All the Kerns children could chatter away in French, and this circumstance made them rare birds in the neighborhood—their local tribespeople spoke a different idiom. The watchmaker’s descendants, although they spoke their mother tongue perfectly, loved to bandy words about in aristocratic French, which was never otherwise heard on their street. They were all educated at home. The tutor of Mark and Joseph, the older boys, was engaged when the family was still relatively prosperous. After their financial ruin, the older boys taught the youngest brother, Mikhail. And he, in turn, taught Marusya, when he grew a bit older. In the early years, when they still lived comfortably, they even received music lessons from a teacher, Mr. Kosarkovsky, who eventually became a family friend. Marusya had always shown a keen interest in learning. The Kerns children were close-knit and fond of one another, but Marusya, as the youngest, was an object of adoration. Her confidence in the love of those around her, in particular men, betrayed her from time to time in her adult life; but in her youth, it only added to her charm.
The preparatory school, because of the quota system for Jews in place at the time, was off-limits for the Kerns children. Joseph, the eldest, had joined the proletariat early on. The second brother, Mark, didn’t make the cut for the quota. Mikhail didn’t even try. Both Mark and Mikhail completed the preparatory-school academic program at night school.
Pinchas’s business plans with the company owner, Louis Brandt, had long before ground to a halt, but their good relations continued in epistolary form, now with the heir of the firm, Louis, Jr. Pinchas had paid off his debt on time, and now and then he would order watch parts from Omega. Slowly but surely, the family lost all their wealth. Nevertheless, in spite of their poverty, their home remained a hospitable one, with constant tea parties and musical evenings that attracted assorted youth of every stripe and color. They were freethinkers. Their gatherings in the warmer months of the year, when they would set up a samovar in the little yard behind their building, were especially popular. Poverty did not cancel out amusement.
In October 1905, a pogrom against Kiev’s Jews raged through the city, hastening the ruin of the family. The watchmaker’s shop was completely destroyed, and the family’s property plundered. What the marauders didn’t take away, they smashed. They even managed to render the samovar unfit for use.
Kiev’s Jewish tradespeople and craftsmen had been ruined, but the consequences of this pogrom were not only material. The Jews who lived through it felt that there was just a thin barrier between them and their utter demise. Talmudic teachers and scholars, living repositories of divine texts and thousands of years of history, sank into sorrow and desperation. Zionism came into vogue, promoting the return of the dispersed Jewish exiles to the Holy Land to establish the historic Israel. But the ideas of socialism had no less appeal for Jewish young people. The 1905 Revolution failed, but the idea of a new, purifying, and liberating revolution took hold of them and troubled their hearts. Politics was all the rage. Only Pinchas Kerns, who had always loved reading newspapers in all the languages available to him, had lost the taste for dispute and argument carried on by journalists and politicians. He abandoned his habit of reading newspapers, and instead took to repairing an old music box left crippled by the pogrom thugs. He only sighed, listening silently to the endless conversations of his sons and their friends about the rebuilding of this unjustly ordered society, about the coming changes, and the struggle, from which old Pinchas didn’t expect anything but trouble and new pogroms.
Fifteen-year-old Marusya, whom their good neighbors, the Yakovenkos, had sheltered from October 18 to 20, during the pogrom, hiding her in their bedroom and, during the most dangerous moments, in their cellar, emerged from this experience as an ardent Christian radical. Her character had matured completely during those dark, shameful days of Kiev’s history. The formerly hospitable, affable world now divided itself into two halves, without shades or nuances. On the one side were the fighters for human dignity and freedom; on the other, their enemies, exploiters and the Black Hundreds.*
The Yakovenkos, who had sheltered Marusya, who fed her and protected her throughout those horrific days, belonged to neither one side nor the other. To simplify matters, she counted them as relatives, for whom you feel an affinity dictated by nature.
While Pelageya Onisimovna Yakovenko was removing the small icon of the Holy Mother and Child from where she had placed it between the two window frames, Marusya looked at the piece of painted wood and felt a confused sense of gratitude to both of them—to the statuesque Ukrainian neighbor, with her tiny eyes and fake crown-braid, and to Miriam (Maria) the Jewess (who bore the same name as Marusya), holding her little Christ Child. Together they had defended her from the screaming crowd of wild beasts who called themselves Christians. In this place, her thinking underwent some sort of turbulence. Her inner certitude faltered, and the world no longer divided itself into two parts, with bad people and good people, but in some other, more complex way. Pelageya Onisimovna and Uncle Taras were monarchists. They owned two apartment buildings and a tavern, and so they were exploiters. But they were good people, even heroic. Rumors were making the rounds that, during those awful days, a Russian family that had sheltered an elderly Jewish woman had been killed. The Yakovenkos had certainly risked a great deal by taking Marusya into their home. None of this accorded with the terms of her understanding, and one thought unsettled another. There was neither clarity nor order in her mind—only agitation, disturbance, and the feeling that drastic changes would be necessary before life could continue. And, with or without Marusya’s help, things were already changing. Her elder brother Joseph, a member of the Jewish Self-Defense Organization, was banished for three years to the Irkutsk region in Siberia, like all those who had taken up weapons during the days of the pogrom. Mark had left the family even earlier. After graduating from the Faculty of Law at St. Petersburg University, he stayed on in the capital to take up an insignificant position with a law firm. To his father’s bitter disappointment, Mark received his “higher” education at a shamefully low cost: he had become a Lutheran. The family refused to talk about it, as though it were some kind of shameful disease.
Old Pinchas, who had read newspapers his whole life, never became a religious fanatic. He did attend the synagogue now and then, however, and never broke off relations with his religious brethren. He did not approve of his elder son’s choices; he simply remained silent, and mourned. Mark put a great deal of effort into trying to help his younger brother join him in Petersburg to study. Soon Mikhail left Kiev, to enroll in St. Petersburg University as an auditor.
Although none of them had perished during the pogrom, the family’s circumstances were still dire. But life began improving of its own accord. The Jewish Relief Committee, which had been set up to aid victims of the pogrom, sent them money and clothes, somewhat the worse for wear, but still in perfectly good condition—though, unfortunately, several sizes too big. Mother sat down at the sewing machine with one of the garments, then ripped out the seams, cut off the excess fabric, and took it in. The result was the most beautiful dress Marusya had ever worn—chestnut-colored flannel wool, trimmed with silk lace. They bought her some little button-down boots with small heels—the first time she had ever worn boots that weren’t made specially for children. Marusya had become a young lady.