In Memory of Memory

by Maria Stepanova

  This memo is dated June 5, 1941.

  The city was in a state of frenzy for several months. People fled precipitously as you might dive through a hole cut in the ice. All the government ministries and offices evacuated their staff, and those who didn’t go were simply left to their own devices. Some fled on foot. On October 16, when the German army was very close to Moscow’s outskirts, the literary critic Emma Gerstein missed the evacuation train she’d been promised a place on. “I walked through the streets and wept. All around scraps of shredded documents and Marxist political brochures whirled about me in the air, carried by the wind. The hairdressers were all full and ‘ladies’ were lining up on the streets. The Germans were coming, they needed to get their hair done.”

  *

  They returned to Moscow in 1944. On May 9, 1945, Lyolya’s birthday, the high windows of the apartment on the boulevard were thrown open. Spring was everywhere, its green streaming like tears, and all the residents in the communal apartment were gathered around a table laden with food: the family, friends, chance passersby brought in from the street, and young Viktoria Ivanova, a singer whose name reminded them of Victory, who wore a blue dress, and sang for them in her divine voice: “The Blue Scarf” and “Come Buy My Violets,” and anything else they asked her to sing. Then they went out to the Ustinsky Bridge to watch the fireworks blooming over the Moscow River.

  After this evening Sarra’s light begins to dim, to disappear into the darkness that will last for nearly thirty years. I remember my mother linked Sarra’s stroke with the “Doctors’ Plot,” which should by rights have consumed her, and Lyolya as well. Her little gray “record of work” book, filled out up to 1949, shows that even before the “Doctors’ Plot” there was no dearth of terrifying events. The whole country was at war with “cosmopolitanism,” a code word for Jewishness. The Jewish Antifascist Committee was disbanded, there were arrests, books by Jewish authors were removed from libraries, all publication in Yiddish ceased, and there was the usual wave of sackings across the city. I don’t know what would have been more dangerous for Doctor Sarra Abramovna Ginzburg: her native Jewishness or her assumed Europeanness. I wonder, did she ever discuss what was going on with her close family, was she scared that it would also affect those around her, her very successful son-in-law, daughter, and grandchild? Her stroke, and the resulting “senility” — that long-awaited inability to be responsible, make decisions, take steps — removed her from the group at risk, and placed her in a cool, safe place, where she could sort through her photographs, make little notes on them, and put her hand out and touch any beckoning memory.

  I remember listening to a school talk on Byzantine architecture in the darkened auditorium of the Pushkin Museum when I was ten. The powerful shoulders of the Hagia Sophia and the sky above the minarets appeared on the projector screen. You could say that this was a later invention, or a stereotype I have retrospectively revived, but I remember all too well the moment when I looked at the bright screen and thought to myself: I will probably never see this in real life. People with our lives, engineers and lowly scientists, the unexceptional Moscow intelligentsia at the beginning of the eighties, simply never went abroad.

  I started traveling as soon as I had the opportunity and I have never stopped. Perhaps this is why I get an almost physical thrill from being under the glass-and-metal roofs of railway stations. It’s as if the roof’s ribs are mine and the circulation of people is my own body’s vital circulation, filling sixteen platforms, the wide glassy wings, the lofty arcs supported by sunlight. I have the same feeling in airports, with their laundrette fumes, their inhuman cleanliness. I have to cling to every opportunity for travel like a monkey wrapped around a branch. The aerial state, the gaseous state, invisible, elusive, passing across borders and breathing in the air one chooses — yes, for this I strive! When we moved apartments and all the cups and sauce boats, photographs and the books of our home life were put into storage, I started traveling twice as much as usual, as if these possessions had weighted me down to the earth.

  My travels had a solid justification: I was writing a book about my people. I moved about from place to place, archive to archive, street to street, places where they had walked. I tried to coincide with them, hoping this would engender a memory of them, however implausible it sounds. I diligently gathered up everything I knew, and entered dates and addresses into the computer’s memory, mapping a route like anyone who embarks on a long journey.

  On the corner of a Paris street, in a building where my great-grandmother had once lived, there is now a small hotel. Here I could spend one or two nights under the same roof as the young Sarra, I could quite literally get under the skin of history. I arrived from London on the train, threading itself through the undersea tunnel and appearing suddenly in the midst of green French fields. Looking out of the window, I thought how terribly tired I was of family. I couldn’t look away from it, I saw nothing else. Like the wrought iron fence of the Summer Gardens, I couldn’t see beyond the captivating design and into the space within. Every past and present phenomenon had been tied to my indistinct relatives, I had rhymed it all, emphasized the simultaneity between them and me, or the lack of it. I’d had to learn to put off my own relations with the world for later, just as truffle pigs are trained to ensure they don’t eat their precious findings. My journeys had only the most oblique connection with me, I made my way from town to town like a traveling salesperson, dragging a wheelie bag. It wasn’t that the wheelie bag was out of place or filled with the wrong things — not even when it clattered down the cobbled Parisian streets — no, it was just that wherever I went it insisted on its presence.

  There I went with it, weaving along the verges, down the long rue Claude-Bernard in the fifth arrondissement, where only people like Sarra Ginzburg lived, and not because it was near the Sorbonne and the Val-de-Grâce hospital — this was the area of rented rooms and cheap lodgings where sparrowlike students flitted from perch to perch, never going far, huddling together for collegiate warmth. On this very street Sarra had spent a few weeks or months in a green-tinged seven-story building with metal balconies. It was a cheap, fierce neighborhood, the stairwells smelt of smoke and damp face powder. It had been rebuilt in the 1860s, but had become no more respectable for it. As the architect of these changes Baron Haussmann said “Paris belongs to France, and not to the Parisians, who inhabit it by birth or by choice, and definitely not to the flowing population of its rented rooms, who distort the meaning of ‘referendum’ with their unintelligent voice.” A few decades later the Russian Mademoiselle Ginzburg joined this floating population.

  Waking one morning in the attic room on the sixth floor, I slowly began groping mentally for what might have been back then: the number of rooms, the crooked ceiling, the old table and the chimney pots, very white against the gray sky. Without even getting up I could see at least ten possibilities. My great-grandmother might have stayed in this very room — why not, the cheapest rooms would have been up in the attics — or she could have lived in any of the other rooms. If I had expected a supernatural happening (paid for in advance and online with my credit card), a dream peopled by Sarra and her student friends, a sudden nighttime revelation, an injection of understanding, no such thing happened. Instead the usual tourist morning, the light, the smell of coffee, the quiet murmur of a vacuum cleaner.

  The owner of the hotel was an older man with grief-stricken eyes. He held himself with the dignity of a caryatid. It was clear that he could carry on a conversation with me, and at the same time carry all the weight of his elegant hotel, with its staircases and the starched envelopes of its beds. He bought the building in the 1980s, reconstructed whole floors of tired rooms and sunk a lift shaft through the building, but left untouched the ancient underground passageway leading into the darkness toward the Seine. He knew little about the life of the building before that, except that the designer Kenzō Takada had lived in one of its microscopic rooms during
his early days in Paris. There were no memories back to the beginning of the century, but the building had always housed the cramped, narrow, warren-like living quarters of the poor. “You’re Jewish, aren’t you?” he suddenly said.

  Twenty or so years ago I was sitting with my future (now former) husband in the little porch of a Crimean café and waiting for it to open. It was noon, a lazy August day, the holiday season was nearing its end and no one was hurrying anywhere, especially not the ragtag band approaching us across the warm asphalt. A man in dirty trousers with a greasy blond beard was leading an elderly horse, and up high on the saddle, gripping on to the pommel with both hands, sat an unusually pretty curly-haired little boy of about six. Even at that hour of desperate longing for Crimean fortified wine, their appearance seemed unreal, like a shamelessly direct quote from a Soviet film about the White Army during the Civil War. The horse was white, too, but red with dust. The man led the beast right up to the porch and said, without any particular expression: “Excuse me but aren’t you ex nostris?” I was so surprised I didn’t immediately grasp what he was saying.

  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.

  Prince Sergei Trubetskoy, who was in Paris in 1913 (like the rest of the world, or so it seems, all enjoying a last stroll along the Seine), wrote in his memoirs: “I recall that on this trip [ . . . ] there was something that surprised me. The hotels I stayed in in Berlin, Amsterdam, Antwerp, and Paris — on the day of my arrival I came down to eat in the hotel restaurant, and in each town they were playing versions of the same popular tune of the time, ‘Pupsik.’” This unprecedented “simultaneity” of life, barely noticeable back then, is frightening now when we look with clear eyes at the date and the places. Those few prewar years are a time when the entire future twentieth century, together with a large part of the nineteenth century, swept its skirts along the same boulevards, sat at neighboring café tables and side by side in theater stalls, hardly suspecting the existence of each other. Sometimes you have to die to find out who lived on the same street as you.

  My brave, lonely great-grandmother lived in Paris from 1910 onward. In September 1911 Kafka briefly visited Paris. At the beginning of his travels he and Max Brod conceived of a plan to write travel guides. It was a brilliant idea, anticipating the Lonely Planet series, for readers who didn’t mind going third class across Italy, or preferred streetcars to barouches. Brod wrote a business plan, including details of accompanying discounts and free concerts. Two phrases are written in Kafka’s hand — one of them is “exact amounts for tipping.” They also included shopping advice on where one could enjoy pineapple, oysters, and madeleines in Paris — this, less than two years before the publication of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.