That was it, though. My father laid down the law. She was to go traveling by herself no more; it was too risky. By that time, it had become understood by the whole town that they were going to marry, and that was enough to give him the right to order her around. In any case, it was too risky, for Russia was falling into revolutionary chaos, with the German Army moving steadily eastward and with counterrevolutionary armies (the "Whites") amusing themselves by killing helpless Jews (always safer than attacking an armed enemy), and with no one able to predict what would happen in Petrograd.
Then, in October 1917, my father fell ill with typhoid fever, and for three weeks the rest of the world receded from him.
My mother visited him every day, although my father's mother warned the young girl that there might be contagion and that she might herself fall sick. This sounds as though my grandmother was a very considerate woman, and so she might have been, but in this case, I think she was merely trying to keep my mother away. She did not approve of my mother and she did not approve of my father's infatuation. Whether this was because she felt my mother to be too small and therefore not likely to be strong enough to be a good wife and mother, or whether she was just one of those mothers who didn't want to give up her first-born son to any woman, I don't know.
In any case, my mother disregarded the warning and my father says, "I think Mamma was destined to help and work for everybody, and to worry constantly. That was how she was when she was young, and that is how it is now."
True enough. I remember her worrying. It was not just concern for others; it was a terrible fear that something had happened or would happen, and it created a dreadful prison for the children, particularly for myself, since I was the oldest and bore the brunt of it.
Any time I was leaving, I had to announce the time I would be back and then be back at that time, or "Mamma would worry," meaning she would go mad and drive everyone about her mad. Fortunately, I have always been timebound (or I became timebound as a result of this), and I did always come back when I said I would. Of course, that made it worse, since on those rare occasions when, through circumstances beyond my control, I was late, my mother was convinced I was dead. ("If Isaac says he'll be at home at five o'clock, he'll be home
at five o'clock, and if it's five minutes after five o'clock, I know something happened to him.")
My younger brother and sister were never as reliable as I was in this respect, and my mother was always holding me as a mark to shoot at ("Why don't you come home when you're supposed to? Isaac always comes home. If Isaac says he'll be home at five o'clock . . .").
I hated it and I always thought that when I was finally out from under, I would throw all that stuff out the window and come and go as I pleased and everyone could just wait.
Fat chance! It was ingrained too deeply. To this day, I am on time everywhere—on the minute if I can manage it. I arrive when I say I will arrive; I return when I say I will return; and I invariably drive my nearest and dearest into fits when I am five minutes late because "You're always so on time, I thought something terrible must have happened to you."
Worse yet, I expect others to be on time and fall into a fury when they prove to be late, or, in the case of loved ones, into a panic. The fact that I'm thoroughly aware of what a pernicious effect my mother's attitude produced on me somehow doesn't prevent me from adopting the same attitude toward others.
That is why it is always a little difficult for me to laugh freely at the follies of mankind. If I look closely enough, I find I share them all.
7
In any case, while my father was sick, the October Revolution took place and the Bolsheviks took over control of the country, or as much of the country as wasn't in the hands of the Germans, the Finns, the Poles, the White Russian bands, the Allied Expeditionary forces, and local functionaries.
When my father had recovered sufficiently to be aware of his surroundings, he asked for a newspaper, and discovered to his astonishment that it was full of unfamiliar names. My mother had to explain the new revolution to him. Russia had become Soviet Russia without his knowing anything about it.
Petrovichi was taken over by a Soviet functionary. The Gentile boy, whom my father had once helped learn to read, had left town as a teen-ager, and he now returned as commissar. My father said, "When we met we became friendly again, just as though we had never parted. He was now a big shot, but I influenced him."
It was a time of inflation, of rising prices and declining food stocks, but my father managed to organize the Petrovichi inhabitants into a
co-operative attack on the problem. He set up an organization for buying and distributing food and, in doing so, he kept constantly falling afoul of the local authorities, who saw in it the attempted establishment of a private business which, in the early years of the Bolshevik Revolution, was strictly forbidden.
My father spent much of his time, therefore, having to prove that it was indeed a community endeavor and that the only money he drew out of it was for operating expenses. He also had to explain why Gentiles were not involved and succeeded in demonstrating that they had been invited to join but had refused to do so. And because he was clearly engaged in useful work, he was not called into the Red Army, and he continued to run the co-operative for five years.
My father also helped organize a library in the town and he and my mother took part in amateur theatricals. Apparently my mother had unexpected talent in this direction. According to my father: "Mamma learned her lines very easily. She did not depend on the prompter, who used to read in a low voice to keep the actors from making mistakes. Mamma did not need anybody's help. She learned the lines and did not make any mistakes. She was the best."
My father, who was an excellent reader 6 and who would read books aloud as part of his library work for those whose reading ability was limited, also took part in the plays but was, apparently, not as proficient as my mother at it.
According to my father, he and my mother "played as amateurs in more than ten plays and we were so good that they used to come to see us play from all the surrounding villages and towns."
There's no sign of anyone in my family having been a writer, though perhaps they might have been if the opportunity had come their way, but obviously both parents were used to being on the stage and must have had some talent for it.
I myself have never acted on the stage, but I do make a substantial part of my living as an after-dinner speaker, and I'm very good at it. 6 Apparently I come by it honestly.
My father says that toward the end she was acting at a time when she was "in the seventh month with a baby and nobody could have told that she was pregnant at that time."
That meant she was acting in the fall of 1919, for the baby she was carrying was I. That nobody could tell she was pregnant was probably
5 I can vouch for my father's ability in this respect, for he would, on rare occasions, recite, from memory, short stories of Sholem Aleichem (in Yiddish, of course), and it was always delightful for me to listen to him.
6 Once again, this may be conceit, but it is not a lie.
true enough, for I was a very undersized baby. (My father's mother very probably said, "I told you so.")
When the time came for my mother to bear her first-born, it happened that there was no doctor in Petrovichi. In general, in the small shtetls, there would be no doctor, and sickness meant a visit to the nearest city, or (at great expense) to bring a doctor to the shtetl— whereupon everyone in the shtetl would bring to the doctor all the illnesses they had been saving up for him.
In 1915, my father had arranged to have a real doctor come to Petrovichi, and had arranged to have an apartment for him. This was a Dr. Gugel, "a real doctor for the first time in our town," my father said. After the revolution, however, a hospital was opened in the region, but not in Petrovichi itself, and Dr. Gugel went off to the hospital, leaving Petrovichi without a doctor again.
My Infancy
When my mother went into labor, there was no o
ne to help her, therefore, but a midwife, and the process took three days and two nights, during much of which time she walked the floor, leaning on my father. The result of all that was myself, and I was named Isaac after my mother's dead father. (A Jewish child is, by tradition, named after a dead relative.)
The date of my birth, as I celebrate it, was January 2, 1920. It could not have been later than that. It might, however, have been earlier. Allowing for the uncertainties of the times, of the lack of records, of the Jewish and Julian calendars, it might have been as early as October 4, 1919. There is, however, no way of finding out. My parents were always uncertain and it really doesn't matter.
I celebrate January 2, 1920, so let it be.
My mother was twenty-four when I was born and my father was twenty-three. I weighed 4V2 pounds at birth. As my father says, I was "a tiny baby, but a live one, with open eyes and working hands, closing and opening constantly. You were a very quiet baby who cried very little."
They must have been pretty uncertain as to whether I would make it, however. Babies who died in their first year were very common in that place and at that time. Although, in the Orthodox Jewish tradition, circumcision should take place eight days after birth, the rite did not take place in my case until five weeks after birth—about February 7, 1920, if my birthdate is correct.
According to my father's golden memories, I was "the healthiest possible" baby for two years and then I got double pneumonia. That must have been toward the end of 1921.
The treatment consisted largely of "cups"—a device in which a small glass cup was dampened with alcohol and a small piece of lighted paper was placed inside. The cup was then upended and placed on the body. The paper went out almost at once, but not before consuming enough of the oxygen in the cup and heating the air enough to create a partial vacuum as it cooled. The skin was drawn into the cup, and surface circulation was in this way encouraged.
Whenever the encouragement of such surface circulation helped
conditions, cups were helpful. Otherwise, their only value was in that they encouraged the patient and those watching around the bedside into feeling that something was being done. On the whole, though, such treatment is largely useless, and it went the way of that other great specific of a half century ago, the mustard plaster. 1
I was also treated by being wrapped up in a complicated way to encourage sweating. Finally, after seven days and nights, during which my parents worked over me in relays without stopping, the crisis was reached and passed, and I recovered.
In later years, my mother told me about the incident with what may have been a number of dramatic additions. She told me, for instance, that there had been an epidemic of pneumonia in town and that seventeen infants had fallen ill and that sixteen had died. I, apparently, was the only survivor.
She told me that the doctor had given me up and said that I would die and that my mother must accommodate herself to this fact. My mother further told me that her mother had told her not to concern herself about the matter—it was only a baby and there would be others.
I was, however, my mother's only child at that time and she had gone through a bad time to have me, and was rather fond of me and wouldn't give me up. So she sent her mother away and never forgave her for characterizing me as "only a baby" (and indeed I never heard my mother say a kind or loving word about her mother). She also sent the doctor away and then (she says) she held me in her arms without ever letting go until I had recovered.
I have only one memory of this early period of my life. It is the vague impression of a book. I recall sitting in a chair, turning the pages of a book, and loving it. Then I seem to recall wanting the book again, and looking about for it vaguely, but not finding it and wondering where it was.
Years later, I told this to my mother in an effort to place the memory and she said, "I remember the book. You were two years old at the time and you loved it."
I said, "But where did it go? I remember turning the pages and then I couldn't find it."
1 Even so, when I was a little boy of five or six, here in the United States, I witnessed my mother being treated with cups. It was quite frightening, for after the cups were taken off, the skin on my mother's back was covered with puffy round red marks.
"Sure/' she said, "because every page you turned you tore out."
From this I deduce that when infants are destructive, they don't mean to be.
My father tells a story which, I believe, refers to this same book. He says that near the house we lived in "was a single house where two old maids lived. Mamma used to visit them when she was in her teens and once they presented her a book containing pictures of all kinds of animals and birds from different lands, with descriptions under each picture. Mamma gave the book to you to play with and read to you the names of the birds and the animals. After a while you could open any page and little Isaac could name them all, and not by reading, because he had not yet learned to read."
Of course, I had to say the names in Russian, I suppose, and I daresay I could speak some Russian in those days, but nothing lingers. My parents spoke Yiddish to each other in the United States and I picked that up and I can still speak and understand it virtually as well as English. Furthermore, I am bilingual in the sense that I understand Yiddish directly and don't have to translate it in my mind in order to understand it—or, for that matter, to speak it. And I never confuse the two languages, either. I can shift from one to the other, but always deliberately, and never accidentally. I presume this is true for other bilingual, or multilingual, people.
My parents did not speak Russian to each other, unfortunately, although they could easily have done so, for they could each speak Russian fluently. They did not choose to. Had they done so, I would have learned Russian and that would have been an infinitely more practical language to have in my repertoire than Yiddish is.
They were, however, anxious to have me learn English, and I arrived in the United States young enough to make English my native language, and an unaccented one (if we don't count Brooklynese as an accent). On the whole, I am satisfied. Of all the languages in the world English is (in my opinion) the best, the richest, literarily the greatest, the most useful. If I had to have one language, it is English I would want, and if Russian would have in any way interfered with my total use of the English language as a tool, then it is well lost.
Yet how I wish I could speak a little Russian, too.
But what happened to the book of my childhood about birds and animals that I loved so much and that was my one memory of my years in Russia?
"We could not take the book with us," said my father, "when we left for the United States because nothing of the book was left but shreds of paper. But what could you do to a baby you love so much?"
So he didn't hit me for tearing up the book.
3
There are other passages from my Russian years that I don't remember.
My father says, "We were very happy with our new baby. When you were six months old, on a Saturday afternoon, a whole lot of our friends walked out to the forest about two miles from the town. Of course, Mamma and I were among them, and all the way there I carried you and danced with you, holding you up high in the palm of my hand. You were the only baby among us."
That must have been rather a high point in my father's memory of young married happiness, for I remember him on occasion saying to my mother, "You remember, dear, the day in the forest?"
Heaven only knows what they did there. I never had the nerve to ask, but I can rely on my father's stern morality and on the general prudishness of Orthodox Judaism. It was not the carrying out of some fertility rite.
I must say that when my father said that to my mother and imitated that happy day with his hand held high, I did not appreciate it. In fact, I can't understand how my mother could have allowed him to do that. What if he had dropped me?
Then there's the time I fell into the pond behind the house (or so my mother tells me). I toppled off a windowsil
l, apparently, and my mother described with great and impossible dramatics the manner in which she rescued me from imminent drowning.
Then, too, I seem to recall being handed by my father to some strange woman, once. This must have been in Russia, for I was unable to explain what was bothering me and therefore was at a stage where I could not talk much—so this must be another Russian memory after all.
My father was holding something which, as I look back on it, must have been the harness, or part of the harness of a horse, so I suppose he had to go somewhere (presumably with my mother) and was leaving me with some baby-sitter.
I objected and I remember crying strenuously while the strange woman (who might have been a grandmother or an aunt, perhaps) kept me clutched to her ample bosom and took me off somewhere. The point is that I remember my emotions exactly. I was not frightened, I was not angry. I was merely trying to say, "I want to be with my father. Can I be with my father?"
Since I didn't know how to say that I made the only sound I knew
how to make and wailed. The memory of that soothed me a bit when I had wailing children of my own and encouraged me to take the wailing as a mere comment.
4
On June 17, 1922, my mother gave birth to my sister, who was named Manya. When she reached the age of discretion, she decided on Marcia, which is now her name. In this book, I will refer to her only as Marcia, in accordance with her wishes.
Leaving the Soviet Union
It might well have been that my parents, my sister and I, along with unborn siblings might have settled down to live in the U.S.S.R. the rest of our days. By 1922, the nation was at peace. Both war and civil war were over; the days of Tsarist pogroms were over as well.
My father snowed no signs of wanting to be a government functionary and was content to run co-operative ventures in Petrovichi and would probably have continued to do so. He and my mother were undoubtedly clever enough and flexible enough to avoid undue trouble and might well have escaped the danger that came as a result of the fall of Trotzky and of the purges of the 1930s.
In memory yet green : the autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954 Page 4