Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

Ex nostris , jid, as he added in his next phrase, meaning the very same “we are Jews.” He took the coins we offered and went on, him and his child toward Feodosiya, without offering any detail in return, and for this reason I sometimes wonder whether we didn’t just invent it all, sitting there in the shade of the porch. But I couldn’t have invented it, the Latin, the jid — in my assimilated experience the space for such an understanding was absent, along with the reflex for such an exchange of passwords. “Yes, I’m Jewish, too,” said the owner of the hotel, hardly doubting either himself or me. “At the end of the streets there’s a synagogue, a very old one. You can understand why your grandmother would have wanted to live here. It’s very hard here for us again. I give us at best another five years in France. After that it will be worse. Far worse.”

The oldest medical institute in France in Montpellier accepted foreign students with open arms. The diaries of the Swiss physician Thomas Platter the Younger, who studied here at the end of the sixteenth century, describe the area’s reddish and very fertile soil, the local wine, so strong it had to be diluted by two thirds, and the elegant townspeople, adept at trickery and intrigue, fine dancers and sportspeople. Thomas noted the seven courts for ball games in the town: “Where do these people get so much money from, just to fritter it away?” Sarra’s life abroad began here, either under the glassy dome of Gare du Nord, if she had arrived via Berlin, or Gare de l’Est, if she’d come via Vienna.

There were hundreds like her, if not thousands. The medical education in France was the cheapest in Europe. From the end of the 1860s, when universities gradually began accepting women, Russian women began filling the quotas. By 1914 they made up 70 percent and sometimes 80 percent of the women studying medicine. They were treated with disdain, their fellow students needed no encouragement to complain about them, their manners, their slovenliness, their political radicalism — and most of all their desire to be at the top of the class, pushing local students out of the family nest like cuckoos. Even Pyotr Kropotkin described how the professors at Zurich University would without fail and very insultingly hold up the women students as examples to their male counterparts.

One of the women students remembered years later how in the 1870s “the Russian women demanded not just the usual rights, which applied to everyone, but special privileges, always occupying the best spaces and putting themselves first.” They lived in a tight community, in areas where spoken Russian dominated, and they ate a diet of bread, tea, milk, and thin slices of meat. They smoked heedlessly, they walked around unchaperoned. They discussed in all seriousness whether one could eat a plate of plums or raspberries and remain a thinking woman and a comrade. The newspapers in Bern called them the hyenas of the revolution: “unhealthy, half-educated, uncontrollable creatures.” But by the end of the 1880s there were already 698 women doctors in Russia. In 1900 there were only 95 in France and 258 in England.

A huge number of the Russian students were Jewish. This was their chance, their golden ticket — a doctor with a medical diploma could practice anywhere in the Russian Empire, and not just in the Pale of Settlement. By the beginning of the new century more than five thousand foreign medical students had converged on Paris, fighting for places with the locals. In 1896 students in Lyon protested on the streets, claiming that foreign students, in particular women, were crowding French students out of the clinics and lecture halls. In 1905 students in Jena signed a petition against giving student places to Russian Jews with their “pushy behavior.” In 1912, when Sarra was already studying at the Sorbonne, there were student strikes all across Germany and everywhere the demand was the same, to limit the influx of foreign students. In Heidelberg, Russian students made a public appeal to the local student body to understand their position and not to judge them too harshly. Mutual annoyance hung in the air, like smoke. Women, those corrupters of youth , were an easy target, widely caricatured in the tabloid press.

My other great-grandmother, Betya Liberman, also dreamed of becoming a doctor, but nothing came of it, except this family legend: Betya felt she had to test herself — would she cope with seeing a dead body or would she be frightened by it? So as a fifteen-year-old she went alone at dusk to the town morgue, and for a small fee she was allowed to sit there, night after night, until she was sure that she was ready and could cope. She wasn’t able to continue her studies, however — instead of medicine she got the fairy-tale prince she deserved, an early and (I want to hope) easy marriage, the wealth, peace, and sparkle of a vie heureuse . I look at them, like two playing cards in the hand: on one card strong-minded Sarra and her battle for a diploma; her stubbornness and drive, once set into motion an unstoppable force. And on the other tender Betya, who worked as an office accountant her entire prosaic Soviet life, while her son was growing up, and for a long time afterward. What difference is there between them? History is such a strange thing — it canceled all the choices they made before 1917 and quickly reduced both to old women, hardly distinguishable in the grandeur of their last years of life.

Medical students were much noisier than the other students. The memoirs and police reports are filled with accounts of merry rowdiness: in Thomas Platter’s time the lecturers were given the slow stamp : “Students began banging with their fists and feathers, and stamping, and if they felt that the lecturer wasn’t paying any attention they would make such a noise that he couldn’t continue.” In the nineteenth century Platter’s equivalents rivaled this riotousness with snowball fights, and boxing matches in the laboratories, and plans to throw a sentry from a high balustrade. But the First World War changed a great deal, it put an end to the youthful boisterousness, which is quite normal when the young are left to their own devices. The games were over, everyone became more serious and angry. Between 1905 and 1913 there hadn’t been a year when student protests in Paris hadn’t disrupt the medical training for a time. The system had ceased to work.

The university in Paris was the largest in Europe at the time. The huge lecture halls were overflowing. Late in the winter of 1914 Sarra wrote to my future great-grandfather: “best not to even try to predict when you might finish [university studies].” In 1893 three quarters of Paris’s medical students were spending up to six years studying before their final exams. 38 percent of students spent more than eight years on their degree, and many spent as long as eleven years studying. Studies were full time, six or seven days a week, with daily dissections in the big anatomical theater, lab work and compulsory morning shifts in the hospital: examinations, assisting with electrotherapy. By the point when the student took the rigorous final exams, he or she would have racked up many hundreds of mornings in the hospital. The exam season lasted two months and the exams were oral and public. They required knowledge, but also a measure of artistry. In the letters written during Sarra’s last Parisian year (and the last year of the old world ) Sarra can’t think of anything else: “Just back from my exam. I’m quite shattered,” “I have another exam tomorrow — on birth and midwifery. If it goes well I can rest a while,” “Still hard at the revision, lots of people have been left behind, they’ll take their finals in autumn,” and so on until her diploma, her long-awaited victory, which happened only a little while before the catastrophe.