Sofa Sessions with Babushka: In the Weimar Years
Friends called her Anna Vassilievna, according to the Russian custom of having the patronym follow the given name. As evening fell, I often lay in my child’s pyjamas, on the living room sofa, close to my grandmother, my Babushka. The sofa stood in our living room in the Leipzig apartment, close to the large window. Some light came from the outside.
Babushka would recite Russian poetry. She made me repeat the names of Pushkin and Lermontov, and sang to me snatches from the opera Eugene Onegin. “Why don’t you dance, Lenski, why don’t you kiss the ladies’ hands?” Onegin asks his close friend whom he will soon kill in a duel. I heard the story many times, as it appears in Pushkin’s verse novel and in Tchaikovsky’s operatic version.
One evening, poetry and arias were brutally interrupted by a shattering sound coming from the street. We rushed to the window. Two cars had smashed into each other. The police soon arrived, and then an ambulance. In the partial darkness, we could distinguish a litter being carried. Some loud German voices reached us. Babushka ordered me back to the sofa, and she recited once again the early lines of Pushkin’s story of Onegin, about his wish that the Devil finally rid him of his uncle, too slow to die and leave him the long-expected inheritance.
That very evening, we were once again interrupted. This time by a marching group of SA stormtroopers vociferously singing the already famous “Horst-Wessel-Lied,” “Die Fahne hoch! . . .” (Raise the flag! The ranks tightly closed!), which soon became the anthem of the Nazi party. Babushka remained impassive. Had she not experienced far worse after the Revolution in Russia—when children were encouraged to denounce their parents, and when she and her husband were held prisoners of the Bolsheviks in their own villa’s servants’ quarters from which they were luckily saved by my father’s efforts?
Even though I had not yet reached my seventh birthday, I was aware of Babushka’s imperious character. She dictated to my mother what clothes to wear for what occasion, whom to invite and whom not to invite. But she also taught me a most important lesson. After she served my grandfather his daily scrambled eggs, I would frequently have lunch with her. My manners were still unpolished, and I would grab the food. Babushka then slapped my wrist and informed me that I must always ask first. Stubbornly naughty, I replied: “Yes, but what if I am alone?” Her own reply came swiftly. “Especially when you are alone.”
I understood, though the exact way of putting it evaded me. What she obviously meant was that under all circumstances it was a human obligation to maintain decorum, dignity, self-respect. One of her favorite French expressions was noblesse oblige. Years later, reading Primo Levi’s account of his Auschwitz experience, I recognized a Holocaust confirmation of the wisdom of Babushka’s repartee. When Levi’s group arrived in the extermination camp, a veteran inmate advised them above all to wash regularly, even in dirty water—not to please the guards or the SS, but to remain human beings, to maintain their humanity, to survive.
Babushka continued to impose herself as a central figure in the family, even though she and Dyedushka had lost every penny in the Revolution, and were entirely supported by my father. Dyedushka sat for hours staring through a magnifying glass at the stock exchange page of the German newspaper. Babushka indulged in more controversial activities. During my parents’ vacation visit to Venice where an old photo shows them, together with other tourists, feeding uninhibited pigeons on the Piazza San Marco, Babushka was entirely in charge of my sister Nora and me, taking advantage of her undisputed authority to have my sister’s hair and mine completely shorn. My parents’ indignation when they returned from Venice was hardly placated by the reason she gave for her capillary aggression. She was convinced that the family’s congenital tendency to radical baldness by mid-age could be treated by early shaving of hair to encourage more vigorous follicles to replace them.
*
This was in the city of Leipzig, in the late 1920s, with the sinister shadow of Hitler becoming increasingly threatening. But why, I asked my mother, was I born in Berlin, a hundred miles to the northeast? Mama provided the answer early in my life, unaware that it would make a lasting impact. Unable to conceive, she was advised to seek help from the immensely famous gynecologist Ernst Bumm, practicing in the German capital. He treated her and, lo and behold, I appeared in this world on a special Sunday morning in 1923. Once I was told of Dr. Bumm’s miraculous intervention, I became intensely aware that I might not have been. This insight, induced by Mama’s candid account, colored my view of existence as a precious, though very fragile, gift. It may explain why I hang onto my Berlin birth certificate—Geburtsurkunde—where my name, Viktor, appears with its German spelling.
But why Leipzig? And a larger question: why were my parents, at the time of my problematic conception, settled in Germany, tolerated as self-exiled stateless Russian aliens? Political upheavals provide the answer. They were on their honeymoon in Denmark when the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917, and they decided, like many other Russian refugees, to flee to Germany, considered a highly civilized and cultured land, where law and order were reputed to reign. That is how Vladimir Nabokov also moved to a country he never learned to enjoy, but where he met his wife Vera, who was related to my father’s family. These refugees were now all stateless, Lenin having revoked their citizenship and deprived them of their passports. The League of Nations eventually provided a document, known as a Nansen passport, which allowed then numerous Russian émigrés to obtain visas for travel and to stand in line to apply for permits of residence in foreign countries.
Statelessness, the condition of these self-exiled apatrides, remained our condition for several decades. In retrospect, it now strikes me as a distinct advantage. Not “belonging” to any national group, to view oneself as a diaspora cosmopolitan, can lead one to invent one’s individual identity. Little Viktor, or Victor, or Vitia (or more tenderly, Vitinka) appeared to me as a malleable character in an ongoing narrative. He had no real mother tongue, but grew up exposed to three languages: the Russian of his parents, the German of the domestic help in the kitchen and nursery room, the French of Babushka who (noblesse oblige) took pride in addressing her grandson in short tutorial sentences almost always beginning with the conjunction donc.
A strictly professional reason determined my father to take up residence in Leipzig rather than in Berlin where some relatives had settled. The family business in the international trade of raw fur skins had an important branch in that city. The offices and storage rooms were located on the Brühl, a street at the city’s heart, home of the fur trade, and in former times a largely Jewish quarter.
A mercantile urban center since antiquity, Leipzig attracted visiting merchants to its trade fair, the reputed Messe. But Leipzig was also, before the Nazi period and the war, the home of an old university. It was the most important book publishing community, a celebrated musical city, the home of Johann Sebastian Bach, Felix Mendelssohn, and of the Gewandhaus, the concert hall, where Mama reported having heard Arthur Nikisch and Wilhelm Furtwängler conduct and admired pianists perform.
The pogroms of the horrendous Kristallnacht in late 1938, with looting and murders, did not spare the Brühl, crowded with Jewish shops, including the large department store, Kaufhaus Brühl, where I had my first experience of an escalator, a Rolltreppe. It was not until much later that I learned that in 1930, three years before Hitler came to power, more than ten thousand Jews lived in Leipzig, a community totally annihilated by the Holocaust. The presence of Jews in Leipzig goes back, it would seem, to the thirteenth century, though they were periodically subject to persecution and expulsion. They were then temporarily readmitted, allowed to assimilate, and at the beginning of the Nazi regime, prohibited from sitting on park benches. Then came far worse.
But in the 1920s, when I was a toddler and then an elementary schoolboy, they constituted a flourishing community, with committed civic leaders. Papa always mentioned with great respect the names of Ariovitch and Eitingon, the latter a generous benefactor and founder of the Jewish hospital as well as of the Jewish retirement home.
The Russian colony that I was aware of, many of whom counted among my parents’ friends, took pride in their higher education and what they considered their liberal views. They liked to make fun of the Germanic character. The Russian word for a German is Nemetz. I learned from Babushka, during one of our sofa sessions, that this word refers to a person deprived of language, unable to speak, mute, or dumb in both senses of this adjective. I overheard my parents deride the Teutonic use of three K’s when referring to the proper occupation of women: Kinder, Küche, Kirche (Children, Kitchen, Church).
Though only in my preteens, I was fully aware that there was a significant difference between my parents and the Germans around us. I would have been hard put to explain the difference. Some of it, as I reflect on it now, may have been due to the pre-Nazi mood of the country, the sorrow that the valiant army had been betrayed, stabbed in the back—notably by the Jews. Violence was already in the air. I may have been four or five years old when, walking with my nanny Lotte (I called her Loppe), we witnessed a street fight, a combat between two columns marching with military determination against each other. One of these, singing the already famous “Horst-Wessel-Lied,” clubs swinging, was heading into the other column, also singing, cudgels raised. Shrieks could be heard. Soon the street seemed clear again. The two columns had vanished but had left bodies lying on the asphalt, some of them moaning aloud. Lotte dragged me away and spoke to my parents when we reached our apartment. I remained shaken and silent, as I recall.
But on the whole, daily life in Leipzig remained relatively calm in the 1920s. The police saw to that. When I dropped the shells of my peanuts on the sidewalk, a policeman, or Schutzmann (Protector), scolded me and made me pick up the shells, every one of them. That was the German way. On the other hand, the police looked the other direction when some obedient party comrades engaged in political boycotts or even looting.
The sofa sessions with Babushka became a habit. So did my family’s habit of making gentle fun of German character traits, although they were genuinely grateful for the hospitality to exiled aliens. They recognized that despite ominous signs, there were, as they put it, many “decent” Germans. It turned out, in fact, that we were saved by one such good Teuton, a train conductor who refused to betray us as we were escaping to Switzerland immediately after Hitler came to power in early 1933. We were locked up in our sleeper compartments, as was my uncle’s family in theirs, when a policeman was heard asking the conductor whether there were any Juden behind the locked doors. His immediate response was also overheard. “Überhaupt nicht” (absolutely not). He knew better, of course. He saved us from arrest and confiscation of money illegally, criminally exported. And this is how we reached Montreux, on our way to a new life in France.
While still in Leipzig, before the Nazi takeover, the evening ritual with my grandmother followed other even more memorable daily routines: visits to the kitchen and to the Herrenzimmer—the reading and smoking room filled with books, featuring Papa’s massive desk and an array of writing utensils. Early mornings were spent in the kitchen with Martha, Lotte, and Marianne, who took turns washing me in the portable bathtub with hot bubbly water. After that abluting ceremony, I would visit my two canaries, who, after I fed them, hopped toward me and pecked tenderly at my finger. Then I would move across the kitchen to go consult the frog in the large jar. Lotte had explained that its elevation on the ladder inside the jar was a sure weather indicator, a sort of animal meteorology. In that same kitchen, I also learned some colorful German locutions. I recall one of them, announcing an unwanted event: Da pfeift ein anderer Wind (the whistle of the wind is hard to translate, but the meaning is something like: then comes the sound of another tune). After all these years, the German sentence with its aggressive onomatopoeia pfeift still rings harshly in my ears.
Later in the day, I sought refuge in the Herrenzimmer, the “gentleman’s room,” where I let myself sink into a deep easy chair, much too big for me, and took flight toward a land of dreams thanks to one of the children’s books my father had provided: Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives, with its train adventure; the famous Max and Moritz, with its sequence of nasty pranks; above all Karl May’s action-packed narratives about an imaginary American Wild West, with its hero Old Shatterhand, the friend of the Apache chief Winnetou. I devoured these novels, and still remember one of the titles, Der Schatz im Silbersee (The Treasure in the Silversea). Quite recently, I learned that Hitler, since childhood, had been a great admirer of Karl May. Small wonder, since Karl May’s works about the Wild West are filled, as I recall, with violence as well as details about scalping and torture.
In that reading and smoking room on Gustav-Adolf Strasse, little Viktor admiringly touched and inspected his Papa’s collection of fountain pens. He now suspects that the sight of these instruments, with the ponderous name of Füllfederhalter, was the original temptation to set words on paper—a temptation that turned into an addiction.
Fragmented memories assail the timeworn memorialist—not all of them strictly reliable. My first sight of a flying plane frightened me as it drew immense letters against the sky. I see myself with my sister in a supine position, subjected to the rays of an artificial sun in the clinic of Herr Doktor Dünzelmann. And then I see myself in the narrow, hot attic room of the expatriate Russian poet recruited by my grandmother to give me lessons in Russian grammar and syntax—lessons I barely listened to, fascinated as I was by the many flies lying on the table, decapitated by the humming ventilator. I was equally fascinated, walking with Martha along the banks of the Pleisse river, by the sight of what I now understand to have been used condoms.
For my bodily needs and functions, I developed a private vocabulary that still emerges on occasion from my largely repressed German infancy. Other precise recollections are more dignified. I see myself walking in silence with my taciturn grandfather, my Dyedushka, in the Rosental, one of the city parks where Jews were soon forbidden to use the benches.
Other vivid memories have confirmed on inspection the unreliability of many stored recollections distorted by hearsay, indirect testimony, or the productive workings of the imagination. Over the years, I have told and retold the story of how I heard the Friseur, the hairdresser, when my sister Nora and I entered the shop, exclaim: “You can see immediately that they are brother and sister.” The only trouble with the memory is that in fact I never heard him say that. I simply found out in time that Marianne, our nanny who accompanied us to the hairdresser, reported his words to my parents, who later still would tell them to me. Eventually, I appropriated my parents’ reporting of a report.
A similar distortion or falsehood affects my conviction that I actually visited one of the most noteworthy landmarks in the immediate surroundings of Leipzig, the Völkerschlachtdenkmal (Monument to the Battle of Nations) celebrating the decisive defeat of Napoleon’s army at the hands of a coalition of Prussian, Austrian, Russian, and Swedish forces. Somehow I convinced myself (and others) that I walked near the monument. But without quite admitting it to myself, I came to realize that it was in all likelihood on a photograph that I inspected the bulky structure, its many steps, the massive statues, and the longish, regal body of water in front of it. In reality, I never saw the monument, nor came close to it. Just as I never heard the hairdresser’s remark about the family resemblance between my sister and me.
*
Nora was soon to become the cause and victim of a family tragedy. At the age of five (I was two years older) she developed a brain tumor, was taken to the medical center at Breslau for expert diagnosis, and succumbed on the operating table during what was termed an exploratory surgery. My tender, loving, vulnerable parents were devastated. To spare me the sight, first of their anxiety, then of their grief and mourning, they sent me to live temporarily with my aunt Helena—the same aunt who, thirty years later, when Mama lay in her open coffin in the New York funeral parlor, said in Russian to console me: “Eto sudba” (That’s fate). During my sister’s illness and after her death, Aunt Helena and I played endless rounds of a silly card game called Krieg und Frieden (War and Peace), with strict instructions not to talk loudly so as not to disturb her grouchy husband’s naps.
While Nora was still alive, shortly before the first signs of her illness, I entered elementary school, the Volksschule. A photo preserved in our family collection shows me on the inaugural day, at the age of six, when I appeared at the school’s ceremony festively dressed, holding a sizable cornucopia, as did many of the other children. My teacher was Herr Prager, who had to be addressed as Herr Oberlehrer Prager. He was obsessed, as many Germans were in the 1920s, by the recently lost war, and did not cease mentioning the efficient French railway system that enabled the enemy to transport fresh troops to the front with enviable speed.
It was in the Oberlehrer’s class that little Viktor was denounced by a teacher of a lower rank named Brenner who, with his finger pointed at the culprit, interrupted the class to report (his finger still pointing at me) that against all the clear rules, I had during the rest period joined the circling group of girls in the courtyard, instead of remaining, as was strictly prescribed, with the rotating circle of boys. Little Viktor was ordered to follow the zealous denouncer and face the punishment of standing in a dark corner, without moving, for an entire hour.
But why don’t I recall any statement at school expressing hostility toward Jews? That was to come.
*
My discovery of mortality and death began before Nora’s fatal surgery, during one of my early morning visits to the kitchen, when I discovered one of my finger-pecking canaries lying motionless on the floor of the cage. I opened the cage, lifted with a shudder the cold, inert, almost weightless little body—and started sobbing. Lotte and Martha tried in vain to console me.
Almost ninety years later, I wrote Musings on Mortality. Friends expressed surprise that I would pick death as a literary subject. I explained that mortality is not death but a condition of life, in fact a reason we must love this life of ours. During our devastating landings in Normandy, I had ample occasion to confirm the link between mortality and allegiance to life. Perhaps never more movingly as when, just beyond Omaha Beach, I came upon what looked like an embracing couple lying beneath a tree—a dead American soldier held tightly by an equally lifeless medic who had been trying to save him. A form of Liebestod, I thought at the time.
That thought brought home a fundamental paradox. Possibly under the influence of his agnostic father, who, early on, warned him to beware of all dogma (a word he did not understand, but considered a “dirty word”), the little boy grew into a self-doubting skeptic. He was himself a paradox: at the same time timid and talkative, silent and given to bragging and even to fabricating self-aggrandizing stories, such as when, in conversation at the age of seven or eight, with an employee of his uncle, he maintained that he really was not his uncle’s nephew, but the unrecognized son of an Egyptian prince.
The uncle and other judgmental members of the family predicted that, sooner or later, the boy’s unbridled imagination would lead him into trouble.
*
Soon after Nora’s death, my parents decided to move. The apartment on Gustav-Adolf Strasse was now filled with insufferable memories. They found an apartment they liked on Ferdinand Rhode Strasse, in the vicinity of the Gewandhaus, with the large statue of Felix Mendelssohn which the Nazis were soon to destroy. Many of the streets in the musical quarter bore the names of famous composers—Haydn, Schumann, Mozart. The new apartment was significantly larger than the previous one. I could speed on my tricycle along the lengthy corridors. It also featured what Mama called the “Wintergarten,” home of two stocky but opulent palm trees. Papa would occasionally sit in that fake exotic décor, with his hands in bowls of warm water, waiting for a manicure. It was in my new bedroom, with its fairy-tale wallpaper, that he gave me, when I was not already asleep, his lessons about “dogma.”
We did not stay long in that new apartment. First, my mother took me out of school for a prolonged stay in Nice, far from gray Leipzig, the scene of Nora’s fatal illness. And then, barely two years later, Hitler’s political takeover hastened our escape to France, where we settled into a new life. France became my country, as Germany had never been, the place where I emerged from infancy and childhood, the place of a multiple education—social, political, cultural, erotic—that determined a lasting desire (or was it a need?) to repress my German past.
But repression was not so easy, for we returned briefly to Germany under Nazi rule between 1935 and 1937 to visit my grandparents on our way to yearly summer vacations in Czechoslovakia, where Mama played tournament bridge in Marienbad, and I took serious tennis lessons from professionals. On these brief stopovers in Leipzig, now seen through French eyes, Victor (now spelling his name the French way) allowed himself defiantly, though in a muffled tone, to walk on the streets humming or whistling the French national anthem, La Marseillaise.
My Dyedushka died at the age of ninety-six, shortly before the infamous Kristallnacht, the Nazi-orchestrated pogrom in late 1938, especially cruel in Leipzig. My father, who had already saved my grandparents from the Bolsheviks who held them hostage in their own house in Samara on the Volga, now saved Babushka, bringing her almost miraculously to live close to us in the Passy section of Paris. And a few years later, when France was occupied by Nazi forces, and we ourselves avoided deportation by escaping to Spain, and from there to the United States, he succeeded once again in rescuing his mother-in-law, this time from being sent to an extermination camp, bringing her by all sorts of devious ways to safety and a new life near Riverside Drive in New York.
*
It took a six-year war, Germany’s defeat, the destruction of many of its cities, to bring me back, by the twists of history, to the city where—also by accident—I was born. In 1945, after the end of hostilities and my frontline work as a Ritchie Boy,[1] I found myself in Berlin working with the Allied Control Council, and then as liaison with the Soviet command in charge of Displaced Persons Camps. I watched Russian soldiers loot German homes, and load horse-drawn carriages with all sorts of household objects to be conveyed over huge distances back to their homeland.
My team and I were billeted in a Berlin housing project named Onkel Toms Hütte, after Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous novel about slavery. We occupied one of the rare houses still standing, untouched by Allied bombs. Inside that commandeered house, I discovered on a shelf a handsome volume of Verlaine’s poems standing in uncanny contiguity to Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
Watching our soldiers, and even some officers, engage in black market negotiations in the streets of Berlin, made me long for another kind of existence. I remembered my first wonder-filled view—or should I call it a vision?—of an American campus, a Latin word I recalled from my lycée days, but had never associated in Paris with a university, where schools and scholarly institutions featured grim façades. The word campus now evoked a cheerful, privileged academic existence, ever since I glimpsed the happy faces and sumptuous trees under the shadow of Princeton’s Nassau Hall. We had come to Princeton on an excursion organized by a friend of my parents shortly after we landed with over a thousand other refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe. Who could have imagined that I would one day be part of that privileged world?
And I remembered with emotion the poetic sofa sessions with Babushka, singing Eugene Onegin’s provocative waltz-time words to his friend Lenski, and making me repeat the revered names of Pushkin and Lermontov.
Thank you, Babushka. Thank you for all the verses you quoted while I lay next to you—in Russian, in French, yes and even in German. “Es lächelt der See, er ladet zum Bade . . .”
[1] The Ritchie Boys were American soldiers during WWII, including Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria during the Nazi period, who were trained at Camp Ritchie, Maryland, by the U.S. Military Intelligence Service and returned to European war zones to do frontline and behind the frontline work to collect intelligence and interrogate prisoners of war.