weeks after we emigrated, Leib died of the cancer of the liver. I still have the gnawing feeling that he had known the diagnosis but didn’t share it so as not to delay our exodus.
Death certificate of Gersh-Leib Averbukh (1896-1976. True birth year 1900). Duplicate.
Lessons in Common Sense.
My first time in Leningrad, in January 1962, took place during my high school winter break and coincided with the first day of Leib’s retirement, the Khrushchev’s Thaw, and Musya’s biologist sister-in-law’s recent return from many years in the Gulag.
The train arrived in the city at dawn, before streetcars began running. While waiting in the empty vestibule of the train station I was reciting Yevtushenko’s Babi Yar to myself again and again. As soon as Leib appeared I recited it for him. Bushy brows raised above his glasses, he was watching with a sarcastic smile.
“There is no Jewish blood that’s blood of mine,
But, hated with a passion that’s corrosive
Am I by anti-Semites like a Jew.
And that is why I call myself a Russian!”
Until then Leib had avoided Soviet authors because he did not accept socialist realism as a literary genre. He was not aware of the cluster of young writers and poets who had sprung up out of nowhere saying out loud what a short time earlier would have had them executed had they whispered it. Their words felt too courageous, too honest to be allowed. I had to remind myself that no danger lurked around each corner but the habit of expecting it was alive, so simply holding these books and memorizing these poems was intoxicating. Leib asked me to recommend what to read and checked out my choices from the library to keep pace with me.
Of all, the poem Babi Yar rang out like a bell summoning people’s consciousness—the word Jew uttered in public, uttered with respect, uttered with compassion, printed for everybody to see. In my exhilaration I told Leib that we had entered the Renaissance, not a humdrum Thaw. “Sure,” he grumbled, “after a forty-year entombment a mat to sleep on is Renaissance.”
A few minutes with Musya and Katya – and I felt at home and knew I would come back every chance I had. The widow of their older brother Vanya who was executed for treason in 1937 came to meet me that evening, a petite sad soft-spoken woman. She listened agreeably to Leib’s outrage over the senseless destruction of her talented and dedicated family. “Well, if that’s what the Party had decided, then it must have been for the best,” she said quietly in her cultured voice.
“Best for whom?” he shouted. “Name one single person for whom your ruin was good!” She smiled. He pointed at me, his finger almost touching my nose, “Look! Look and learn! Do you see what happens when people don’t think?” I expected the woman to act offended, but she continued smiling patronizingly – she was privy to something profound that Leib was not capable of comprehending.
In addition to the exoneration, she received, in writing, the right to an apartment in Leningrad. Meanwhile she rotated between cousins. It took a year for Leib to secure a studio apartment for her. She died soon afterward. Her daughter had refused to see her: exonerated or not, dead or alive, Communist Party memberships restored or not, her parents remained enemies of the people. The orphanages for the children of the enemies of the people had done a commendable job of molding their wards’ mentality.
Theater and Shopping.
On each of my visits, Katya waited for me at the top of the stairs, shifting from foot to foot, one side of her upper lip permanently crooked around the eternal cigarette. We hugged then I ran into the apartment and got enveloped in Musya’s tall soft body. Leib grumbled. Public display of emotion tried his patience.
The sisters binge-pampered me, criticizing each other for skimping when filling my plate and for depriving me of rest when I attempted to clear the table after a meal. They kept the duster and broom out of my reach and, crackling with energy, stood guard at the entrance to the corridor leading to the kitchen to prevent the neighbors from casting the evil eye.
I had never caught a glimpse of a single neighbor but frequently heard the phone ring in the middle of the night and Musya shuffle out to the foyer, speak into the phone, waddle down that forbidden corridor, knock on one of the six doors and half-whisper: “Apologies, my dear. There is a young man on the phone asking for you. Will you accept his call, or do you wish me to relate a message?” Leib, in the meantime, stormed out, slammed the receiver, and growled: “What are you doing? She’s a prostitute, for God’s sake!” It did not ruffle Musya a bit: “Lyovushka, do keep your voice down, you’ll wake Benochka. You are not being reasonable. What choice did I have but to deliver the message?”
Her wistful comments and memories of dancing with knights and gossiping with countesses… I had to remind myself that I was not dreaming. Movies and history books came alive in the words that this gentle, softspoken lady uttered serenely: nobility names, titles, fashion trends and customs. Her memory of the day of the Bolshevik Revolution: “As we were leaving Countess N’s ball, we saw laborers running back and forth, back and forth, with no rhyme or reason. Our carriage could barely get through the crowd. Our coachman was so worried that the horses would hit someone.” Speech cadence and the unflappable ingrained civility placed her irrefutably in the blue-blooded St. Petersburg. She was an endangered species flailing for air in the perplexing world.
A stack of tickets to the best plays of the season awaited my arrival – Musya, Katya and I led a sumptuous life, theater-wise. They burst with joy if I wanted to see a play more than once. The clerks at the box office welcomed them with open arms, literally; the word sold-out did not exist.
(They referred to the State Academic Dramatic Theatre and the Kirov Opera and Ballet Theatre under the pre-revolutionary Aleksandiinka and Mariinka. These theaters were named after the wife of Tsar Nicolas I and wife of Tsar Aleksander II, respectively. Kirov, a revolutionary, meant nothing. Neither would they dream of calling their beloved city Leningrad instead of Peter, an indearment.)
We attended some shows more than once. I could not get enough of “Pygmalion” (“My Fair Lady”) and we went three times. At matinees, the remnants of the parasitic class filled the main orchestra seats. Neat gray curls, pleated blouses with bows at the throat, dainty gloves and muffs, pince-nez, knife-sharp trouser creases, bowties, goatees, kissing ladies’ hands, heel clicking – a scene from a period movie, even if the blouses were threadbare, gloves darned, bowties tattered.
In a perfectly modulated tone tinged with defiance, Musya introduced me as her niece. We did not raise the subject of anti-Semitism, but we knew that her circle was dismayed at her wholehearted acceptance of Jewish relatives by marriage. Once, the smirk of a man we ran into was so full of repulsion that my head sank between my shoulders. Musya told me firmly, “Don’t you worry about it. He is a fool. Has always been a fool.”
Leib was no theatergoer; it took my teary eyes to persuade him to take me to a Yevtushenko’s reading at some obscure venue. He liked what he heard and got swept up in the excitement of the wide-eyed audience where he was the oldest by far.
*****
Theater-less days were divided between Leib and Musya.
City walks with Leib turned into lessons on architecture, culture and history. In the Hermitage and the Russian Museum, he followed me silently. I wandered, awed by the opulence, mesmerized by the art.
Musya and I shopped every chance we had. Leningrad, being the cradle of revolution, had its stores supplied much better than Kiev’s. Musya clucked sympathetically over the shopping list my mother had compiled; most of the items were not deficit in Leningrad, like toothbrushes or buckwheat (I could not return home without a healthy quantity of buckwheat) or oranges or zippers or shoelaces – we didn’t even have to stand in lines, at least not long lines.
But Musya did not limit our trips to the list; she spoiled me with imported clothes that were no comparison to what one saw in Kiev. Of course, for that we had to stand in long lines and fight crowds but we got a pair of ankle boots and sandals, a hat, a skirt, a jacket, wool tights.
I remember them all; they served me for years and made me proud every time somebody asked enviously where I got them. The more I bought the wider Musya beamed and the more I had to borrow from her. As if she or Leib would let me pay back.
All You Have to Do Is Think
We spent the evenings talking. Or rather, Leib nudged me subtly into talking. I gushed about the promise of the post-Stalin epoch – the future belongs to me, as I put it. Leib threw in observations that chilled my fervor and struck doubts I did not want to have. “Khrushchev did not give us freedom. People are born free; freedom cannot be given; but sometimes you must lock it away inside you. You know what cannot be locked away? Being a mensch. And only you know if you are a mensch.”
I paid scant attention to Leib’s skepticism. He shrugged, not expecting to overcome teenage obstinacy, but the hope of overcoming indoctrination was diminishing. The breakthrough came on a visit to the Russian Museum when his dry humor succeeded where reasoning had no chance. On the way there, I gushed about our open-minded society that welcomed hundreds of ethnicities that voluntarily joined Russia then the Soviet Union and were allowed to preserve their ancient traditions – “native in form, socialist in substance” it was called. When we approached the monumental painting “Yermak’s Conquest of Siberia,” Leib mumbled: “Voluntary joining of Siberia to Russia.”
Yermak’s Conquest of Siberia. Painting by Vasily Surikov, 1895. Portrays a battle between Russians and Tatars in 1582. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_conquest_of_Siberia#/media/File:Surikov_Pokoreniye_Sibiri_Yermakom.jpg
My resistance dissolved. I could not suppress a fit of laughter. Two grim-looking attendants escorted us out of the building.
*****
Leib’s bookshelves hid Musya’s pre-revolution newspapers and magazines with news reports and stories that, Thaw or no Thaw, would get one arrested. He placed a stack in front of me. He placed the old and the Soviet editions of the encyclopedia in front of me: the same war, for example, listed Russia defeated in the former and victorious in the latter.
“Nothing built on lies is justifiable, or ends well. To remain a mensch – think and understand; to survive — keep quiet and stay away.” He watched me immerse in these sources then come up for air, disoriented and jolted out of my cocoon. “After what you’ve learned, would you want to have a friend like Lenin? So, why would you allow him to define you?”
Leib possessed a breathtakingly vast knowledge of Russian and Soviet history and a vast and unforgiving memory. He was even well-versed in Marxism-Leninism, something he had to do when he had worked on saving the mind of his nephew, Esther’s son. “My librarian almost lost all respect for me when I took out these books,” he laughed, “but I convinced her that they were my ammunition against their authors.”
Ahead of each visit I prepared arguments to counter his reasoning and each time he quashed them without seemingly trying, without raising his voice or delving into tedious discussions. “Have you listened to the words of songs you are taught? ‘Bravely we’ll go to battle for the Soviets and will all die fighting’? Suppose we all die – then what?”
With Leib, it was not a matter of proving his case in a quarrel, it was a matter of resetting my brain, wiring it to recognize logic. Everything was simple, all I needed to do was to think. He reinforced his success on another trip to the Russian Museum. In one of the lesser rooms, he suddenly steered me to a window looking out to a gloomy courtyard. An assortment of large, darkened, snow-splattered statues in various degrees of dismemberment covered the ground. Uniforms, helmets, mustaches, swords, horses – the noblemen and the warriors of the Tsar’s Russia. “History cast out like garbage,” Leib whispered bitterly. The sight stayed with me for life. In thirty short years, the mass toppling of statues of Lenin began.
Past glory: busts removed after the fall of the Soviet Union. Left to right: Lenin, Marx, Stalin, three busts of Lenin.
*****
Leib’s dream project for retirement was adding English to his cache of languages. He acquired a thick grammar textbook, an unwieldy Russian-English dictionary, a two-volume English-Russian dictionary, and began with Shakespeare.
Practical Grammar of the English Lanuage. Moscow, 1957.
A cousin, an English teacher, helped with the pronunciation. Four years later when he read and understood the Bard easily, he placed the textbook and the dictionaries into a capacious avoska and handed it to me as I was packing for my return trip home. He decided that it was useless at his age to learn a new language. “I cannot throw out books,” he said. “You do what you want with them.”
I could not throw out books, either. Instead I began learning English, not with Shakespeare but modestly, with the basics. I still have the textbook.
Previous: Leib Averbukh. 2. Marrying into Parasitic Class. WWII
Read about Leib’s parents and siblings in Averbukh, Kuppershmidt
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