“By the way I walk?” I was puzzled.
“Yes, you walk very freely, not the way we walk.” He was obviously referring to my ducklike walk, the kind that used to infuriate my army sergeant.
The Khreshchatyk was a broad boulevard, now bustling with traffic, but during World War II it had been destroyed. Major “remont,” or renovation, started in 1946 with tall, Soviet-style buildings on both sides. Trees and flowers happily obstructed much of the view, leaving behind a feeling of an old, lived-in Kiev, disturbed only by the occasional black limo racing down the center of the boulevard. Last week, I noted in my diary, these limos were called ZISs, short for Zavod Imena Stalina, meaning “factory in the name of Stalin.” When one needed a limo, one ordered a ZIS. Now the ZIS has been renamed ZIL—“factory in the name of Lenin,” infinitely safer after the Khrushchev speech.
The Khreshchatyk was a historic boulevard that screamed “Ukraine” to a visitor from any other part of the Soviet Union. “I’m different,” it proclaimed. “I’m me.” It conveyed not only a feeling of youthful energy but also a link to the past, a place where a Ukrainian poet such as Taras Shevchenko could stride while creating sentimental odes to Cossacks and damning condemnations of Russian leaders such as Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. I enjoyed the simple pleasure of buying an ice cream cone from one of the many vendors on the Khreshchatyk and then finding a park bench and watching people, young and old, strolling by, many of them seeking an adventure they may never find.
In the afternoon I visited the Kiev Pechersk Cathedral and Monastery, whose golden cupolas glistened in the bright sunshine. Located on an elevation on the right bank of the Dnieper, it was surrounded by a yellowish wall, which from a distance looked like a giant snake frozen into the green mountainside. The cathedral, called the Lavra, was built in the tenth century on orders of Yaroslav the Wise. It ushered in the golden age of Kievan Rus. For Russians the Lavra had special appeal. It was believed to be the first Orthodox church in Russia, and the famous Russian Chronicles, recording the early history of Russia, were written there by monks. Though the cathedral itself no longer served as a church, a number of smaller churches within its massive walls were open to the public. Each was overcrowded. On a pathway to one church were the ruins of another, leveled by the Germans in the early days of World War II. I saw an old lady bow down before the ruins, touch her head to the ground, cross herself, and, with tears in her eyes, whisper a prayer. Religion remained a powerful force in a nation governed by atheists.
Kiev was divided roughly into three parts: the first one, Soviet and postwar; the second, centered on the cathedral, historic and impressive; and the third, possibly the oldest part, the Podol, the marketplace fronting the Dnieper. Having paid my respects to parts one and two of Kiev, I wanted to see part three. My cabdriver objected. “Why see that?” he asked. “There is nothing interesting there. It is old.” I insisted, hinting a big tip would be his reward, and off we went. But he refused to stop anywhere, and when I saw the Podol, I understood his reluctance. In truth, I didn’t know what to expect. Because my mother was born there in 1899, well before the Russian Revolution, I imagined from her stories that it would be a modest, middle-class community of merchants, artisans, and teachers. Now, it was anything but. In fact, I was “thunderstruck,” as I noted in my diary, by the sight of “incredible poverty, filth and misery, slums unparalleled in my experience.”
The Nizhny Val was the Podol’s main street. It was dirty, crowded, cluttered with pushcarts and peddlers, and littered with garbage. I wrote, “Nothing that Dickens described in 19th-century capitalist London could hope to match the reality of the socialist Podol.” I made a quick decision: I knew I would have to return, but I wanted to do so on my own. I asked the cabdriver to take me back to my hotel. “Yes, sir,” he smiled, tickled to escape the Podol.
The following day, late in the afternoon, after exhausting hours of cathedral hopping, I left my hotel and slowly made my way down a steep, narrow pathway running a few hundred yards from the upper reaches of Kiev to the Podol, to the pit of Maxim Gorky’s Lower Depths, a classic depiction of Eastern European poverty. The Nizhny Val was still overcrowded with pushcarts and peddlers. The odor everywhere was foul, and the rickety houses looked old and windblown. I heard many languages—Russian, Ukrainian, Armenian, Georgian; more than any other, I heard Yiddish. Most of the people were Jews. The Podol was the Jewish ghetto of Kiev. An elderly man, dressed in rags, told me there were more Jews in Kiev than anywhere else in the Soviet Union, and more Armenians in the Podol than in the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. I doubted his estimates but did not challenge him.
The Podol was a place of astonishing poverty. Many of the people I saw were barefoot, their feet wrapped in rags. Behind one stand stood an old women selling potatoes that looked rotten and vegetables that looked wilted. The meat on the adjacent stand smelled bad. Everywhere people pushed and poked in a Darwinian struggle for position—and survival.
Kiev had suffered severely, and it looked it. I suspected that my mother, if she were with me, would have been shocked by the Podol’s shoddy appearance.
I stopped at a pushcart, where blankets were being sold.
“How much for this blanket, Yankel? It has holes in it, but how much anyway?”
“Seventy-five rubles, Moishe, the state price.”
“I’ll give you sixty-five.”
“Don’t be silly. You know it costs seventy-five. That’s the state’s price.”
“Yankel, don’t talk to me about ‘the state’s price.’ How much?”
The negotiation continued for another few minutes. The buyer got the blanket for sixty-nine rubles.
The Podol used to have two synagogues. One was turned into a “theater for young audiences” in 1949 during one of Stalin’s anti-Semitic rages. The other, small and sad, survived on Shcherbytsky Pereulok. A twenty-eight-year-old Jew, a native of Kiev, kindly escorted me to a Friday evening service. He had returned to Kiev in 1948 after fleeing the Nazi onslaught in 1941. He spoke both Yiddish and Russian and a “bit of Ukrainian.” He told me that conditions had improved since Stalin’s death. “If anyone calls me a dirty Jew now,” he said, “I can turn him in to the authorities. Things have become much better since Stalin died.”
Jews were gathering for prayer when I entered the synagogue. I became an instant celebrity, standing, so it seemed, a head taller than many of them. They gushed with questions:
“Where are you from?”
“New York.”
“New York? I have an uncle who lives there. Maybe you know him.”
“Are you married?”
“No.”
“No? But what’s wrong? Are there no nice Jewish girls in America?”
“What do you do?”
“I work at the U.S. embassy in Moscow. (I sensed a moment of caution.)
“But you are Jewish, yes?”
“Yes. Jews are allowed to work at the U.S. embassy? Yes.”
“Where did you go to school?”
“City College and Harvard.”
“They are good schools?”
“Yes, very good.”
An old man approached me. He spoke surprisingly good English. “How is Harry Truman?” he asked.
“He’s in good health,” I replied.
“Oh good,” he went on, “and can you please tell me how Margaret is? I mean, is she married?” I told him that she had only recently married Clifton Daniels, a prominent correspondent and an editor for the New York Times.