Why This World

by Benjamin Moser

  In Galicia, to the northwest of Podolia, as many as 450,000 Jews (more than half the Jewish population) were uprooted by the war. In one forty-eight-hour period in May 1915, the entire population of forty thousand Jews was evicted from Kaunas, in Lithuania.40 All told, around 600,000 Jews were deported. Up to 200,000 Jewish civilians were murdered.41

  As the war drew to its bloody and protracted end, law and order vanished from the collapsing Russian Empire. The removal of the bungling tsar in the revolution of March 1917 at first seemed to herald a new dawn for Russia. Overnight the country went from a repressive police state to “the freest country in the world.” But the two liberal governments that succeeded the tsar did not end the war. Instead, eager to show that the revolutionary democracy was as patriotically committed to the defense of the fatherland as any dictatorship, the provisional government threw the tattered army into a great offensive in June 1917, whose calamitous failure bled the government of the almost universal popular support that had greeted its establishment only a few months earlier. And it opened the way for the demagogue Vladimir Lenin to take control of the capital in November, in large part because he promised to end the war.

  This he did, though not as quickly as he promised. In the Polish town of Brest-Litovsk, his deputy Trotsky spun the peace talks out for several months, hoping that the delay would spark a revolution in Germany and Austria. It did not. Instead, at the end of February 1918, the Germans, frustrated with the intransigence of the Bolsheviks, recommenced hostilities. Lenin had no army to resist the German advance. Within a couple of weeks the Germans had advanced across enormous swaths of Russian territory. With the Germans nearing the capital, Petrograd, Lenin suddenly capitulated on March 3, 1918, signing a treaty whose terms were even worse than those he could have achieved at the end of 1917.

  The treaty eventually ensured the independence of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. In the Ukraine, the picture was complicated. Most Russians did not then, and do not now, easily accept the idea that the Ukrainians were a separate people, or that their language, related to but quite distinct from Russian, was anything more than a peasant dialect. The Ukrainians themselves were cautious. Like many nationalist movements in the former Russian Empire, the Ukrainians, at the beginning of 1917, initially wanted nothing more than autonomy: the freedom to use their own language, especially in the schools and in the government.42

  After Lenin’s coup in November, the Ukrainian government distanced itself further from the government in Petrograd. But they stopped short of full independence. This reassured the Jews, whose two principal goals, Jewish autonomy and the continued unity of Russia, were respected.43 But the honeymoon was about to end, with the government under pressure from the Bolsheviks in the north and the Jews alarmed by the wave of pogroms breaking out in Podolia, Volhynia, and Kiev.44 The government responded by allowing the formation of Jewish military units for self-defense.45 The self-defense units never got off the ground, and the Jews in the western Ukraine were left defenseless.

  On January 25, 1918, the Ukrainian Rada declared the independence of the Ukrainian People’s Republic.46 Soon after the declaration Kiev was occupied by Bolshevik forces. But not for long: by April the Rada had been overthrown in a German-sponsored coup, establishing the so-called hetmanate under General Pavlo Skoropads’kyi, who took the traditional Ukrainian title of hetman, and creating a German military protectorate in exchange for supplies of food and raw materials.47 The German grain confiscations stirred peasant resistance, and the Germans were quick to blame the Jews.48

  Meanwhile, the divided country faced a Bolshevik invasion. The presence of Jews, especially Trotsky (born Lev Bronstein), at the highest levels of the Bolshevik organization meant that, though a large majority and all Jewish political parties opposed the Bolsheviks, the idea that the Jews were behind the Bolsheviks quickly took root. “The Trotskys make the revolutions,” people grimly quipped, “the Bronsteins pay the price.”

  Throughout 1918 there were sporadic pogroms, sparked, to some extent, by the anarchy unleashed by the general German surrender on November 11, 1918, which ended the Ukrainian protectorate and created a power vacuum. Deprived of its critical German support, the hetman’s puppet government proved too weak to restore order. Throughout November and December the Ukrainian National Movement, known as the Directorate, fought a civil war to depose the hetman. Headed by the former journalist Simon Petlura, the Directorate eventually vanquished the hetman.

  But as Petlura was conquering the Ukraine, the Bolsheviks were invading from the north and east. In many cases, Petlura had only nominal control over his troops, who splintered into detachments under local warlords. These “generals” were often no more than thugs and criminals who used the chaos of the civil war to plunder the defenseless population. For the Jews, this was the worst possible scenario.

  In Elisa Lispector’s unpublished memoirs, she remembered with special affection the making of liquors in the autumn:

  The wines, the cider, the fine liquors, especially vishniak, ruby-colored cherry liquor. This wasn’t child’s play. It was the occupation of grownups with real skill. That is why that expertise demanded respect. That is also the reason we felt such horror one day, when—returning from a hiding place after a terrific pogrom, and finding the house turned inside out, the cabinets and the secret drawers for the good silver and embroidered linens ransacked, the furniture broken and hacked to pieces—we saw red rivers running all over the floor, the wines and liquors, with their indescribable taste, transformed into rivers of blood.49

  Soon news came of another disaster. Law and order had vanished and highwaymen invaded defenseless towns, taking hostages and then demanding outrageous “levies” to free them. When they appeared in Isaac Krimgold’s town, in one of the first pogroms that followed the October Revolution, they took a group of young people hostage, promising to free them in exchange for money. Isaac and some neighbors offered to change places with the hostages, and with great difficulty the sum demanded was collected. The bandits murdered the hostages anyway.50

  Of herself, Elisa writes, “She shouldn’t have mentioned Grandfather. Mother also knew what ‘they’ had done to him.” In Isaac’s lovely house, where Elisa fondly remembered bathing in the stream and playing in the surrounding woods, “they broke the colored glass on the porch, tore down the wall around his garden, and cut down all the trees. Now anyone could go into Grandfather’s house. The house no longer belonged to him.”51

  The final clipped sentences in her lightly fictionalized novel may reproduce a childhood memory of Elisa’s. Perhaps it was in those terms that her parents explained to the little girl that her grandfather had been murdered.

  3

  The Average Pogrom

  At the end of December 1918 the great wave of pogroms began. It was a series of attacks “unparalleled in history, [covering] the fields and towns of the Ukraine with rivers of Jewish blood,” an epidemic “exceeding all other periods in its refined cruelty, in the merciless thoroughness of the acts of violence, and in the naked bloodthirstiness of the barbarous criminals.”1

  According to a contemporary report, the “average pogrom” went something like this:

  The gang breaks into the township, spreads all over the streets, separate groups break into the Jewish houses, killing without distinction of age and sex everybody they meet, with the exception of women, who are bestially violated before they are murdered, and men are forced to give up all there is in the house before being killed.

  Everything that can be removed is taken away, the rest is destroyed, the walls, doors, and windows are broken in search of money. On one group departing another comes, then a third, until absolutely nothing is left that could possibly be taken away. All clothing and linen is taken, not only from those who escape death, but also from the corpses of the dead. A new administration is established in the place, and a deputation of the Jews miraculously preserved go to them or to the Christians who are supposed to be fri
endly to Jews, and request protection. As a rule the new authorities consent to grant the protection on the condition that a certain contribution is paid by the Jews. With great difficulty a contribution is paid and then a new claim arrives from the authorities for contributions in kind, and it is the duty of the Jews to obtain a certain number of boots and a certain quantity of meat for the soldiers. In the meantime small groups continue terrorizing the Jews, exact money, murder and violate. Then the town is occupied by the Soviet troops, who often continue the robbery of their predecessors. But soon all the gangs return, as the front fluctuates and the place continually changes hands. Thus, for instance, Boguslav was taken five times during one week. Every change of Government or administration brings new pogroms, and the end of it is that the terrorized population, ruined and exhausted, naked and barefooted, without a single coin in their pocket, fly heedless of the climatic conditions and risking the dangers of the journey, to the nearest town in the vain hope of getting protection there.

  There were at least a thousand such pogroms, committed by every side in the war. The Russian Red Cross estimated that by 1920 at least forty thousand Jews had been killed but acknowledged that the true total would never be known. Their statistics, after all, did not include “those who died during their wanderings from one town to another in search of an asylum, those who were thrown out of trains and shot, those who were drowned in the rivers, and those who were murdered in forests and other lonely and sequestered places. In the above totals we have not included those who died from wounds, from infection, and from starvation and exposure.”2

  Like millions of others, Mania, Pinkhas, Elisa, and Tania Lispector were trapped in this horror. At some point after April 19, 1915, when Tania was born in Pinkhas’s native Teplyk, the family moved to Haysyn, only a few miles away.3 Then as now, there were more opportunities in Haysyn, which was something of a regional center.

  Pinkhas desperately tried to scrape by working as a traveling salesman or petty trader, and when the White Army arrived he was absent, unable to rejoin his family in the war zone. Among the Jews, rumors circulated that the Whites would be better than the Reds, that they would bring peace, but there was no reliable news.

  On a night Elisa recalls in her novel, there were shots; fires broke out. Something awful was happening, but no one knew what. This had become a common enough occurrence. “Every morning,” Elisa wrote, “a surprise. We never knew in whose hands the night’s battle had left the town.”4 Mania, in charge of a group of terrified refugees, was unsure what to do. She decided to leave the house and find out.

  At this point in Elisa’s narrative there is a strange lacuna. “So it was up to her,” Elisa writes of her mother, “to save her daughters, and the women and children who had taken refuge in her house.” She goes out.

  She was in the street, her hair blowing in the wind, the snow almost to her waist. When she saw two militiamen coming in her direction, she fell at their feet, begging for help. She cried, imploringly kissing their muddy boots. After that the images blurred fantastically in the dim moonlight. As in a dream, in the dense fog, she saw men running and firing at each other, and then, for what seemed like an eternity, the world was deserted. So with sluggish, elastic steps, she walked home. …

  Without knowing what to do, Marim [Mania] let herself slide into a chair, and there she remained quietly and meekly.5

  In her unpublished memoir Elisa writes simply, “The trauma resulting from one of those fateful pogroms caused my mother to fall ill.”6 In the passage above from her novel In Exile, she hints at the trauma indirectly. Until Mania falls at the feet of the soldiers there is no suggestion of sickness. Afterward, though, Mania faced a slow and horrible demise, dying young from some untreatable disease.

  It is no surprise that Mania’s daughters did not fill in the gaps. At the very end of her life, Clarice confided to her closest friend that her mother was raped by a gang of Russian soldiers.7 From them, she contracted syphilis, which in the ghastly conditions of the civil war went untreated. Perhaps if she had reached a hospital sooner she would have stood a better chance. But it would be another twenty years before penicillin, the most effective treatment, entered common use. By then, after a decade of horrible suffering, Mania, the elegant, intelligent, free-spirited girl from the Podolia countryside, would be lying in a Brazilian graveyard.

  “There is something I would like to say but I can’t. And it will be very difficult for someone to write my biography,” Clarice Lispector wrote in an unpublished manuscript.8 Is this “something” a reference to the rape of her mother, one of the central facts of her life?

  Every account of the pogroms records the prevalence of rape. Along with robbery of Jewish property, it was one of the indispensable characteristics of the pogroms. This is not unusual; rape is an essential element of ethnic cleansing, designed as much to humiliate a people as to kill and expel them. The Ukraine of the civil war era was no different.

  In the sense that Mania’s two oldest daughters were not killed or raped, that her third daughter survived a birth to a syphilitic mother, that her husband survived, and that she herself lived long enough to see her family safely established abroad, she was luckier than many. In the panoply of horrors that was the civil war–era Ukraine, Mania can even be said to have got off lightly.

  Thousands of girls were gang-raped; after one pogrom, “many of the victims were later found with knife and saber wounds to their small vaginas.”9 The Russian Red Cross recorded the aftermath of an “ordinary, simple pogrom” in Ladyshenka, one town east of Pinkhas and Tania’s native Teplyk. “On July 9th a peasant brought to the Jewish hospital in Uman the last two Jews from Ladyshenka (before the war Ladyshenka counted a Jewish population of 1,600). These were two young Jewish girls, frightfully beaten and bruised, one with her nose cut off and the other with her arms broken. They are both in Kiev now and both suffer from venereal disease.”10

  It is hard to know exactly when Mania Lispector was attacked; there are several conflicting possibilities. Elisa sets her elusive scene in the winter, with heavy snow all around; the major attacks on Haysyn occurred in the summer. The neighborhood of Haysyn, where the family lived, was one of the heaviest hit areas in all of the Ukraine. Pogroms were more common there than in any other part of Podolia, which after Kiev was the most brutalized province in the Ukraine.

  In the small district of Haysyn, there were no fewer than twenty-nine pogroms up to September 19, 1919. Many more followed. In 1919 the Red Cross noted, “The pogroms in Trostianetz [just south of Haysyn] on May 10th and in Gaisin [Haysyn] on May 12th may be classed among the most cruel ever perpetrated.” In Haysyn on May 12 to 13 at least 350 people were killed.11 From July 15 to 20 Haysyn was hit again.12 Was it during one of these attacks that Mania Lispector was raped? In 1968, in her only direct allusion to these events, Clarice gives a hint of the timing:

  I was prepared for birth in such a beautiful way. My mother was already sick, and a common superstition had it that pregnancy would cure a woman of her illness. So I was deliberately created: with love and hope. Except that I didn’t cure my mother. And to this day that guilt weighs on me: they made me for a specific mission, and I let them down. As if they were counting on me in the trenches of a war and I had deserted. I know that my parents forgave me for being born in vain and for having betrayed their great hope. But I can’t forgive myself. I simply wanted a miracle: for my birth to cure my mother.13

  This would mean that Mania had taken ill some time before March 1920, when Clarice was conceived. How reliable is this account, though? The Lispectors came from a backwoods town and had no advanced secular education to explain the cause of syphilis. Still, it was an old and greatly feared disease, and it is surprising that Mania and Pinkhas would have risked sex, not to speak of pregnancy, knowing that she was infected.

  But a danger widely understood in more sophisticated places might have appeared mysterious in Podolia. The region hardly groaned under excessive medical attention.
It boasted no more than one doctor for every twenty thousand people. That, by comparison, is half the number in Afghanistan today, one-sixth the number in Cambodia, and one twenty-fifth the number in Brazil. And that was in peacetime.14

  In the desperate circumstances of the civil war, when even that paltry medical care was nonexistent, Pinkhas and Mania probably did rely on local superstition, which would have been the normal course for the poor people of the obscure regions of the Ukraine. In such areas, people believed that

  unclean or divine forces caused illness, which fell into the same category as misfortune, economic ruin, and crop failures. … Hasidic tsadikim [saints], midwives, clairvoyants, and sorcerers all bore the power to heal. They cured with a blessing, an incantation, an amulet, a potent herbal drink, or a night-long vigil at the synagogue. Places and objects, as well as individuals, possessed miraculous qualities. Water from a particular well, earth from a special place, herbs from a special spot, the excrement from a hen grouse, all worked in healing the sick.15

  In rural Podolia, such beliefs were specific to certain localities.16 To this day in Chechelnik, though not as close as Uman, only a few miles away, the local population believe that genital “bubbles,” or chancres, will disappear during pregnancy. Primary syphilis appears as a hard, painless chancre, on an average of twenty-one days after initial infection. Then, in many cases, the primary lesion disappears. The symptoms return later in a much more painful and visible secondary stage. So if Clarice was conceived as a response to her mother’s primary syphilis, Pinkhas and Mania, seeing the chancre disappear, would surely have hoped that the old popular wisdom was true. But their hopes would have been dashed when the infection returned in a more laming form. The disease’s second stage would probably have begun when Mania’s pregnancy was already advanced, which means that Clarice was very lucky to be born without congenital syphilis: 40 percent of births to syphilitic mothers are stillborn. As many as 70 percent of the survivors are infected, and 12 percent of these will die prematurely. In the middle of a war zone, without adequate nutrition, the percentages would be even higher. To the extent that one can speak of luck in a situation such as this one, Clarice was extremely lucky.