“Naum’s clothes and Aunt Clara’s sunduk saved our lives!” Grandma Liza used to say, gravely nodding at the blue trunk still in her hallway during my childhood. Indeed. Markets of every shade from white (legal) to black (illegal) were central to daily survival. With rubles almost useless, food itself, bread especially, became currency.
Diaries from the Leningrad Siege leave bone-chilling details of the economics of starvation. Ushanka (flap hat) = four ounces of bread; men’s galoshes = five ounces of bread; used samovar = two pounds of bread. Families hid the deaths of relatives so they could continue using the deceased’s monthly bread kartochki. The cost of an individual grave = four and a half pounds of bread plus five hundred rubles.
Starvation was nowhere as horrifying, as extreme, as it was in Leningrad, during those nine hundred days. But for any Russian who suffered hunger contractions at all, a wartime food glossary was etched in his or her memory:
Balanda: An anorexic sham “soup.” Flavored with anything from a horse bone to herring tail. Thickened with crushed rusks or a handful of millet. Also a term used for gulag fodder.
Duranda: Hard cakes of linseed or other seed hulls left over from oil processing. Peacetime cattlefeed.
Kombizhir (literally “combined fat”): Hydrogenated oil, usually rancid and greenish.
Khleb (bread): Heavy loaves, claylike inside. Baked from rye flour stretched out with oats or duranda and/or sawdust.
Tushonka (tinned pork): At the start of 1942 a new class of edibles began appearing in Russia. Vtoroy front (“second front”) was the nickname for American lend-lease foodstuffs. The most coveted and iconic of Yankee delicacies was tushonka tinned in its fat in Iowa to exact Russian specifications. Tushonka far outlasted the war. Even during my childhood it was the cherished sine qua non of hiking trips and dacha summers.
Shokolad.
Of all the gifts that made their way from Naum during those days, one struck Mother right in the heart. It made her delirious. Not just because it was shokolad in war-torn Russia. Not even because it tasted far better than the chalky American lend-lease stuff. No. It was because of the dark-eyed young man on the wrapper: prodigious of nose, young and steely of glare, with a gloriously embossed collar. The crush Mom developed on this chocolate hero was instant and hopeless. His swoony Orientalist name matched his fiery looks. Mohammed Reza Pahlavi—crowned shah of Iran in 1941 after his father was forced into exile by occupiers Soviet Union and Britain.
Oil. Petroleum was the reason the Frumkin children were getting Pahlavi Jr. chocolates.
The second summer of war marked the Soviet low ebb of the conflict: six million soldiers killed or captured, most of Ukraine occupied, Leningrad faltering under blokada, Moscow unfallen but vulnerable. As the Germans headed southeast, Naum had yet again been transferred, this time to Baku, the hot, windy, uneasily quiet capital of Soviet Azerbaijan. This vital Caucasian republic, bordering Iran on the Caspian Sea, pumped the majority of Russia’s oil. It was oil Hitler coveted for himself. Launching Operation Blau at the Caucasus in June 1942, the Fuhrer aimed to take Baku by September. His overconfident generals presented him with an extravagantly frosted cake with a sign that said KASPISCHES MEER (Caspian Sea). Film footage shows Hitler smiling suavely as he takes the slice labeled BAKU. But the Luftwaffe left Baku alone: its vast petroleum infrastructure had to be delivered intact. The Fuhrer wanted to eat his cake but have it too.
Iran, meanwhile, occupied but still nominally neutral, simmered with international intrigue. Tehran was thick with German agents and operatives. Shuttling between Baku and the Iranian capital, Naum was back in the familiar world of cloak-and-dagger. So highly classified was his work that he never confided its details to any of us—aside from bragging about having met the dashing young shah on the chocolates.
From Baku, Naum dispatched Ivan Ivanych, his intelligence aide, to Ulyanovsk to bring the family south. Gray-eyed and sinewy, Ivan looked the part of an elite GRU spy guy—lend-lease black leather coat, tall boots, a pistol, plus a mysterious attaché case he watched like a hawk. The journey to Baku lasted three nightmarish weeks, or maybe six, Mother can’t remember. Mostly they bivouacked for days at train stations on layovers between hopelessly delayed, crawling teplushki, the wartime cattle freights overcrowded with orphaned children and wounded combatants whose bandages undulated with black swarms of lice. At one point Ivan dozed off on a station bench and someone snatched his attaché case. Mom watched the GRU hero chase down the culprit and whack him on the head with the butt of his gun. The police intervened, the attaché case sprang open, and to her utter astonishment, Mom saw watches—big clunky watches!—tumble out onto the pavement. Larisa was little, but not too little to smell a black marketeer, even though Granddad later insisted that the watches were “crucial intelligence tools.” (Who knew?) For the final leg of the journey there was a boat at a filthy port in Turkmenistan where women in headscarves hawked quince and men with Turkic features rode atop camels. For several days everyone vomited crossing the Caspian during a storm.
Naum met the family on a pier in Baku with an armful of tangerines. An oily Caspian darkness smothered the city. Mom could barely make out Naum’s features, but the overwhelming aroma of citrus made her weep. The family was together again. Their luck had held.
Compared to hungry Ulyanovsk, Baku was a different planet, a lush Orientalist dreamscape similar to the magical pavilions Larisa had encountered at Moscow’s agricultural exhibition back in prewar 1939. At the bazaars men with splendiferous mustaches not unlike Comrade Stalin’s whistled at Liza as she bartered her bread rations for fuzzy porcelain-looking peaches, sun-dried figs threaded on strings, and tubs of Azeri yogurt, piercingly tart. There were swims in the polluted Caspian Sea; mouths and fingers stained from climbing mulberry trees. Local Caspian Flotilla dignitaries hosted rice pilaf feasts aboard destroyers and cruisers. Only the foul smell from the oil rigs marred Mother’s happiness.
Once in a while Naum’s family even got a taste—literally—of his intelligence work. A few of his “boys” would haul a big table into the courtyard of the house where they shared one narrow closetlike room, but with a balcony and a view. On the table lay a sturgeon the size of a man, or a small whale. Fishing was the cover for Naum’s spies in the Caspian. The sturgeon was split open, glistening caviar scooped from its belly. For weeks after, the family ate sturgeon pickled, brined, dried, and minced into kotleti. To this day Mother can’t look at sturgeon or caviar, still riven, she says, by the guilt of eating those delicacies while the rest of the country was starving. During the entire eighteen months they spent by the Caspian, Mom couldn’t shake the sense that she was hallucinating. She was dazed and overwhelmed by her family’s luck—their improbable luck.