By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel — Nachum moved to Kiev from the provincial Ukrainian town of Nikopol six years before the German occupation of the Ukrainian capital in 1941. He loved mathematics and was a jack-of-all-trades. He combined analytical ability and ingenuity with technical skills.
In those years, antisemitism in Kiev was as dormant as a bear in winter. It was dormant but waiting to return. While antisemitism was sleeping, Nachum was acting. He was an excellent engineer and researcher, earned his doctorate and made a career in a research institute, becoming a senior researcher.
Although Nachum did not have a liberal arts or musical education, he loved classical music and often went to concerts at the Philharmonic and actively attended the Kiev Opera and Ballet Theater. He found love in classical music and married. His wife was a professional musician, my mother’s sister. My aunt played the piano beautifully, sang wonderfully, and was a well-known musicologist in Kiev.
Before the outbreak of the war with the Nazis, Jews in the USSR, particularly in Kiev, could still occupy a leading position in Soviet musicology. In the atmosphere of internationalism, the Jews of Kiev felt quite comfortable. The Philharmonic Hall and the Opera House were full of Jews, there were Jewish musicians on stage and Jewish classical music lovers in the audience.
Nachum was an awkward provincial boy with a gentle soul. He was drawn to beauty and was fascinated by the art of music and by my aunt’s appearance. He idolized her and fell under her power. At that time, she was a beautiful young woman, ambitious, bossy, capricious, and everything worked out for her: she was successful in her career and in winning men’s hearts. However, she was at the mercy of national tradition and married a Jew, Nachum, without loving him.
On June 28, 1941, when Kiev was already being bombed by German planes, Leah defended her doctor dissertation. The famous musicologist Academician Boris Asafyev sent an enthusiastic review of her work. He wrote her letters and predicted a brilliant musicology career. The Academic Council of the Kiev Academy of Music unanimously voted to award her the degree of Doctor of Art History. At the age of 26 she was admitted to the Union of Composers of the USSR.
In 1944 she returned from evacuation to Kiev and was reinstated to work at the Kiev Academy of Music. She became a professor and the first head of the department of the history of Russian music and dean of the vocal faculty, and was given three rooms in a large communal apartment at 51 Vladimirskaya Street opposite the Opera Theater in a house built in the 19th century. My parents and grandmother lived in this apartment, along with her and her husband, and after the end of World War II I was born there.
My aunt was a musicologist, a specialist in Russian music and a vocal teacher. She loved Tchaikovsky’s music, published a book about him, and was one of the main victims of the “cosmopolitan” pogrom in 1949. State antisemitism awoke and unfolded with unprecedented force. The example of Hitler’s anti-Jewish policy must have inspired Stalin. The leader of the USSR feared the national revival of the Jewish people after World War II as a manifestation of freedom, unacceptable in his country, and the creation of Israel. Therefore, antisemitic actions at the state level began in 1948.
My aunt wrote that Tchaikovsky’s symphonism was not formed in a vacuum, but that it felt in the tradition of Beethoven. Within days she was scolded in the pages of the newspapers, she was under fire of public criticism. On International Women’s Day, March 8, 1949, orders were delivered to our house to expel my father from the University and my aunt from the Academy.
My aunt’s “crime” was even worse than the “crime” of my father, who was a “low worshipper of the German, petty-bourgeois poet Heinrich Heine,” a Jew by birth. She did not limit herself to glorifying Beethoven, but proved Schumann’s influence on the Ukrainian composer Viktor Kosenko, with whom she was well acquainted, and promoted the performance of music by French composers Ravel and Debussy. For this she was ostracized.
She left Kiev, where she had lived and worked for 28 years. The hordes of pogromists ruined her professional life, threw her out of her home, her cherished academy, and separated her from her family, colleagues, and students. She was saved from the pogroms of the Petlyurians and White Guards, saved from the Nazis, but not saved from the Soviet pogroms, from the Stalinist purge of culture, from its “cleansing” from its best Jewish representatives.
She was not forgiven for the influence of the German Beethoven on the Russian Tchaikovsky and the influence of the German Schumann on the Ukrainian Kosenko. Not only did she not celebrate International Women’s Day on March 8, but she also wore mourning clothes on that day.
The house where Aunt Leah got her apartment was mostly inhabited by teachers from the academy and the higher music school. Our house was full of musicians. My whole childhood was spent among them. I was doomed to live by and with music. I could only marry a musician, which happened, but Nachum had a choice, but he was “captive”: his wife commanded him like a servant. He was not entitled to his own opinion, nor, indeed, were many of the people around her, who included admirers of her talent, her students, and her haters.
She had a polar opposite relationship with people: love-hate. She inherited her authoritarianism from her mother, my grandmother. My father recalled that “the only person who could handle Leah was her mother.” Nachum was a man of tall stature, strong, excellent health, and a loud voice, but his marriage to my aunt made his voice soft and his health weak. He lived with her for ten years. Because of his prominent role at work, which proved important to the Soviet war industry during the war, he was evacuated to Kuibyshev (today this town is named Samara), the city where many Soviet dignitaries, including members of the government, fled from the Germans on October 16-17, 1941. There he earned good money in a war factory and supported his wife, who openly cheated on him.
Returning to Kiev after the expulsion of German troops was a great celebration for my family: my father and my aunt had a great career in a short time, she became a professor at the Kiev Music Academy, he a professor at Kiev University and editor of the main literary magazine of Ukraine. But in 1949 they were both accused of “cosmopolitanism,” of “worshipping Western culture, hostile to Soviet culture.” Both were forced to leave Kiev and seek work in the provinces.
In this search, my father divorced my mother and Aunt Leah divorced Nachum. My aunt left Kiev and Nachum. In the USSR, people were awarded the “Medal of Courage.” Nachum should have received the “Medal of Courage” for living with my aunt. His courage knew no bounds, for he wanted to be my grandmother’s son-in-law again by marrying her husband-free daughter, my mother. My mother was very much like her sister in appearance and character. Apparently, Nachum had a tendency toward masochism, for he wanted to get under his wife’s power again. But my mother, under pressure from my grandmother, turned him down and thus saved him from having another unsuccessful marriage.
Grandmother believed that a son-in-law who had failed in his marriage to one daughter would also fail in his marriage to a second daughter. Nahum married a second time when he was forty years old and lived a happy, quiet life. True, it was short, for life with my aunt did not dispose him to longevity.
After Kiev, Aunt Leah worked in music academies in three cities. Everywhere she struggled for power, honor and influence. She resigned from two academies with scandals, while in the third and last one she found a refuge. Apparently, the Soviet persecution of her as a Jew caused her to subconsciously protest against her origins. She decided to spite her mother, who demanded that she marry a Jew only, to live with a Russian man, a soloist of the Kiev operetta, whom she took with her to different music academies. They had no children, but her maternal instinct and thirst for creativity led my aunt to give birth and raise spiritual children, to turn her students into professional musicologists and singers. But her main childbirth project was to create a musicologist and outstanding vocal teacher out of her poorly educated husband: with her help, he became a doctor of musicology, a professor of solo singing and an educator of folk and honored artists, laureates and diploma holders of competitions, soloists of opera theaters and operetta theaters.
It is hard to say whether she was only his “creative director” and adviser or did much of the work in his place. For her, marriage became a creative process. She became a sculptor, a Pygmalion, who, like the mythical Greek sculptor, created her beautiful statue and brought it to life. However, she ruled her husband, her students, and her subordinate colleagues in an administrative-command way, giving orders that were not subject to discussion.
She was a terribly thin woman with sunken cheeks, ate very little, but liked to feed others, apparently symbolically satisfying her hunger. Due to this characteristic, her husband weighed 120 kilograms, moved with difficulty, but loved technology and all sorts of exotic activities: he sailed on a motorboat, rode a motorcycle, made homemade wine and made secret trips to various cities. The purpose of his business trips could not be ascertained, only many years later some of his mysterious propensities were understood through the complaints of his vocal female pupils: when he put their voice and taught them how to breathe properly while singing, he would feel their breasts.
Aunt Leah smoked a lot. The most frequent pose in which she was seen at the academy was standing by the radiator with a cigarette in her teeth on the landing between two neighboring floors. This standing had two purposes: to keep warm, for her thinness and scanty diet always made her cold, and to watch her colleagues and pupils passing by. She left no one without caustic criticism. Because she smoked a lot, she smoked her voice: her soprano voice turned into a hoarse male voice. She spoke very loudly. When she spoke near the radiator, her voice sounded like thunder. People cringed in fear at the sound of her loud voice. Her jokes sounded like mockery. Her maxims sounded like court verdicts. Her terrible thinness, her face with pressed cheeks, her thunderous voice, the puffs of smoke she spread with her smoking, her merciless taunts, her shrewd bileful remarks made her look satanic. Those around her recoiled fearfully from her, trying not to pass through her observation point near the heating radiator. She was a Valkyrie warrior, flying on a winged horse and deciding people’s fates. She soared above the people around her and controlled them.
Aunt Leah displeased everyone, as did her mother, my grandmother, and her sister, my mother. She loved to correct people. She was very displeased with me and, wishing to remedy the situation, married me off to her best student. When we did her bidding, she expressed great dissatisfaction with my wife, whom she herself had found for me, and with our marriage. My aunt did not accept our departure for Israel. The move was foreign to her. Suffering from antisemitism, she opposed my emigration to the Jewish state as a way to get rid of antisemitism. Outraged by me, she cut me out of her life.
In her later years, she sent letters full of love to her sister, my mother, in Israel. Love and harmony between the sisters was only possible from a great distance. When they met, they quarreled without end. There was great love in the female part of my family. Everyone loved each other fervently and criticized each other just as fervently, going as far as hysterical intonations in expressing displeasure. How such musical people as my relatives could allow disharmony in their relationships, I did not know.
Once, when I was a young boy, I attended a conversation between my grandmother Rosa and her two daughters. Their communication was accompanied by wild shouting, terrible accusations, and crushing criticism. I did not understand the reason for the disagreement, but I remembered the storm of indignation that engulfed mother and daughters in conversation.
Many years later I asked Grandma Rosa’s brother Boris why love took the form of hate in our family. He said: “My sister is a volcano woman, with bile playing the role of lava. God is already tired of guarding the Jews. That is why your grandmother herself saved her daughters from trouble several times, and after she lost her husband when she was young, she took it upon herself only to keep the family together. Her responsibility was so great that she had to become grumpy and oppressive. She has lived such a terrible life that she is unable to be cheerful and optimistic. She is as gloomy and bitter as hydrocyanic acid. She ‘radiated gloom.’ Pogroms, suffering, and the deaths of loved ones spoil the characters. She raised her daughters, my nieces, in black. They, too, have hobbled with grief. They live with dark glasses and are unable to see light and joy. Maybe that’s a trait of our people in general.”
Uncle Boris gave this speech in Yiddish. Perhaps he wanted to be especially close to the sources of the dark character of his kin and his people. But suddenly he added: – Byron has a cycle of poems called Hebrew Melodies. He was quiet and suddenly spoke in English, quoting from Byron’s Hebrew Melodies.
“Tribes of the wandering foot and weary breast… But we must wander witheringly, in other lands to die…My soul is dark”.
*
Alex Gordon is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the academic college of education, and the author of 10 books.