The Education of a Traitor: A Memoir of Growing Up in Cold War Russia Read Online Free Page B

small leather-currying business. He was a hard-working and strong man who, according to family lore, could bend an iron poker with his bare hands. He was also religious. He went regularly to synagogue and presided over Sabbath dinners with a yarmulke on his head and a tallit over his shoulders.
    Together with my great grandmother he had five surviving children: three sons and two daughters—my grandfather the oldest. When the time came, the sons went to a cheder (a traditional Jewish school), where boys—but not girls—studied the Torah and the Talmud, as well as learned some Hebrew under the supervision of the Rabbi.
    Later, my grandfather went to a government school, which was taught in Ukrainian but offered Russian as well. There he perfected his Ukrainian, improved his Russian, and developed good penmanship. The latter especially came in handy when, during World War I, he was drafted in the Tsar’s Army. He served as a military clerk—a rare job for a Jew—which may have saved his life, although it did not prevent him from being captured by the Germans and spending a year in a German POW camp.
    The good thing was that, in those days, the Germans treated all their prisoners, including Jews, equally. So my grandfather survived the camp and, after the war ended, came home dressed in a European-style suit and hat. That hat impressed many young women in Monasterische, including my grandmother and, more importantly, her parents, and soon my grandparents were married. 
    Of course, the shtetl my grandfather returned to was not the same shtetl he left before the war. It had undergone pogroms and revolutionary changes. The pogroms alone left half the town dead. During one of them, several drunken men burst into my great grandparents’ house demanding money. My great grandfather and two of his children were out of town. My great grandmother, with her youngest daughter on her lap, was at home fixing dinner. She got up and offered the marauders some food. They shot her in the chest, and they threw the toddler out the window. The youngest son rushed to his fallen mother, and they shot him, too. The middle daughter tried to escape, but the bandits caught up with her and raped her. Everywhere around them, hundreds of people were murdered, hanged and tortured, and their possessions stolen while the police did nothing.
    Despite such recent violence, the beginning of my grand-parents’ life together was no different from the lives of any young Jewish couple in the Pale of Settlement. They worked. They went to synagogue. Their only ambition was to start a family. They could have been supporting characters in Shalom Aleichem’s “Fiddler on the Roof”—neighbors or distant relatives of Tevye, the milk-man. They spoke the same language, wore the same clothes, and had the same problems. Besides, my grandfather was a good musician, although he poured his heart out through the guitar and not the fiddle.
    The difference was that Shalom Aleichem sent his characters to America, while my grandparents stayed in Russia. That forever changed their lives, for shortly afterward, the October Revolution of 1917 swept across the country. 
    When my grandfather returned home after the war, he first joined his father and younger brother in the family’s leather tanning business. Soon, however, the new Soviet government introduced taxes so high that no matter how much they worked, they could hardly break even. The family decided to close the business and leave Monasterishche.
    They moved to a Jewish collective farm, Frayheyt (Freedom), near the Black Sea where my grandmother’s parents had settled earlier. There they were given a place to live and a job as dairymen. For a while, life seemed good. They worked hard, but the work paid off. Their children were born, and my grandmother’s parents, who lived nearby on a small farm, helped to care for them.
    This relative tranquility did not last long. The power-hungry Soviet authorities began a