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Appendix 1. The Family Portrait. Remembering the Plisetsky Family
By Boris Pevzner
Contents Page
Part 1. Written in 1999-2001, published in Russian in 2001, translated from Russian by author’s daughter Julia Billiard in April 2008
1. The Gomelites 1
2. The Family of Grandfather Irael 2
3. Iosif I. Plisetsky (Uncle Iosya) 4
4. Mikhail I. Plisetsky (Uncle Mosya) 6
5. Elizaveta I. Plisetsky & Grigorij M. Lomize (Aunt Liza & Uncle Giga) 8
6. Sof’ya I. Plisetskaya & Veniamin G. Leites (Aunt Sonya & Uncle Nyoma) 10
7. Guta I. Plisetskaya & Moisej B. Pevzner (My Parents) 13
8. The family of Mendel (Emmanuil) M. Plisetsky (The Emmanuiloviches) 18
9. Mariya E. Levitskaya (Aunt Manya) 19
Part 2. Written in 2007-2008.
10. Viktor M. Plisetsky Written in April 2008 21
11. Lev G. Lomize Written in February, 2008 26
12. Minna M. Perelman Written in July 2007 30 (Translation is not ready yet)
Some names in this translation differ from names used in Volume 1and in other parts of this Volume 2.
The missed text of Russian versión is replaced by … or <…>, added text (autor’s, interpreter’s, or editor’s notes) is placed in rectangular bracetes [ ].
Part 1. Written in 1999-2001.
Published in Russian in the book “The Plisetskys … Genealogy”, 2001 (Volume 1).
Translated from Russian by author’s daughter Julia Billiard. April 2008
The past is never dead. It’s not even past. – William Faulkner
1. The Gomelites
Why did people take better pictures a hundred years ago? From an old group photograph, my departed relatives are looking at me with dignity, calm, and grace. There is nothing transient, no fidgeting, no accidental expressions. No one blinked, moved, or got blurred, despite the long exposure time of the old camera. The picture on the grey cardstock did not fade, did not curl, and the faces from it have been looking out steadily for four generations.
Back then, people did not take everyday pictures, and every picture they took was a treasure. Taking a family picture was an event, a ritual, an importance of which you can still see in their faces. And even so, I think they could not imagine, as they gathered together in a photo studio in Gomel, just how important and how monumental an occasion it was. It was almost the only picture to ever show the whole family together… The year was 1912, the turn of the century. The end of the whole era of Russian history that became known as ‘the time of peace’. The time when all were still alive…
The picture shows my grandma and grandpa Plisetskys and their seven children. The eldest daughter Guta, the one in the center against the drawn columns, is my mother. It was not an overly large family for that time; not 13 children, as had my other grandpa, not even 10 as my grandpa’s father, but seven children was not a small family either. And all the children survived, no one died in childhood, all were educated, all thrived. The children were Guta, Haim, Meer, Liza, Moisej, Sima, and Iosif. The eldest son Haim (later known as Efim) already has a beard and mustache, and the youngest Iosif, 9 at the time, is kneeling on a chair to reach the other’s height, and his 11-year-old sister Sima (Sonya) is holding him around the waist. All women, down to the youngest, are wearing long dresses with standing collars with white trim. Somehow I cannot imagine these faces, with their inner light and calm dignity, combined with today’s miniskirts.
Think about that for a minute: they are Jews living in a ghetto, they are ‘Persons Practicing Judaism’ with 650 laws of the Russian Empire written against them, they are facing multiple daily prohibitions – but there is not a trace of humiliation in their faces, only dignity and honor, the kind that we can still envy today. Or are we seeing the inner pride at the thought that they kept their faith, even though they could have gotten baptized and put an end to any discrimination? Do these faces reflect the inner conviction that the values they chose to keep are worth more than those taken from them?
And here is another picture, taking us one generation earlier, to the very beginnings of the known history of the Plisetskys. It shows a majestic grey-bearded patriarch in a black yarmulke atop his tall forehead and a small old lady with a head of flat hair. The patriarch is my grandfather’s father, Meer, and the lady we always took to be his wife Malya, even though the stark contrast in their appearance was surprising to us. However, my cousin Lyonya Leites, with his characteristic perseverance, did eventually find some acquaintances in a Jewish newspaper who translated the few lines in Yiddish scribbled on the back of this picture. Unfortunately, we could never translate all of it, but we gathered that it was not Malya, but her sister. Malya probably died in 1902 and could not be pictured in this photograph of 1909.
My great-grandfather is almost 100 years my senior (he was born in 1820 and I in 1927), and looking at him I sense with renewed conviction how small and insignificant we became in these 100 years. Neither I nor his other great-grandchildren, even if we grew beards, could ever come close to the monumental dignity of this father of ten. He looks like the Head of the family and the Keeper of traditions. He was a clerk for the City of Chernigov, a position of no great importance, I would imagine. However, it could be his conviction that he communicates with God that gave him his dignity.
“Pevzner from Gomel”, said the well-respected head of the Physico-Technical Institute Konstantinov sadly, looking at my CV. “No, we cannot hire you now, we’ll have to wait for the better times”. His position was understandable: Jews already comprised half his Institute, the fact never forgotten by the party elements inside or outside. However, ‘the better times’ did not come for another quarter of a century and so I lost a chance to work at one of the best scientific establishments in the country. Every HR person looking at my CV forever saw ‘Pevzner from Gomel’. But I remember little of Gomel, and sometimes speak of myself using a phrase I read some place: ‘I was born in Leningrad at the age of 3’.
I have two memories of Gomel. The first one is of me running through a shed in our back yard with the sun streaming through the gates open both behind and in front of me. I am brandishing a stick trying to catch my older second cousin Elik who is running away screaming: ‘nepman, nepman’ [A nickname for persons who owned stores or factories during NEP (New Economic Policy). NEP started in 1921 and ended in 1930 when Stalin’s government confiscated all private property]. This was a real negative tease back then and I must have been a plump little boy to deserve it. The second memory is of us leaving Gomel forever. We are going to a train station in a horse-drawn carriage, I am sitting in grandpa’s lap and my mother and sister are holding suitcases and a hat box in their lap.
That’s all I remembered of Gomel. I did not remember the town and when I found myself there on a business trip at the age of 25, I walked around its clean streets with wonder. I strolled in the city park called the Paskevich Park – a beautiful over-grown park with little bridges arching over a mate, going through the tree branches. I visited the only family that still remained in the city from all the many relatives – the family of Guta Zlobinsky, mom’s first cousin. They managed to escape the city during the Second World War just before the German occupationi, but one of her two sons was killed on the front in 1942; she was now living with the other. I will never forget the warm welcome I received in their home. From them I learned that our house did not survive, but I wanted to find at least the spot where it stood. The street names were unchanged and at the intersection of Aptechnaya and Mogilevskaya I found a big school yard looking bear and drab with nothing but a few meager pieces of athletic equipment. This was the place where my family lived for 30 years, my uncle Iosya was born here, my parents were married here, my sister and I were born in the house that stood right here… I tried to stir some sentiment inside myself, to cause some inner tears, but in vain – I found nothing to hold onto in the past, my mother’s stories could not replace my own live memories.
But to tell the truth, I did not dwell too much on these questions back then. The desire to uncover the past and discover the roots came, unfortunately, too late when most of the old generation was gone. Only my Aunt Sonya remained, who was born in 1901. Erika, Lenya and I bombarded her with questions about the past and she recorded her answers on tape, the tape I am using even now to write about Gomel.
2. The Family of Grandfather Izrail
The picture of great-grandfather as a patriarch was made as a post-card and sent from Chernigov in 1909 to a very unusual address: ‘Plisetsky Izrail Meerovich, Gomel, Mogilev Province’. Surprisingly, it made it. Aunt Sonya, in reply to my puzzled question, explained that grandpa was known to the whole city, especially to people with children because he owned a bookstore where one could buy all kinds of school supplies. It was a small store, where his sons worked in lieu of hired help. The oldest son – Efim – inherited this profession and passed it on to his oldest son. It seems that the love of books is one of the genetic traits of the entire family.
How could a family of nine survive on one person’s salary? Well, at that time in Russia it was possible, although not easy. All kids worked from a young age, tutored other children, and helped with chores. Boys kneaded the dough that mother used to bake bread. On Fridays, she baked white bread that had a wonderful smell. After mom’s passing, the kids divided her duties among themselves. Sonya had to cook dinners for the entire family. “I had a wood stove and eight mouths to feed, but I managed all right at 17 years old” Sonya says now. None of them were afraid of work, they liked to keep their house clean and their affairs in order, and they could do almost anything. Their mather used to say: ‘God willing, you won’t have to pluck the chicken, but you have to know how to do it’. (What she could not imagine is that later their problem would be – where to find that chicken…)
The house had a living room, a dining room, a master bedroom, and a kid’s room (one room for seven kids of different sexes!) All the rooms were small, the toilet was outside and there was no bath. Once a week, the entire family went to a bathhouse in a horse-drawn carriage. As the children grew, the house became too small and the parents bought another house next-door. This one had a dining room, one more bedroom, a kitchen and a big room, which grandpa turned into his bookstore.
In the USSR … the family could never mention that their father owned a bookstore as it would have marked them as ‘property owners’. When my Aunt Sonya applied to Moscow State University, she had to show proof of belonging to a working class. And her sister Guta was able to send her an official document from Gomel stating that she was a daughter of a worker. ‘Many people in Gomel knew us’, Sonya explains, ‘and remembered how my Dad gave away all the books after the revolution. High school kids came, made lists of what was on the shelves and took it all.’ This document allowed Sonya to get into the University, but she was almost expelled when she mentioned later that her father was a forest ranger (in pre-bookstore times). Fortunately for her, some one on the committee said ‘You must be mistaken, no Jew could work as a forest ranger’. Indeed, Jews in tsarist Russia were not allowed to work for the government. In truth, before he owned a bookstore, her father was riding around evaluating the price of wood for a local wood merchant.
The remains of that bookstore were around for a long time, even after we moved to Leningrad – I remember stacks of thin yellow wrapping paper that I used to wrap my school notebooks to keep them clean, and a stack of lined writing paper that was of such good quality that we never dared use it (I’ll tell you later how it was eventually used). But most importantly, there were many thin paperback books that were published as part of a cheap series and for which one could buy high-quality hard covers separately. I can confirm that the covers were indeed ‘high-quality’ as grandpa had a set of them in his store. A single novel could take up three or four of these little books, each ending in mid-sentence. These books contained Meterlink and Knut Gamsun, Rostan and Tolstoy, Tyutchev and Korolenko – my education owes a lot to these books.
Grandpa had a mustache and a small beard and was always well-dressed in a suit and tie. I do not remember ever seeing him wearing a robe or pajamas. Even in a picture taken at a dacha he was wearing a tie. He spoke Russian with no accent, which means that his parents spoke Russian, although their native tong was Yiddish. But for grandpa and his children Russian was the first language and Yiddish became the second. His younger children did not know Yiddish well at all and even the older ones used it mostly for jokes.
Together with the language, religion was lost as well. Grandpa prayed only on major holidays, although scrupulously following the rules, with the tallit and tefillin. The synagogues were closed, but grandpa once took me to a prayer house across the street, where in a large dark basement of an apartment building many Jewish men in tallits were praying together. I was there only once – in mid-1930s the prayer houses were closed as well. My parents’ generation did not believe in God. My mother graduated from Bestuzhev’s Courses (an all-girl college) with the highest honors and was offered a teaching post there on the condition that she became a Christian. She refused, but not because she believed in a Jewish God, but because she could not live with betrayal. The entire family would get together in my mom’s house for a Passover, but these were simply festive holiday gatherings with no religious connotation.