Babinsky. School (1952 – 1963). 1: Choosing a School

Next: School. 2: Father of all Nations died; Joining the Pioneers

Choosing a School

The misfortune of ending up in Kurenevka marked a happy ending and a happier beginning. Stalin’s steamroller left us on the side of the road, bruised but not crushed. Miraculously, after nine months of homelessness and separation, not only were we together, we were together in a private apartment, Avram had a job, and the adults had propiska. For those miserable nine months, their passports showed a stamp terminating their propiska on the day of eviction in January 1951 and no stamp with a current address. Had their identities been checked this fact would have amounted to admission of vagrancy, a phenomenon that could not exist in the Soviet Union, by definition. The consequences were best not to think of, particularly for Avram, a proven cosmopolitan, and for me – a child without an address qualified for orphanage.

As we settled in our new life, my school enrollment became top priority. There was no choice: our address, aka propiska, tied us to a nearby school with instructions in Ukrainian, shunned in the largely Russian-speaking Kiev. Avram and Rakhil set their hearts on School No. 14, a mile away but with instructions in Russian. Pre-Revolution, its building housed a boarding school for girls of noble birth.

(School No. 14 was located across the street from the farmer’s market where Rakhil hired peasant women to do our big laundry. Afterwards, Rakhil did the ironing. Preparing bed linen for ironing was both a heartwarming ritual and entertainment. First, two people grabbed the corners of a bed sheet (no elastics!) and, arms stretched to the side, walked backwards as far as the length of the linen allowed. Then they slowly brought their arms close, rapidly pleating the fabric into their fists, and firmly pulled the linen diagonally. Then they released the pleats, returned to the original position, aligned the corners, and completed the folding. These horizontal pulls, especially if repeated when I, a novice, let go of the linen, were moments of laughter and delight. When I was too short to participate, I looked forward to scampering back and forth under the linen while it was being pulled.)

Boiling laundry in a pail with hot water, soap, and baking soda. Photo from Fishki.net. Source: About Soviet Life Hacks: https://novate.ru/blogs/040225/72302/

To enroll in School No. 14, I would have to live in the village-like area at the edge of the city, still full of private houses. Their owners, exempt from propiska law, maintained registers that listed names of residents and the relationship to the head of the family. It was this loophole that put the coveted school within our reach: Avram’s subordinate owned a house next to it – Abram Isayevich Nemirovsky was possibly the only Jew indigenous to Kurenevka. He entered my name into the register as his great-niece. My job was to remember, if questions arose, that he was my great-uncle and I lived with him. Just in case, Rakhil and I visited him so that he and I could meet and I could describe the house.

The house sat on a small lot (the wooden outhouse on it served also the adjacent house) and had one large room that fit a bed with metal head and foot boards painted blue, a wardrobe with a chipped mirror, a square table, two long benches, a gigantic wood-burning stove, a rusted sink, and a tub on cast-iron legs used to store firewood.

With a disclaimer “she is Ukrainian but not an anti-Semite,” Abram Isayevich introduced us to his outhouse-sharing neighbor, Maria Fyodorovna Kuznetsova, a first-to-fourth-grade teacher at my future school. (He had trusted her to keep his house safe during the war when he and his late wife, a nurse, were at the front.)

Before being asked, Rakhil confessed, nervously, that it was impossible to stop me from learning how to read but, luckily, I did not know how to write. She absolutely agreed that all Soviet children should begin school from the same starting point to ensure equal progress. But she hoped that my obstinacy would not count against me. It was not every day that Rakhil sounded meek or contrite. Maria Fyodorovna reached into the capacious pocket of her apron, pulled out a magazine, and asked me to read from a random page. Her verdict: “She’ll be bored in first grade. I have the third grade this year, I’ll take her.”

(Fourteen years later, the novel Babi Yar, pawed a bit by censors, made her son, Anatoly Kuznetsov, famous. A teenager at the time of the Nazi occupation, he based his story on personal observations. Following the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, he defected to England.)

Babi Yar, 29./30. 9. 1941 — Murder of 33771 Jewish people.
Author Johannes Hähle (1906–1944), German military photographer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_H%C3%A4hle.
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Babi_Yar-06-194.jpg. Soviet POWs covering a mass grave after the Babi Yar massacre, October 1, 1941.
Source: https://loznitsa.com/ (SERGEI LOZNITSA). “The Natural History of Destruction.”

Maria Fyodorovna assured us that the principal, Nikifor Fedotovich Naumenko, would not object to my jumping over two grades. He wanted advanced pupils and, she hinted, might have disregarded the out-of-district address. Makarenko’s student, he had unparalleled influence in the city’s school administration (Anton Makarenko, a revered Soviet educator, established self-supporting labor communes where he rehabilitated street urchins after the Russian Civil War.)

Nikifor Fedotovich, a juvenile delinquent whose life Makarenko had turned around, graduated from the Course of Agitators and Instructors of the Communist Party that transformed into a Communist University that transformed into the Higher Party School. His vocabulary and grammar remained rudimentary. A stocky unsmiling man with a potato nose and a lion roar, he knew every pupil by name and was universally feared and loved. When he stopped some hapless first-grader on the first floor for running, the tenth-graders on the third floor stopped running.

(The Higher Party School under the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was founded in 1918, a few months after the Bolshevik Revolution, and existed – under different names: School of Soviet Work, Communist University, Higher School of Propagandists, and finally Higher Party School – for as long as the regime did. The post-Soviet Ukraine blithely ignored the irony of renaming it into the Institute of Entrepreneurship and Market Relations. The instructors quickly adapted to the new reality: those who taught scientific atheism, scientific communism, political economy were now teaching, respectively, religious studies, political science, economics.)

Nikifor Fedotovich guaranteed the authorities a model school to trot out to various delegations. For that he demanded, and received, full discretion in staffing and in pupil selection. He accepted children of intelligentsia that resided outside the school’s district and turned away most children from uneducated families that resided in the school’s district. Worse, he hired professors discarded by institutions of higher learning—Maria Fyodorovna did not utter cosmopolitan or Jewish but she didn’t have to. By all accounts, Nikifor Fedotovich earned the title of mensch.

Through blat—she worked at a garment factory, after all—Rakhil acquired brown wool for my school uniform, black wool for the everyday pinafore, white cambric for the holiday pinafore. Polina sewed the dress and both pinafores and crocheted lace embellishments for the white pinafore. (The uniform was similar to one worn by students of classical gymnasia a in the times of the Russian Empire.)

Everyday School Outfit: Uniform, Black Pinafore, Briefcase, Dark Bows. Source; https://www.imperiasumok.rublogfokus-v-proshloe-kak-sunduk-prevratilsya-v-portfel.html

For the first school day, she sewed the white over-collar and over-cuffs to the uniform, afterward it was my daily chore, not a favorite one.

Daily Sewing on Over-collar and Over-cuffs to School Uniform. Picture by Evgenia Dvoskin. From: http://www.izbrannoe.com/news/iskusstvo/dlya-tekh-kto-pomnit-nashe-proshloe-v-risunkakh-evgenii-dvoskinoy/

The pinafores had folds on the bottom and on the handkerchief pocket and secreted fabric inside the belts to let out as I grew. The dress had a hem sufficient for three school years; after that, Polina went with a two-piece solution. She had to replace the top more frequently than the skirt because I inherited Avram’s tendency to sweat; Rakhil, like many Gnoyenskys, did not sweat at all.

(Antiperspirants entered the Soviet reality in the late 1970s, after our emigration. Limited to the black market in the beginning, the product quickly rose in status to the most desirable present for a girlfriend.)

First Days of School.

The calendar marked the First of September, the first school day, in red. Dressed-up parents escorted girls in white pinafores and boys in blue suits to school.

Soviet School outfit. Boys: Uniform, Briefcase. Girls (for special occasions): Uniform, White Pinafore, White Bows, Briefcase. Source: https://shnim.livejournal.com/54806.html

Our principal roared a speech in the school backyard. Teachers marched their pupils around the building and through the main lobby graced by a wall-size painting of a little girl presenting a bouquet of wildflowers to Stalin.

Sun lit up everything in the picture: the blue sky, the green meadow, the grandfatherly Stalin in white military attire, the girl’s rosy worshipping face, her white pinafore. The ceiling prevented Stalin from straightening up to his full height, so he looked squashed vis-à-vis the girl. I did not know then that in real life he was five-four but I doubt that the painter had intended to zero in on that fact.

Scrawny and short for my age I appeared even tinier next to third-graders, especially when wearing the obligatory oversleeves.

Oversleeves (narukavniki) worn by bookkeepers and school children. Photo from: http://novaya.com.ua/?/articles/2010/08/31/114914-16

I read better than some of my classmates and recited Samuil Marshak’s poems easily and, it turned out, we were almost equal in arithmetic. But they knew so much more. They knew all the rules, like to speak only when called on after raising your hand and to stand up before speaking. They raised their hands correctly and stood up when Maria Fyodorovna came in or was leaving the classroom.

Soviet School Classroom. Photo from: https://defendingrussia.ru/a/russkaya_sovetskaya_sistema_obuchenija-6547/

Soviet School Classroom. Source: https://novate.ru/blogs/291221/61692/

They had two years of calligraphy under their belts. In first grade they learned to write in pencil, in the second they progressed to dip pens.

Dip Pens used in Soviet School. 1950s. Source: https://fishki.net/1313971-sovetskaja-shkolnaja-promokashka.html

They knew how to change a pen nib when it broke. They used the inkwells and blotting paper masterfully;

Non-Spill Inkwell used in Soviet Schools in the 1940s-1960s. Photo from: https://m-nsk.ru/portfolio-item/20-noyabrya-chernilnitsa-neprolivayka-1940-h-60-h-godov

Ink-Blotting Paper for school. Source: https://vk.com/@dianagabaldon-istoriya-promokashki

my inkblots were so fat that Maria Fyodorovna’s big semi-round blotter had to come to the rescue.

Ink-Blotter for school. Source: https://vk.com/@dianagabaldon-istoriya-promokashki

And they had calluses and ink stains on their middle fingers while I had ink stains on my hands and cheeks. My classmates disliked me because Maria Fyodorovna spent a lot of time helping me.

I contended with sneak shoves and braid pulls. I didn’t even cry or tattletale when boys sat on my briefcase after pushing the non-spill inkwell into it after class. The ink did spill inside. When I placed the inkwell into the desk recess the next morning there was not enough ink in it to fill my pen. I practiced writing at home but the letters came out crooked and shaky. In a few days, Maria Fyodorovna handed me over to Maria Illarionovna Poplavskaya who taught the first grade that year.

“Be patient while we learn the alphabet, we’ll catch up in no time,” Maria Illarionovna whispered in my ear. “Do you know that the school has a library?”

Slight and soft-spoken, she became the second mother to us for four years. Rakhil insisted that I invite Maria Illarionovna to the graduation ceremony eleven years later and thank her in my speech as the most precious teacher in our lives.

Next: School. 2: Father of all Nations died; Joining the Pioneers