Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking

by Anya Von Bremzen

  By fall, the juggernaut of Operation Barbarossa pounded at Leningrad’s gates. On September 8, Shlisselburg, a strategically important town nearby on Lake Ladoga, fell to the Germans. Russia’s second-largest city was now completely cut off by land: no transport, no provisions, no fuel. It was the start of blokada, the Siege of Leningrad, which would last a mythic nine hundred days. Stalin was furious. He’d only learned the Shlisselburg news from a German communiqué; Marshal Kliment (Klim) Voroshilov, Leningrad’s bumbling commander, had been too scared to tell him. The Vozhd rushed General Zhukov north with a terse note for Voroshilov: he was fired. Zhukov was taking over. Klim bade stoic farewells to his aides, assuming he would be shot. (Somehow he wasn’t.)

  On September 22 Naum stood in Zhukov’s office at the Smolny in Leningrad. The general seemed even more abrupt and severe than usual, pacing with his arm behind his back. A bold, brutal campaigner, Georgy Konstantinovich was notoriously callous with the lives of his men. He cleared minefields by sending troops attacking across them. The cheapness of Russian blood fueled the future marshal’s combat strategy.

  Zhukov ordered Naum to lead an amphibious reconnaissance mission as part of a counterattack on Shlisselburg, to try to break the Nazi encirclement. Immediately.

  Naum quickly calculated. Zero time for preparations. Boats for the counterattack in wretched shape. Number of men: grossly inadequate. His troops were to include 125 naval school cadets—mere kids. Granddad had recently delivered an address to them. He remembered one eager boy: dark-haired, small, with pensive eyes and crooked teeth, a pimply face.

  Despite his survival instinct, almost despite himself, Naum blurted out his objections.

  A bolt of rage familiar to everyone under Zhukov’s command flashed in the general’s eyes. His bullmastiff jaw tightened.

  “We’ll execute you for this,” Zhukov snarled quietly. “You have your orders!”

  Orders were orders, even if suicidal.

  High winds on Lake Ladoga postponed the counterattack the first night. The second night three boats overturned, drowning two men, and the operation was aborted. The main force’s commander was arrested on the spot and sent to the gulag. The third night Naum and his scouting party were able to land, though the main force still couldn’t. Granddad and his men had to wade two kilometers through chest-high, ice-cold water. With their radio soaked, they were unable to relay reconnaissance but managed some sabotage before fighting their way back to Soviet lines the following night, losing four men.

  The main assault force was ordered to try yet again the day after. It was obliterated in the shallows by the Germans.

  But Russian blood was cheap; that was the ongoing lesson from Zhukov, who would be anointed the great architect of the Soviet victory to come, then brutally demoted by Stalin (saved from arrest by a heart attack), repromoted by Khrushchev, then demoted again.

  Back from his mission, Naum lay semiconscious, wheezing and grunting. The acute pneumonia he’d contracted from his forty-eight drenched hours could finish him, he knew, here in this anonymous hospital bed. Or he could perish in another “meat-grinder” like Shlisselburg—the best death, since his kids would remember him as a hero. Zhukov’s firing squad was the most agonizing scenario. Families of “enemies of the people” were usually exiled, or worse; their children grew up in orphanages, branding their fathers as betrayers of Homeland. This last possibility deprived Naum of sleep. It pierced like a red-hot iron. For several years now he’d been writing to his kids almost daily, letters composed mostly in his head, but some actually written and left in locked drawers.

  Only one of those letters was ever opened in front of Larisa, Yulia, and Sashka. Three sentences jabbed out there on that hospital bed: “Liza, teach the children to throw grenades. Make sure they remember their papa. He loved them so.”

  These lines reached Liza at the end of 1941 in a seven-hundred-square-foot room on the second floor of a crumbling warehouse. She, the children, and Dedushka Yankel shared the room with six other families evacuated from Moscow. The September journey, during which Nazi Messerschmitt fighters circled low over their riverboat, had brought them here, to the relative safety of Ulyanovsk, an old Volga town with muddy streets and folkloric carved wooden shutters.

  “Look, look, Jews!” pale-blond street kids greeted them upon arrival.

  “We are not Jews,” Mother corrected them. “We are from Moscow.”

  Now, several months into their stay, Liza had barely unpacked Aunt Clara’s blue sunduk. Why bother? Peace, she still believed, would surely come any day. She attended to their makeshift existence while Dedushka Yankel dug trenches—and sometimes potatoes—outside the city, both his fingers and the potatoes harder and blacker as the earth froze. The five of them slept and did most of their living on two striped mattresses pushed together on the room’s cement floor. Beyond the flimsy curtain partition a sound tormented them around the clock: the piercing shriek of a toddler slightly older than Sashka. The boy was barely nursed, barely touched by Katya, his mother, who disappeared all day to return after midnight with nylon negligee and Coty perfume. “Prostitutka and black marketeer” everyone in the room said, taking turns holding and rocking the inconsolable child, who wouldn’t eat.

  Katya wasn’t home when the boy stopped crying. The next day Larisa watched in solemn exultation as a small sheet-wrapped bundle was carried out the door. She knew exactly what had happened: death had been her constant obsession ever since she’d read about a little frozen match girl in a Hans Christian Andersen tale.

  Death. It was in the wail of Dasha their neighbor when she unfolded the triangular letter from the front, the official notification known as a pokhoronka, or funeral letter. Death came every day from the radio where the Voice announced it, in numbers so catastrophic, they baffled a child who could barely count over one hundred.

  “Vnimaniye, govorit Moskva!” (Attention, Moscow speaking!) the Voice always began. The dramatic, sonorous baritone that awed and hypnotized not just my mother but the whole country belonged to Yuri Levitan, a bespectacled Jewish tailor’s son. Russia’s top radio man delivered most of his broadcasts—some 60,000 throughout the war—not from Moscow but from cities hundreds of miles away, to which radio staff had been evacuated. Such was Levitan’s power, Hitler marked him as a personal enemy. A whopping 250,000 reichsmarks was offered for his head.

  Reading aloud soldiers’ letters home, the Voice conjured tender, intimate chords. Reporting the fall of each new city as the Germans advanced, it turned slow and grave, chanting out and accenting each syllable. Go-vo-rit Mos-kva.

  More frightening still was a song on the radio. “Arise, our vast country. Arise to mortal battle. With dark fascist forces, with the accursed horde!” After a blood-chilling staccato opening, the vast choral refrain gathered force and crescendoed in a massive wave of sheer terror.

  The song was playing when Liza opened Naum’s letter from the Baltic, hand-delivered by his red-haired young adjutant, Kolya.

  “Liza, teach the children to throw grenades …”

  There was a parcel as well, of raisins and rock-hard prunes for the kids. “Naum, he’s fine …” Kolya assured them. The letter’s jolting past tense and Kolya’s averted gaze told Liza otherwise. And there was something else. A paper slipped out of the parcel. Kolya leapt to tear it up and throw it in the trash. Liza spent half the night assembling the pieces into a photo of a brunette in a nurse’s cap. To my dear Naum, read the inscription. And that’s how my petite grandmother, who was terrified even of mice, decided to leave the children with Dedushka and start north, north toward besieged Leningrad—to claim her husband.

  Heading up past Moscow, Liza was already pushing her own version of Naum’s improbable luck. Late for a military chopper, she could only watch helplessly as it took off—and exploded in the air, struck by a bomb. A train carried her now through snowy wastes in the direction of Leningrad. The entire way a general held Liza’s hand, crying. She reminded him of his daughter, wh
o’d just starved to death in the Siege. The train reached Kobona, a village on the span of Lake Lagoda’s frigid southeastern shore still in Russian hands. A makeshift hospital had been set up for evacuees from Peter the Great’s imperial city, which Hitler meant to raze to the ground. The emaciated arrivals, mostly women and children, were given half a liter of warm water and spoonfuls of gruel. Some ate and instantly died, their dystrophied bodies unable to handle the food. I can only imagine my grandmother confronting all this with her characteristic half daze, half denial. In the years to come, she would rarely discuss her own feelings, modestly deferring instead to the collective narrative of the Leningrad tragedy.

  The lone route in and out of blockaded Leningrad lay across twenty perilous miles of windswept snow-covered lake ice to the opposite shore—through enemy fire. This was the legendary Doroga Zhizni, the Road of Life, a route desperately improvised by authorities and meteorologists in the second month of the Siege as temperatures sank and the lake froze over. This first terrible winter—the coldest in decades—and the two following, trucks laboring over the Road of Life carried the only supplies into a city where rations fell to four ounces of ersatz bread a day, and vintage parquet floors and precious rare books were burned as fuel in the minus-thirty-degree cold. The besieged ate sweetened soil around a sugar warehouse bombed by the Germans, and papier-mâché bookbinding, even jelly made out of softened carpenter glue—not to mention far more gruesome stuff. More than fifty thousand people perished in December 1941 alone.

  On their two daily runs along the Road of Life, exhausted drivers fought sleep by hanging a metal pot from the cab ceiling, which rattled and hit them on the head. German shells and bombs fell constantly. Often the ice caved in. Liza rode on a truck on top of a flour sack. In the open back, wind-whipped snow, like an icy sandstorm, lashed her face.

  All my grandmother possessed was a special pass and an official letter asking for assistance. Reaching besieged, frozen Leningrad at last, she had no idea how or where to find Naum. At city naval headquarters, harried men in uniform kept shrugging, waving her off.

  Naum Solomonovich Frumkin? Baltic intelligence chief? Could be anywhere.

  Finally the desperation in Liza’s gray eyes moved a staffer to suggest she try Baltic Fleet headquarters at Kronstadt—nineteen miles away, in the Gulf of Finland. As it happened, a naval glisser, an ice-gliding hovercraft, was going there shortly. In fact a driver was about to take someone to the glisser that very minute. If Liza rushed …

  My grandmother made the hovercraft, too weak and shaken to even hope. Someone brought her to the onboard cafeteria to scrounge for something to eat. A group of naval commanders was sitting at a table. And among them, who else? Naum. Smiling (of course), smelling of cologne. Lucky as ever, he had survived pneumonia and then escaped Zhukov’s execution threat by reporting the Shlisselburg mission to Voroshilov, who still retained a seat on the Soviet High Command—going around Zhukov, essentially. Instead of a firing squad, Naum got a medal.

  “I SAW WAR, I SAW DEATH, I SAW BULLETS AND BLOOD!” Grandma would yell years later. “There I was, scratched up, starving, braids flying … and there he is, flashing his idiotic white teeth at me!”

  “Lizochka!” Granddad famously greeted my grandma. “And what brings you here?”

  The tale of finding Naum on the glisser has always been among my grandmother’s wartime chestnuts. My cousin Masha and I preferred the one about Liza returning to the family in Ulyanovsk and finding Larisa burning with scarlet fever. Every evening Grandma would trudge miles through the snow to the hospital carrying potato peel pancakes for Larochka. Until one night, caught in a blizzard, she fell through a snow slope into a trench and couldn’t climb out.

  “I dozed half frozen inside the trench, leaning on some hardened tree trunks,” she’d tell us repeatedly. “At the morning’s first light I realized that those ‘tree trunks’ were …”

  Amputated arms and legs! Cousin Masha and I would squeal the punchline in unison.

  Of her monthlong hospital stay Mother herself remembers only the pancakes. Indeed, in her mind food dominates all other wartime recollections. For instance, the ration during her first school year in Ulyanovsk. Lunch was at 11:15 during grand recess. From a smudgy zinc tray children were allotted one bublik and one podushechka each. Bublik: a flimsy chewy bagel scattered with poppy seeds. Podushechka (little pillow): a sugar-coated pebble, green, blue, or pink, the size of a fingernail, with a center of jam. Eating them together was a ritual, a sacrament really. You stuck the candy under your tongue and sat without breathing as a pool of sweetened saliva collected on the floor of your mouth. A cautious oral maneuvering delivered a stronger sweet rush and the sublime coarseness of sugar grains against the tip of your tongue. Dizzy with desire you pressed the bublik hard against your face and inhaled for a while. Then you spat out the candy into your hand and took the first careful bite of the bublik; it tasted like the greatest of pastries in your candy-sweet mouth. A bite of bublik, a lick of podushechka. The pleasure had to last the entire fifteen minutes of recess. The hardest part was putting off the rapturous moment when the surface of the podushechka cracked and jam began to ooze from inside. Some stoic classmates managed to spit out the half-eaten candy for younger siblings. Mom wasn’t one of them.

  My mother has impeccable manners, is ladylike in every respect. But to this day she eats like a starved wolf, a war survivor gobbling down her plate of food before other people at table have even touched their forks. Sometimes at posh restaurants I’m embarrassed by how she eats—then ashamed at myself for my shame. “Mom, really, they say chewing properly is good for you,” I admonish her weakly. She usually glares. “What do you know?” she retorts.

  From her I do know that civilians distilled survival into one word: kartochki. They were printed on one large sheet of paper, these ration cards, a month’s worth of square coupons with an official stamp, the recipient’s name and signature, and a stern warning—CARDS NOT REPLACEABLE—because corruption and counterfeiting ran rampant. Lost your kartochki? Good luck surviving.

  At seven years of age my mother was a kartochki veteran. She was the one dispatched to trade them at stores while Dedushka Yankel dug his trenches and Liza and Yulia minded baby Sashka. The most crucial kartochki were for khleb (bread). One morning long before opening time Larisa joined hundreds of puffy-eyed, red-nosed people outside the bakery door. She tried not to gulp and swallow cold air too hard when the bread truck arrived and two men carted the aromatic, thick-crusted dark bricks inside. Behind the counter severe women in splotchy blue robes over shapeless padded coats weighed each ration of bread to the last milligram. They stomped their feet to keep warm and wore fingerless gloves so they could easily snip off the right coupon.

  As her turn in the line neared, Mom felt a slight panic. Back in the house a power outage had prevented her from sorting through the ration books. It was the first of the month. All the coupon sheets—for grain, sugar, bread, meat for each family member—sat folded in the pocket of the blue princess coat Naum had brought from Sweden. Now she could barely feel them there; she couldn’t even feel her own hands from the cold.

  Why did she put all the cards on the counter when her turn came? But how else to sift through the rationing sheets with people behind pushing and barking? Why panic so completely, so utterly at the invasion of arms? Arms, hands, mittens and gloves, smelly coat armpits, anxious breath. Fingers swarming the counter like tentacles—gnarled, blackened digits; gaunt fingers with white anemic nails; red swollen fingers. The kartochki were gone from the counter. The saleslady gave a bleak grin and a wag of a nail-bitten finger.

  Standing outside the bread store, Mother imagined what she’d always imagined ever since she remembered imagining anything. She saw Naum coming back home. He’d be dressed in the gray civilian suit he wore at the station for Leningrad; she could almost smell the lavanda cologne on his cap. “Lizochka, I’m home!” he would shout, peering at the thin, shoddy figures in the wareh
ouse room. Then he’d spy them. Arms open, he’d rush over. And what would he find? Liza, Dedushka, and Sashka—and Larisa and Yulia, pale and majestically beautiful in their identical fur-trimmed princess coats. All silent and motionless on their striped mattress, like Katya’s small baby. Dead, all of them.

  Dead is what happened to people who lost their rationing cards on the first of the month. Dead from golod (starvation), from thirty whole days without kasha or bread or the tiny ration of milk for the baby. Would Naum wail like Dasha their neighbor did when she opened her funeral letter? Or would he find a new wife, one who didn’t shriek and convulse in hysterics like Liza surely would when Larisa came home without bread and without rationing cards.

  Going home wasn’t an option. And so Mother went to the only place in the city where electricity always shone brightly and where a sprit of cozy, prosperous happiness wafted through every beautiful room. She went there often, to that traditional wooden two-story house up the street from their warehouse. She came to escape from the sight of her pitiful dedushka peeling warty potatoes, from the catastrophic Voice on the radio. The house was untouched by all this. Here the mother, Maria Alexandrovna, never yelled at her children. She played the grand piano while everyone had tea from a samovar in the living room. There were six kids in the house, but the apple of everyone’s eye was a boy called Volodya. Larisa liked to examine his baby picture, a brim of blond curls fringing his high, stubborn forehead. As a student Volodya had a proud, focused expression and a shrewd direct gaze. He got the best grades in his class. He never lied to his parents. He fought for justice and truth. Volodya’s attic bedroom with its patterned beige wallpaper was where Mom often sat daydreaming in the wooden chair between the boy’s small, neat desk and his bookshelf filled with volumes by Pushkin, Turgenev, and Gogol. Lucky Volodya got to sleep alone in bed, unlike Larisa and Yulia. He had such a nifty map of the world on his wall. The green lamp on his desk was so hypnotic, so peaceful.