Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

It looked as if no one had held these documents in their hands for seventy years — there were no names on the list of readers, the list of robbed bor’bists (the name for members of the left-wing Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary party) and former bishops was barely discernible against the stationary screen. Editorial staff at the closed local paper Our Land asked to be allowed to continue their work; Comrade Olshvang, dealer and repairer of typewriters, offered the Revolutionary Committee “typewriter ribbon, used, 800 rubles.”

In some places what seemed like a choir was divided into individual voices, and the text expanded with the rising bubbles of literature. “The countless relocations of the Office of Management (four moves in a week) has left its nomadic imprint on staff and visitors to the Office. Everyone is rushing around, moving from office to office, and it’s a waste of energy,” wrote the Assistant Director of the Office, Comrade Fisak, who noted the importance of “girding our loins and finding a permanent location for the Office with enough (eleven) rooms.” And a St. Petersburg theater company, trying to move to the nearby town of Kakhovka, explained their desire to move because there were too many theaters in Kherson, the theater public had had enough, and the company had nothing to live on.

It was as if I was traveling over the turbid dark waters of a lake in a flimsy little vessel, leaning down to the lip of the water, and the waxen rounds of heads were rising up from the depths to meet me. They increased in number, floating up like pelmeni do, bobbing at the edges of the pan of boiling water. I could hardly make out their faces, I had to pull those closest to me with a heavy boat hook, twisting them round, peering at them without recognizing them. Their lips moved, but they made no sound, and none of mine were among them. Almost no space was left in the boat, the hull was piled high with sacks of some nameless ballast. There was no end to this sequence, as there often isn’t in dreams, just the quiet unrelenting motion, the constant inescapable fact that you can never take anyone with you, or perhaps you can take this one, or this one. You can shine a torch into the blackness of a half-opened mouth and try to make out what he or she is saying, but to choose — is it possible to choose?

Perhaps there is no greater lie than the feeling that someone else’s prolonged daylight depends on you, their chance to flounder for a while longer on the surface, to appear briefly once more in the light before yielding to the complete and total darkness. All the same, I sat at the little plywood desk in the archive and wrote down someone else’s words, the captive tongue of our general history, as another might root around in the earth looking for last year’s rotten potatoes, trying not to change a single word.

To the War Comisar of Kherson

You comrade comisar sacked the head baker that saboter and theef and snak in the grass and White scowndrel. Also a specolater and a lot of others things besides but still living in the army house by the fotress and using the kindnes of the peepol and spiting in their faces. I says to you wot write does he have that eneme of the peepol and the sovietts. I a working man protest and ask you comrade comisar to chayse him out to a place where he deservs to be

The same note is written in red pencil above this text, and typed in blue ink below: “By order of the War Committee: Forwarded for information.”

My great-grandmother’s postcard correspondence (dozens of cards that had winged their way across the prewar borders of France, Germany, and Russia) has survived by some miracle, but its incompleteness intrigues me. The correspondents constantly refer to letters written and received and they are always promising to write more, in more detail. But none of these letters have survived, though doubtless they did once exist, and the explanation for this is almost too obvious: our continuing love affair with the visual. When, in my childhood, I leafed through the two stuffed postcard albums, I noted the skeleton embracing a marble-skinned girl, and the lights of Nice shining by night, but I never thought to turn the cards over, to where handwriting and postmarks jostled against each other — there was no need. The family knows everything about itself that needs to be known.

I began reading the cards a century after they’d been written, and, as I read, events lined up obediently. It became slowly clearer who was answering whom, and in what order. Apart from the main topics of conversation and the very few details in passing, one thing struck me: in all this correspondence there was not one reference to Jewishness, however superficial. And beyond this absence (of festivals, rituals, anything connected with the observance of tradition), lay another: Yiddish, the language of exile and humiliation, was never spoken.

There were flashes of Latin, the professional language of diagnosis and assessment, and tiny scatterings of French and German. But words from the language of home, words that could have served as little shared call signs or beacons of understanding, seemed to have been excluded from daily use, forbidden for conversation. Only once, when the discussion focused on family matters and summer examinations, my future great-grandfather suddenly reached for a phrase from this hidden register: «(«эс редцех а зай!»)» written just like that, with the double quote marks and the brackets, as if the phrase had been placed under the glass of a museum case. The meaning of the phrase “ es redt zich azoi ” is remarkable, literally “it is indeed so,” but the actual sense is the exact opposite: “it is supposed to be so, but I don’t believe a word of it.” What did hiding it in its punctuation mean? It seems obvious now: it was a form of distancing from the people who spoke “like that,” an attempt to define a common ground with a correspondent who lay outside the sphere of Jewishness, its general opinions, its intonations. That was how their childhood spoke: loudly, incorrectly, without brackets or quote marks. That — according to observers from outside — was how they were supposed to speak.

In the 1930s the poet Osip Mandelstam read a description of himself in an emigrant poet’s memoirs. The author considered Mandelstam’s face so characteristic that he must remind even the old shopkeepers of their grandsons, “some little Yankel or Osip.” The same half-insulting, half-sentimental tone is heard in the late notes of another poet and critic, printed in a journal that had once published Mandelstam. These notes adroitly turn past events into little anecdotes, which is to say that they attempt to pass off the singular as typical. Among them is a description of the young Mandelstam visiting the journal’s editorial office with his mother, Flora Osipovna Verblovskaya, whom the author insultingly calls “mamasha” in the memoirs. Her speech is carefully stylized and even accented (and this was probably even clearer for the contemporary reader, more sensitive to the “deviant” in speech): the hilariously plain dealing appeal of the foreigner, “You tell me what to do with him. We’re in trade, the leather business. But all the boy can think about are his poems!”

You could say that what is being sent up here is class, and not race, but it is Jewish identity (not poverty, nor a comic combination of insistence and uncertainty, and hardly even his poetry) that defines how Mandelstam is seen from the very outset in the literary circles of the early twentieth century. His identity was considered exotic then, to such an extent that it overshadowed everything else. Most of the documents relating to his first literary steps openly mention his “roots,” and the tone of these mentions is shocking today. Mandelstam first appears in Mikhail Kuzmin’s diaries without a name: “Zinaida’s little jewboy.” The writer Zinaida Gippius’s letter recommending the young poet to the influential Valery Bryusov had this to say: “A certain nervy young Jew, who was tied to his mother’s apron strings only two years ago, has come on tremendously recently and even writes a good line from time to time.” In the papers of the famous Bashnya literary salon in St. Petersburg, where attendance was meticulously recorded, especially of writers, Mandelstam is repeatedly called Mendelson. Because what difference does it really make?