Marvin Kalb - The Year I Was Peter the Great - 1956 - Khrushchev, Stalin's Ghost, and a Young American in Russia

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 .

“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.”