After finishing the eighth grade, my cousins began working as drivers without any additional training. By the way, when they were drafted, their favorite occupation helped out: instead of digging trenches and drilling, they just drove commanding officers and took care of their cars.
The future of Boris, Uncle Avner’s son, took shape long before he finished school. His musical talent was hereditary – from his grandfather and father. Boris began to play the violin when he was seven. He attended a music school, performed in concerts, took part in international competitions, and won the first prize at the republic-wide competition. After the eighth grade, he switched entirely to his music school. He had already attended it for two years, and in another two years, he could enter the music conservatory.
“That’s what happens to people who are talented,” I sometimes thought, not without envy. But what about me? Boris and I were relatives, cousins. Why couldn’t I love music as much as he? I had also attended a music school. Why had I given it up regardless of how much Mama had asked me not to?
What I definitely wanted was to get a higher education. But what field should I choose? What profession? There was complete chaos in my head on that account… My desires intertwined, boiled, replaced one another, and I couldn’t decide on any of them.
I imagined quite a few possibilities for myself when I was a child. My first sweet dream was to be a crane operator. I saw myself sitting there way up high… However, I’ve already written about that. The skeleton of a dinosaur was brought to Chirchik – I was a famous paleontologist… or archeologist… My passion for history, my interest in it wasn’t merely a child’s interest. It was nurtured by plenty of reading, and even malicious GooPoo, with his irksome lessons, couldn’t kill it.
My trouble was not so much in my constant changes of interests and plans, in my hesitance, doubts, in envying my friends who had already made their choices, in asking myself faint-heartedly, “Should I go to the tank school?” It was life itself that gave me the greatest difficulties. Life, as Ostap Bender, the hero of the famous book “Twelve Chairs” put it, dictated its harsh laws to us.
To begin with, I was a Jewish boy. I belonged to the Jewish community, which meant that I was growing up, to some extent, under the influence of its traditions.
When I became an adult, I read about Jewish families in Odessa who, in their time, were obsessed with the idea of turning their children into musicians. Strange as it may seem, some of the most brilliant Jewish musicians were actually natives of Odessa. Thanks to this mania, or it may have been the other way around, that the mania sprang up because of the rise of a few child prodigies, but that’s not my point. I thought about something else: many fates were ruined when children who hated music were forced into becoming professional musicians.
Fortunately, Bucharan Jews didn’t have that kind of fanaticism. Many of them had their children study music, but the only ones who became musicians, like Boris, were those who strived for it. However, there were quite a few predilections and also biases in our little world. I don’t denounce them, for many were the bitter fruits of the centuries-old struggle for survival. But…
When, for example, I told Mama that Kolya and Sasha would enter the tank school, and perhaps I should try it too, she just threw up her hands. I wasn’t surprised. I knew Mama would be against it. They thought the same in every Jewish family I knew – a military career was not for Jews; it was dangerous. A child would go far away from home, and in general… It wasn’t the proper milieu… There was terrible antisemitism in the army. People would tell each other about Jewish lads killed by someone in their own unit. The military commanders covered up those antisemitic killings. They would inform the parents that their son had had an accident while cleaning a rifle… One of our relatives had friends in Samarkand whose son had been killed. He served in a military battalion somewhere in Russia and was sent to cut timber. A guy who was cutting a tree next to him killed him with the butt of his axe. The parents were informed that it had been an accident… No one in our parts believed in such accidents.
In Jewish families it was assumed that if you wanted to study, you would obviously choose a profession that was reputable, prestigious and well paid. Become an engineer, a physician, a lawyer. Hardly anyone seriously cared about their son’s or daughter’s interests. It was the future position that was important. For example, what kind of a position was literature teacher? How much could such a teacher earn? It was much better to go into business. Get yourself a job at a store or a warehouse, and proper income would be guaranteed. Mama must have had the same attitude about “proper income” as everyone else in her circle. She herself suffered enough from a constant, humiliating lack of money. But she understood perfectly well that I was not cut out for a store or warehouse or any other similar occupation. With my personality, I wouldn’t fit in there. She certainly would not encourage me to make such a choice. On the contrary, she wanted me to continue my studies so I could earn a living with my head, not my hands, so to speak. “I couldn’t do it,” she used to say, “I didn’t have the opportunity. But Emma and you… Believe me, to toil at a sewing machine twelve hours a day… Believe me.” Of course, we saw how hard Mama worked.
All right, it was certainly necessary to study, and I really wanted to. So far, it wasn’t quite clear what to study, but that was only a minor misfortune. The real problem was getting into an institution of higher learnng.
A forbidden, venomous and very popular song was sung in those times: “But then, we manufacture missiles, we build a dam across the Yenisei, and even in the field of ballet, we are ahead of our whole planet.” It was considered that in the field of education we were also ahead of our whole planet, for school and college education was free in the Soviet Union. That’s how it was at schools, from primary to high school, without the cheating. But then the cheating would begin.
There weren’t enough colleges. There were twice as many applicants, sometimes three times as many, or even ten times as many as a college could admit. The flood of those eager to study ran into a granite wall with a narrow slit. Only ten or fifteen per cent of those who relied on their own knowledge and abilities could slip through that slit. But even among the lucky ones, the majority of those admitted were either honor students (awarded gold or silver medals at graduation) or athletes, for each college wanted to become famous for its soccer or basketball players. The rest of the quota was reserved for those who were either well connected with someone at a college or had someone who could pull strings on their behalf or pay a bribe.
It was called “greasing someone’s palm.” Practically all the teachers were willing to have their “palms greased.” Provosts, deans, and other college officials enriched themselves from this annual competition. The price of having a son or daughter on the list of the admitted was considerable – from ten to twenty thousand rubles. That’s what it cost in our parts. It was much higher in republics like Georgia and Armenia. What could be bought with ten or twenty thousand rubles in those days? That was the price of a Zhiguly car. Converted into our family’s budget, it would be Mama’s total salary for four or five years of work at the factory. Some people used a Volga car as a bribe. The chicest Soviet Volga cost about twenty thousand.
I heard about the price from Zhenya Suchkov, who had recently taken up residence in our building. Zhenya wanted to become a physician and hoped to enter the medical school in Tashkent, in the evening department. He didn’t dream of making it into the daytime department where the competition was over twenty applicants per slot. “If only we had twenty-five thousand. That would be quite a different story. We would buy a Volga, and onward! You can only drive into the daytime department in a Volga,” Zhenya used to say with bitterness. His father was a military man, but he didn’t have twenty-five thousand, nor even ten thousand. Zhenya tried to enter the medical school without pulling strings or paying a bribe for two years in a row. He didn’t succeed. But he was a persistent young man: he went to the old Russian town of Tver and managed to make it into the evening department there. He either did it himself or with someone’s help.