“Thank God,” he said with a smile and vanished into the crowd that had formed around me.
Another man, also old, sidled up to me and, sensitively fingering the lapel of my jacket, asked where it had been made. “In New York,” I said. “I bought it in a famous clothing store called Brooks Brothers.” He turned to a friend and I overheard him say in Yiddish, “You know, thirty years ago, we made better suits than this right here in the Podol.”
“Really?” his friend said.
“Yes, and better fabric, too. Of course, that was all before the revolution.”
The rabbi intervened. Pointing to the ceiling—his way of saying, “Let’s be careful. This place is bugged, you know”—he urged us to continue the conversation in the courtyard.
“Where were your parents born?” Many asked this question.
“My mother was born right here in Kiev.”
With this personal revelation the mood changed, and what I would later come to appreciate as the highlight of my Podol visit began to unfold before me, one question, one answer after another:
“When did your mother leave?”
“In 1914, just before the war started.” At the time, hustlers, for a hefty price, would arrange visas for Western European travel and, more important, for transportation to America, then, for many Eastern European Jews, the goldene medina, the blessed land.
The man with the wise fingers, who had melted into the crowd, reappeared. Looking up at me with eyes that had seen much of Kiev’s recent history, he asked, “And what was her name? And what was her father’s name?”
“Bluma,” I answered, using the Yiddish translation of Bella, “and her father’s name was Volf, Volf Portnoy.”
“And her father—what did he do? How did he make a living?”
I paused, not certain how to describe his fur trading business. “He bought and sold furs,” I said finally. “He was a furrier.”
Something extraordinary, almost magical, then happened. “Volf Portnoy,” the man sighed, old, old recollections forming around the wrinkles of his eyes. “Of course,” he remembered. “Volf, the furrier—he left with two children, a daughter and a son.” He smiled warmly. “We never heard from them again.”
The daughter was my mother. I remember being overwhelmed, tears quickly forming. Was it possible? More than four decades had passed—from 1914 to 1956, four decades filled with war, revolution, collectivization, famine, more war and then the Holocaust, and this man remembered my mother, Volf Portnoy’s daughter. I was serving as the human link between these two people. The Holocaust had claimed millions, but left these two.
Outside of Kiev, in a ravine called Babi Yar, the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko was soon to write of “heaving civilization,” Jews not quite dead, still breathing below the surface of the earth. Now the heaving had stopped, and “over Babi Yar,” he wrote, “rustles the wild grass. The trees look threatening, like judges, and everything is one silent cry.”
As I left the Podol synagogue that evening, I felt like “one silent cry.” There, I thought, but for the grace of God…
CHAPTER TEN
A Summertime Break in Central Asia
I had no idea how dreary Moscow could be in the summer. It was hot, smelly, and sullen. In August, Russians with connections (and money) would escape to their dachas on the outskirts of the capital. Others with still more connections would go south to Crimea—to Odessa or other spots along the Black Sea coast.
At the U.S. embassy many diplomats had already fled to Western Europe or the Mediterranean. The place seemed strangely deserted. I myself was restless for another trip. A month had passed since my memorable weekend in Kiev, and I set my sights this time on central Asia and the Caucasus. Ambassador Bohlen encouraged the journey, adding simply, “Be careful.” Central Asia had only recently been opened to foreign travel, and the Russians were likely to be especially suspicious of American tourists and to assume that they were all spies.
A year or two earlier I had read Harold Lamb’s romantic biography Tamerlane, the Earth Shaker, which at the time fascinated me. My itinerary included his glistening capital, Samarkand—at least, it glistened in Lamb’s account. I would also visit Tashkent and Bukhara. My imagination raced back to the late fourteenthth century, when Tamerlane’s empire stretched from the Mediterranean to Mongolia, from Russia to India. He was at the time a truly awesome figure, frightening to many, godlike to some. He stimulated the arts and left an impressive collection of monuments and museums, but he also slaughtered millions as he expanded his central Asian empire. He was called a “bloody butcher.” If proof be needed that he had earned the title justifiably, it lay literally in the mountains of skulls that dotted his warpath, each a stark reminder of his brutality. When he raided a town, he often decapitated all of its inhabitants. Tamerlane, a direct descendent of Genghis Khan, was the last of the memorable Turco-Mongol warrior chiefs, his empire the last to flourish in central Asia, which then slipped into centuries of sandy nothingness.
As I prepared for my journey, I suffered more than a few bouts of jitters, as I noted in my diary. I wondered whether I was wise to travel alone to a region only recently opened. Foreigners could be made to disappear, never to be heard from again. But I found comfort in my diplomatic passport, which afforded a degree of protection, and I always felt, foolishly, I suspect, that since I had nothing to hide, I had nothing to fear.
And so, at 2:15 a.m. on August 25 (why Aeroflot, the Soviet airline, always chose to depart from Moscow at such ungodly hours escaped me), I set a southeast course for Tashkent in a pitifully small two-engine, twenty-seater plane. Like my flight to Kiev, this one to Tashkent was an awful experience: it was unrelievedly bumpy, the food was indigestible, and the other passengers all looked like overweight bureaucrats, drinking vodka from takeoff to landing and smoking foul-smelling papirosi cigarettes—those, that is, who were not already sick from the flight, doubled over in discomfort.
Four hours later our first refueling stop loomed on the near horizon. It was Uralsk, a small town in the northwest corner of Kazakhstan. It was a town of no distinction. It had a primitive airport, but there was no terminal building, no hangars, only wide expanses of desert sand rolling into the morning mist. While the passengers stretched their legs, the plane was refueled.
Our next stop was Aktyubinsk, two and a half hours farther east. It had a modern terminal that sported, much to my surprise, a moderately good restaurant. There I met an official guide from the Soviet travel agency, Intourist, who explained with pride that by doing nothing more daring than looking out of the window I could see Khrushchev’s famous “virgin lands.” It was one of the Soviet leader’s most cherished projects—his way of demonstrating creative leadership, increasing grain production, and creating jobs. No doubt Khrushchev had flown into this desert metropolis on many occasions, which would explain why it had a paved runway and a decent restaurant. It was the modern equivalent of a Potemkin village. Khrushchev, like Catherine the Great, needed to be impressed.
Our third stop was Dzhusaly, another hot, dreary airport in the middle of the Kazakh desert. There were no other airplanes, no runways, no hangars, but there was the amazing sight of large photos of Stalin propped up one in front of another, extending from our plane to a ragged hut, where we could buy water, a precious commodity. An old Russian with a handlebar mustache explained, “Water to us is like gold to you.” I asked him why there were so many photos of Stalin here in Kazakhstan when he was being criticized so sharply in Moscow. “Oh,” he said, reflecting a widespread view in the Russian countryside, “Stalin was our great vozhd. He was a genius.”