In Memory of Memory

by Maria Stepanova

  I do know other things now. In one of Lyodik Gimmelfarb’s letters from the front he adds, “I expect you know that Grandfather stayed in Odessa. I am very worried about what will happen to him.” Both Lyodik’s grandfathers were in Odessa and both were Jews. Israel Gimmelfarb, Lyodik’s paternal grandfather, was shot in October 1941, immediately after Romanian forces occupied the town. The other grandfather, father of Betya and Verochka, was called Leonty, or Leib. I only now realize that although I know the year and the day, and almost the hour of the deaths of my other great-grandfathers, I have never found out anything about him — he vanished, quite as if he had never existed. In youth he was incredibly beautiful with a waxen pallor; in pictures taken in the 1870s he looks as dapper an advert for a tailor. His daughters had no pictures of him in later life.

  Lyodik’s note is perhaps the last time this man’s life floats to the surface. On the Yad Vashem database eighty-one people come up when I type in “Liberman, Odessa,” and only a few of these have first names. A few are listed with initials or short forms of their first name, Busya, Basya, Besya. Some of them crop up in lists of the evacuated, but most were killed: shot or hanged during the October roundups; burned to death in the munitions depot at Lustdorf or sleeping side by side in the ghetto at Slobodya; slaughtered in Domanevka, Akmechetka, Bogdanovka. By the end of the war Odessa, with its Polish, Greek, Italian, and Jewish streets, had no more than six hundred Jewish residents, and none of my family were among them.

  *

  As a child I was always very disappointed by the professions and activities of my family. Engineers and librarians, doctors and accountants, my relatives represented the full range of the ordinary and humdrum; nothing special or exciting, nothing adventurous. Although one of my great-great-grandfathers did sell ice cream in a shtetl near Nevel, and that was far more interesting to me as a child than the agricultural machinery sold by the other. The black-and-white television at the time showed endless newsreels of combine harvesters chewing through the thick corn and I could not have predicted that anything of interest would ever come of those fields.

  At the beginning of the 1990s, when food was scarce, my father traveled to the south of Ukraine with a friend to see whether he couldn’t sell something in return for food. He came back from Kherson with some photographs, and he and my mother spent ages looking at them before bringing a set of old architectural plans down from a top cupboard. Grandfather Lyonya’s family house in Kherson was a fine-looking building with a wide balcony supported by two bearded Atlases in loincloths. It was odd and pleasant to imagine all those rooms and windows occupied by just one family, but it seemed outlandish in comparison with my day-to-day life at the time: ration books were being reintroduced, we had coupons for cigarettes. Very well-to-do people, my mother said, repeating someone else’s words from long before, and for some reason their well-to-do-ness seemed even more tedious than their agricultural machinery.

  There are so many stories in which a person turns out to be not what they seem at first sight. The frog prince, for example, or the superhero masquerading as a bespectacled boy. When I began my blind groping for family history over the last hundred years, what had seemed initially to be well-documented and interesting momentarily evaporated as I reached for it, crumbling like ancient fabric. My guesses were confounded, my witnesses slow to step forward, but there was one exception to this. When I entered “Gurevich, Kherson” into the search engine, the answers came tumbling out as if I’d won on a slot machine.

  A side street in Kherson now bears the name of my great-great-grandfather — it had once borne the name of a Communist, but Ukraine was removing traces of its Soviet heritage. The Gurevich concern had included a number of factories (so many I couldn’t immediately distinguish them all) with substantial income — a Soviet brochure described with disgust the more than four million rubles of total profit he made in 1913. By current standards this amounts to about fifty million dollars, which explains the provenance of the Atlases on the facade. On a history website I found an image of a blue-and-white bond issued in December 1911 in Basel. The Société Anonyme des Usines Mécaniques I. Hourevitch was attracting new investors, and in the oval medallions on the bonds you could see, as if through an arrow slit, two model factories, surrounded by what look like poplars, smoke issuing through the chimneys and ponies-and-traps driving through the front gates.

  This predecessor of ours was a famous man. A telegraph addressed to him read simply: KHERSON, GUREVICH. He appeared in the area at the beginning of 1880s and began with a workshop repairing carts, and then an iron foundry. Over twenty-five years he achieved a great deal. There were a few big factories in the southern town of Kherson (kerosene streetlamps, parks, five chemist shops, six libraries, 227 hansom cabs) — and Great-Great-Grandfather’s were the largest, employing five hundred people. I was even able to track down wages at the factories: nine and a half rubles a day for a qualified worker, forty kopecks for an apprentice.

  I was vaguely bothered that I hadn’t found anything “living” in all the array of documentation I had unearthed, anything that wasn’t simply an illustration of the history of capitalism in Russia. The internet was happy to tell me about Isaak Gurevich’s income and expenditure, but there wasn’t one photograph of him online. I found a catalog of produced goods, printed in good taste, with curlicues at the corners and attractive diagrams of plows and seed drills, resembling large insects. The implements had fashionable names from the era, vaguely reminiscent of racing horses: “Universe” and “Dactyl” and “Phryne” and even the unlikely English word “Dentist.”

  “One may always choose a layer of earth moist enough for the successful growing of seed,” the sales brochure says. But I found nothing at all about Isaak Gurevich’s seed, as if neither he, nor I (by extension) existed. Even the website of the Jewish cemetery only promised to show the monuments “to the family of the founder and owner of the agricultural machinery factory Israel Zelmanovich Gurevich” — it seemed the man himself wasn’t buried there.

  There was a dissonance between the excess of information about one aspect of his life and the absence of information about the man himself, and it began to gnaw at me as if something invisible was pulling at my sleeve or twitching my collar. In my home, where nothing of sentimental value was ever thrown away, and lace collars and dickeys lay moldering in suitcases for decades, there was absolutely nothing from the wealthy Kherson household. This in itself was strange. I made a mental list of all the old furniture I had grown up with, the worn bentwood chairs and the ancient crockery, and I realized that my assumptions were right: everything came from that short period when Sarra and Misha were married, working, and setting up house. There was nothing from the Gurevichs, apart from the ring my mother refused to wear. Then, for the first time, I asked myself what I really knew about my great-grandfather, the son of Isaak / Israel.

  I had two documents. The first was on thick card, pleasant to the touch, with a tiny ribbon attaching a second card to the first. It was an invitation to the circumcision of the tiny Lyonya. The second was a death certificate for my great-grandfather Vladimir Gurevich (“Moisey Vulf” in brackets) who died in Odessa of brain inflammation at the age of thirty-three on June 25, 1920. At the beginning of February that year the very last refugee boats from the Civil War left the Odessa harbor. An eyewitness remembers the crowd on the pier, a woman with a pram desperately searching for her husband and child, and another woman dragging a gold-framed mirror behind her. The Red Army entered Odessa soon after and set up their infamous secret police. News of my great-grandfather’s death only reached the family two years later in 1922.

  My taciturn great-grandmother Betya did have one story about the past she loved to tell. When guests once came to see her little son Lyonya they made a joke of asking him, “And who are you?” The little boy shied away at first since he didn’t know them. Then he answered in a deep voice: “I’m little Lyonya from the nursery.” I
n the same year, 1922, Betya and her son appeared in Moscow, quite alone: no one knew them and they knew no one. They had nothing from the old life with them, apart from a few photographs: white dresses, stripy pajamas, and the cheerful mustachioed Vladimir sitting on a bench with friends. On all the Soviet forms Vladimir is described as an “employee,” as was customary. Betya worked at home to begin with, typing with two fingers on a heavy Mercedes typewriter. Then she eventually found work. Lyonya went to school. They began to settle in Moscow.

  I found one other thing, almost by chance: Grandfather Lyonya’s brown wallet lying in a drawer all these years. It had nothing in it, just a colorized photo of my mother, the dark square of a negative with the young smiling Lyolya, and a postcard cut around its edge for some reason. It was sent from Kakhovka to the city of Kharkov in 1916 and it read: Dear Lyonya, Daddy is missing you very much and wants you to come home very soon. Tomochka hasn’t been round since you left, and won’t come back until you do. Much love to you, Lyonya. From Daddy

  *

  I couldn’t get to sleep on the first night I spent in Kherson. The night was streaked with early morning light, the remote pools of yellow streetlamps dimmed, but the dogs never once stopped their noise, the whole district rang out with the deep bass of their barks, passing between one dog and the next. Then the cockerels began their crowing. From my lace-framed window I could see lonely roofs and boarded fences stretching to the horizon. My great-great-grandfather’s factory was next to the station and the yellow building hadn’t changed in a century: it was built in 1907 right on the edge of the steppe. That year there were huge celebrations to mark the arrival of the railway, with an orchestra playing. The new railway meant you could get to nearby Nikolaev in only two hours, and a third-class ticket to Odessa cost just over seven rubles — a first-class ticket cost an impossible eighteen rubles fifty kopecks. A strange and frustratingly vague account describes Isaak Gurevich in the crowds on the square as the “gentleman in a black frock coat standing by the only car of the English ‘Vauxhall’ make in the whole area.” The gentleman is offering the train driver a cigarette from his golden cigarette case.

  We got off the train from Odessa at midday, when the leatherette of the train seats was beginning to stick to the thighs, and the white steppe was tired of loping alongside the train. The town was deserted; it was just because of the midday heat, but it felt terrifying, like the whole town had been left in 1919 just as it was, and the newer concrete buildings were simply the scar tissue that had grown over the burned flesh. In the town center, where Suvorov Street and Potemkin Street crossed, stood the family’s former house, the “House with Atlases” as the guidebook called it, although it mentioned neither Isaak, nor his heir, Vladimir. I began my research at the town archives, where I was treated with great kindness, and given access to a wealth of material.

  Our predecessor, Isaak Gurevich, seems to have come to Kherson from the Urals, where few Jews had ever lived — he was described as a “Chelyabinsk merchant” until at least 1905 in the town’s documents. There were heaps of papers documenting his many and various occupations: steel and iron foundries; machine building works; all managed with a very steady hand. The machinery in the workshops cost around a hundred thousand rubles; production increased incrementally. He fought a legal battle with someone over a patch of land on the edge of town and then built another factory on this land. I was brought the blueprint of the buildings, white lines on a storm-cloud blue paper. The table at the archive wasn’t large enough for us to unfold the plans — they hung over the edges. The archive also held lists of Gurevich correspondence, probably mostly written by his secretary; in vain I listened out for the tone of his voice in the dictated letters, “I urgently need money right now, and I have the honor of asking you to transfer the requested amount if possible.” But his signature was real, and I followed it across the page with my fingernail when no one was watching.

  I really wanted to know only one thing: when he had died and how. I’d amassed a few scraps of half-plausible information from various websites, including an article with the following anecdote: in his old age the former factory owner Gurevich, sitting in the warm sun, said laughingly that he remembered the war and the revolution, but he couldn’t recall making a present of his factory to the Communist Petrovsky. I tried to imagine what was meant by this “warm sun”: a park bench of pensioners and pigeons at their feet? That seemed profoundly unlikely. The article gave no clues. I wrote to the author, but never received a reply. In the period from 1917 to 1920 there were about twenty changes of power in Kherson: the Bolsheviks, then the Austrians, the Greeks, Grigoriev’s army, and then the Red Army again, who immediately took hostages from among the wealthier citizens and demanded payment. No one had any money left by then and lists of the executed appeared in the newspapers. The last information I found was just before my visit to Kherson, in the minutes of a factory board meeting from February 28, 1918:

  we heard a report on the transfer of the factory to the management of the workers. We decreed that the factory must be taken out of the private ownership of Gurevich immediately, along with all the assets: buildings, stock, raw materials, and manufactured products transferred to the workers. No decisions will be taken on the nationalization, socialization, or municipalization of the factory until this matter is decided by central government.

  *

  Before transferring the factory to the workers in February 1918 the factory board made it clear to the owner that he was to blame for the factory stopping production after the revolution, when there was neither money nor raw materials to be had.

  1. It is determined that Gurevich, rather than the workers, is more to blame for the lack of working materials.

  2. The materials may be obtained by the workers, if not now, then in the near future.

  3. In firing workers Gurevich sought to rid the factory of elements unfavorable to him.

  The united board demands:

  1. That without permission from the board no worker shall be fired.

  2. All the workers must receive full pay until the resumption of normal activity.

  The sequence of subsequent events is hard to reconstruct. Life in the town was in constant flux, time was measured by a new calendar. The factory fell silent. The merchants, landowners, homeowners, landlords, and self-employed had until February 23 to gather 23 million rubles for the Red Army, and those who didn’t pay were arrested. And yet the pianist Mogilevsky gave a series of successful piano concerts — he played Scriabin, with the intention of giving the public an understanding “of his last masterpieces.” Outside the concert hall the anarchists were having a street battle with the police and the trees in the park were being chopped down for firewood.

  When the Austrian army entered the town, they restored a flimsy semblance of order. Local government was conducted in Ukrainian; the weather got warmer and the townspeople played football and lawn tennis at the sports ground. They opened a conscription office for Denikin’s Army for “officers, land­owners and students.” A head of local government, Boris Bonch-Osmolovsky, was elected, and died of typhus in 1920. They held a charity day in Kherson to raise money for those suffering from TB, and set up an Esperanto Club. This was at the same time as bands of peasants moved across the steppe, murdering land­owners and attacking Jewish communities. In July a local newspaper announced that the “The Gurevich agricultural machinery factory has resumed production after a deal was struck between the owner Gurevich, the local authorities and the Austro-Hungarian army.”

  And that is all. News of arrests, burglaries, and deaths are woven together with football matches and charity bazaars in the newspapers, much as they are in real life. For a while the town resembled the sun-warmed seaside shallows: masses of brightly colored crowds from Moscow and St. Petersburg passed through, drawn along by an invisible current. There was a popular series of lectures in the town on the theme of “Theater and the Scaffold.”
Spanish flu replaced typhus. On December 11 the Austro-Hungarian army left Kherson. It was then occupied by volunteer armies, Petlyura’s Ukrainian army, Grigoriev’s army again, Greeks and French, Red Army, White Army, Red Army . . . Sometimes the bodies of the executed were returned to their families. At the beginning they were even given proper funerals.

  My ancestor’s name slowly fades out. The archive has a few more papers, tax notifications sent to him by the authorities in 1919. In March 1920, when the Kherson Revolutionary Committee is wondering who to tax for the land and assets of the factory, they received a declaration back from the factory’s own revolutionary committee, refusing to pay since the factory already belonged to the state. By then Isaak Gurevich has disappeared: he can’t be found in March or April, nor even when they begin selling factory assets, or when the factory begins working again. There are no more traces of him; no shadows, no photographs, nothing human I could grasp on to and consider my own, apart from a few ink markings and a single iron object.

  This object occupies nearly an entire hall in the local museum, which is otherwise stuffed with amphorae and embroidered blouses. It’s huge and lumbering, balanced on iron paws, with a long, outstretched neck and wheels hanging to the sides of its carapace: a “Bunker Plow for shallow plowing.” It wore the sign of its provenance — both our provenance — like a birthmark, embossed in unambiguous Cyrillic lettering: ЗАВОДЪ ГУРЕВИЧА КАХОВКА (Gurevich factory, Kakhovka).