About my Mother

CHAPTER 2

It will be hard for me to speak about my Mother. There is so much to tell and I don't know whether I will be able to do so. For many years after she died it was hard for me even to mention her, even to say the word 'mother'. It was very hard for me to realize that she was no longer alive. And now, 36 years after she died, I shall try to tell it all from the very beginning…

Mother's maiden name was Levin. Her name was Tsetsiliya, Tsilya Moiseevna (her father's name was Moishe-Zalman and therefore her patronymic was 'Moiseevna' as the Russian version of 'Moishe" is 'Moisey'). Zyaka or Zyama was named after my Mother's father's other name, Zalman or Solomon. I heard this when I was a child and that's why I understood that her father's name was Moishe-Zalman. Mother used to tell that he had a long beard and that he died when she was still a little girl. I don't know anything about my Mother's mother, not even her name or when she died. Either Mother never told me that or I had forgotten it all.

Mother was born in the Ukraine, in the Chernigov Gubernia (district), maybe even in the town of Chernigov itself. She had a sister named Frieda, who lived with us when we were refugees during World War I. She was a strict woman, did not play games with us or tell us jokes. When we returned from Russia to Latvia Frieda did not come back with us. She stayed somewhere in Russia and I don't know what had happened to her. Mother also had a brother called Zelik. We had met him when we were living as refugees in Russia. He came to see us twice. I will tell more about it later. He was a very cheerful man who used to make up all sorts of stories. I think our Zyaka reminds me of Zelik. Frieda was older than Mother and Zelik was younger. According to Mother's passport, she was born in 1885 (that's what I figured out). She died in 1935 at the age of 50. I do remember though that she used to say that she was younger than the age stated in her passport.

According to her, she had left home early and went to work. She studied at night by herself and had eventually passed her high-school ('gymnasium') exams. She went on to do a teachers' course and acquired a teacher's diploma. However, all the relevant documents were left somewhere in Russia and, as I remember, she tried very hard to find them as she wanted very much to work as a teacher. She never succeeded in realizing this dream. When I was 12 she entered a teachers' course organized by the Jewish educational organization TsISHO, but she did not finish it as she had found it difficult to study in Yiddish. When she finally succeeded in obtaining her teacher's papers from Russia, it was already too late for her to start working as a teacher. It happened a short time before she died.

She taught herself German, which she spoke quite well, and also French, which she spoke fluently enough and which she could also read. I remember that she had read Maupassant's "Belle Amie" in French. Sometimes I heard her speak French. She used to read German books in pedagogical studies and psychology, two fields she was very interested in. We even had Freud's books in German at home. However, she spoke Latvian very poorly. One day the milk-woman came to us in the morning (they used to come to deliver milk to homes in the morning) and she asked to be paid. Mother started to assure her that she will pay, but said in Latvian "Es samaksaju!, which means 'I had already paid'. The milk-woman protested that this was not so, but Mother kept saying the same phrase. I laughed so hard that I could not explain to both of them why they did not understand each other. What she wanted to say was "Es samaksashu!", which means "I shall pay". That was a real misunderstanding and all I could do was just to stand there laughing.

Mother did not look Jewish at all, she looked more like a Russian or a Latvian. I was often asked whether she was Jewish and some people even expressed their doubt whether I really knew the truth about it.

Mother spoke Yiddish, but she did not speak it well and used to put in Russian words when she did not know what the Yiddish words were. When she laughed at a joke she used to say "Sara Potekha" ("Sara is funny" in Russian). I remember this expression since I was very little when I did not yet know any Yiddish. This was, in fact, a totally wrong expression. What she should have said was "S'far a vitz!" which means "What a joke" in Yiddish. Also, she used to call me a "marshaas", a mean one, or a "klek", a pest. When our parents wanted to make sure that we, the kids, will not understand them they spoke Yiddish. We did not, of course, understand a thing until the time when we began to study Yiddish, so that we could go to a Yiddish school.

I remember asking her once about how she and Father got married. (That was well after I found out that he had been married before. ) This is what I remember: "When Father's first wife passed away he was left alone with two small children. This was in Libau. I used to come to their house quite often. The children got to like me and they used to wait for my visits. One day they locked the door after I came in and said that they will not let me out. After that Father asked me whether I would agree to be his wife and to be the mother of his children. That's how we got married. "

Since then and until her dying day Mother was the real mother of Tusya and Benno. Neither Tusya nor Benno had ever mentioned the fact that she was not their real mother and I would have never dreamed of saying anything like it. I will come back later to the way I found out about it and to what I felt about it. Now I will just mention what Tusya used to say when she was a grown-up, after, I think, Mother was already dead.

When Tusya went to Belgium she had Mother's picture on the table in her room. One of our family friends, Eva Markovna Opeshkina, went to Belgium and visited Tusya there. She asked her: "Why do you have Tsilya's picture here and not the picture of your own mother?" Tusya replied: "She is my mother, I have had no other. " I remember very well how Tusya treated Mother, how open and sincere she was with her. She used to tell her everything and they used to sit for hours discussing Tusya's love affairs, etc. I remember hearing their laughter and bits of phrases from behind closed doors

This picture was taken in Vitebsk, in March 1915, i. e. when I was 6 months' old. The picture was sent to Maxi, Father's brother. The inscription on the back of the picture says so. It seems that at that time Tusya and Benno still did not call her Mother because the inscription says: "We are sending you our picture with Tsilya". I remember that white fox fur quite well. It 'lived' with us for many years and I used to put it on when it was cold at home. …

I remember Mother's handwriting very well. She had two thick notebooks in black binding which I used to read very often when I was about 13. In one of them she used to write about our one-year-old Sashen'ka (this was a project she had to do for her teacher's course). The other notebook was filled with her notes addressed to a 'penfriend'. I never found out whether Mother meant by that her notebook or a certain person. There was quite a lot I did not understand in those letters or notes. I remember wishing very much to be able to read in them something about real events and real people, but there were just philosophical musings I could not understand.

This is what Mother told me about 'Sasha's" notebook. The Pedagogical Studies and Psychology lecturer at her teacher's course suggested that the students keep notes about children (their own or others) and record their observations and conclusions. It was suggested that the child be a small one or a teenager. Mother said that she decided to write about Sasha and not about Zyama and she kept a daily record of what Sasha had said or done. By the time I had read these notes Mother was not longer attending her teachers' course and Sasha was a year and a half. I found it very interesting to recollect how he was growing up. I still remember one of the records: "Today Sasha's ball rolled under the cupboard. Sasha looked down there, then found a stick and carefully started moving it under the cupboard until he got his ball out. " These might not be the exact words she used, but they are close enough. I also remember some of the first words Sashen'ka used and how used often used to repeat: "Myself, I'll do it myself".

Mother allowed me to read her notebooks and I used to take them out of her cupboard, sit in out comfortable armchair and read them. She had a sweeping kind of a handwriting with large letters and thin lines. …

As far as I remember, Mother did not have friends 'of her own'. There was only one close friend who lived in Libau and sometimes used to come to stay with us for a few days. At home everyone called her 'Nekrich' (or Negrich). This was her maiden name, while her married name was Lichter, Yohanna Lichter. She had three children who sometimes used to come with her. She did not have a husband. When Yohanna use to come to stay with us Mother used to sit with her for hours and these long talks often lasted well into the night. I often heard bits and pieces of what these talks were about: children in general and us, children's education, their characters, etc. Yohanna's children were "brought up well" and Mother often pointed them out to us as an example. They were very friendly and they helped their mother a lot with the housework.

Their future fate could have been written up in some book: every one of the children chose a path of his own. The eldest, Ava, was arrested for Communist activity (banned in Latvia then – Tr. ) but somehow managed to obtain a permit to leave for the Soviet Union. Before his departure he came to stay with us for a few days (or was it longer?). I shall write later about the effect this had on the development of my life. Vera, his sister, became a Socialist and a Zionist and moved to Palestine. Volya, the youngest brother, became a revolutionary and went underground. He later went to Spain to fight and died there in 1936 or 1937. Thus, Nekrich was left all alone even before the war started. She used to come to us, lonely as she was, and held long talks with Mother. I heard later that during the war years she was in Moscow. I never heard anything about her or about Ava. Nekrich, however, remained part of my childhood and my adolescence and part of my Mother's life. Different people used to come to see Mother in order to tell her about their trouble, to seek advice. She knew how to help them and how to encourage them. I don't remember what they spoke about, but I do remember them sitting in the kitchen or on the dining-room sofa, talking to her.

There was a lot of work at home: five children, lodgers "with food and cleaning provided" or just "cleaning". Mother usually did all the washing herself, she also mended our clothing and made us new clothes. Only Tusya used to help her with the housework. So, in fact, Mother did everything herself: she brought it the shopping from the market and the shops, she cooked, washed and cleaned all by herself. There was hardly ever a cleaning woman at home. At the age of 14 I started giving private lessons and then my underground activities started, so there was not much time left for helping at home. However, Mother never asked for my help. She only asked me sometimes to set the table or wipe the dust.

Mother devoted a lot of time and attention to all of us. When we were little she used to read to us, she spent a lot of time explaining things to Zyama and helping him with his arithmetic (he used to be sick a lot) and she knew how to explain things in a simple and unobtrusive way. All the books I read as a child were books recommended by her. I remember very well how she recommended books by E. Ozheshko, Senkiewicz and the novel "First Love" by Turgenev. I remember her telling me about Stefan Zweig's story "The Letter from an Unknown Woman. " It was all done very unobtrusively, almost by chance. There were, of course, a lot of books at home. I recently gave to Zyama as a present the last of our children's books, "Around the World", which survived by chance and which still had the original binding Mother had ordered.

I had kept one of Pushkin's children's poems, still in its old binding. I remember how Mother, Zyama and I had read aloud "The Prince and the Pauper".

Sometimes I think of something and remember a certain scene or event, a detail. Here we are all sitting together: Mother, Zyama and I, and Mother is reading aloud from Gogol's "The Night in May", from his "On the Christmas Eve". That part where Vyi spoke in the church used to scare me cold…

Mother was very glad when she found Ukrainian verses or songs in Gogol's texts. She still remembered the language and she loved to sing these songs for us. …"The sun is low, the evening near and close, come to me, my little heart…" And here, after a few days of straining my memory to remember the words, is another song Mother used to sing to us:

"My neighbor has a white hut, my neighbor has a lovely wife, I, the orphan, have no home and no wife. "

In the evenings Mother used to dart stockings under the large lampshade in the dining-room. She also used to read there, at the table, when she had the time. When she was tired, she put her arms on the table, lowered her head on her arms and fell asleep right away. When we tried to wake her up and told her: "Mum, go to bed", she replied: "Let me just sleep here, I am so comfortable!"

At the time when there was a piano at home (a Bluthner) she sometimes played. She played something she had made up, as she went along playing by the ear. She never studied the piano, but she did play. I remember her playing Beethoven's "Fur Elise". I have loved this piece ever since and yet I have only heard it once at a concert since after the war.

I remember how she dressed up to go out. This did not happen a lot, she hardly had any fancy clothes, just one black dress. Sometimes she went to the hairdresser and then she came back with her hair tied up in a fancy bun at the back of her head. We, the children, liked her very much that way.

Mother used to get interested in all sorts of innovations. I remember that after a new booklet on athletic exercises for women was published, she started doing her morning exercises. Wearing a long nightshirt she stood near an open window "breathing in" and "breathing out" and doing all sorts of movements. I remember especially how she used to do jump-ups at the end of each set of morning exercises: we could hear it all over the flat. Sashen'ka was three or four years old then and he liked to jump up and down together with her. I looked at her rather condescendingly and sometimes even laughed a little at some movement she did not do too well, but she did not mind, she laughed with me. Sometimes, when she could not do some exercise, she looked concerned (and two little lines appeared on her forehead above her nose).

I remember one day she had heard that gymnastics would be very good for Zyama who was a physically weak child. She started taking him to Anna Abramovna, a friend of the family who was a masseuse. Anna Abramovna taught Zyama what is called today "correctional massage": Zyama used to crawl, bent his back like a cat and did all sorts of other useful movements. Mother also took Zyama to a private swimming teacher, a certain Mr. Fischer, who was considered a great specialist in his field. Yoka and Tamara also went to him to learn to swim. (It was obviously hard to pay for lessons for the two of us, so it happened that Zyama became a good swimmer while I learned to swim after I grew up and am still a poor swimmer. I am still afraid of deep water. )

Mother had a good eye for people and all sorts of things: she was good at guessing what the weather would be like, would a social event be fun or it would be a bore, etc. When boys and girls used to come to our place she could see right away the nature of the different guests. She was always very welcoming, but did not go out of her way to "entertain": she had no time and no financial possibilities to do so.

There were many cares and concerns at home. I remember how she sat in the evening filling in her expenses ledger and often sighed. We kept hearing quiet conversations about money – there was never enough of it. Mother knew how to joke when money was tight: soup from chicken giblets was called "the chicken flew away" and the main dish from lungs and hearts was called "anatomy parts". We knew that both Father and Mother always cared about us and took an interest in what was happening to us, but the truth was that all these cares and the whole matter of our upbringing was Mother's sole responsibility. I remember how Father used to say to her: "Tsilya, tell Lyuba to cut her nails" or "Tell Sasha to wash his hands" even though I or Sasha were standing right here near him. Father hardly ever caressed us, while she always did. She used to hug each one of us separately or two or even three of us together and kiss our eyes and our foreheads. …

Mother did not draw well at all: she could maybe draw a little chick or a house and I always laughed at her efforts because I always drew quite well. She could embroider very well and she did so in different styles.

She must have loved us all alike, but her love towards each one of us was a different kind of love. I never felt envious of her feelings towards Sasha, but I often felt strong envy because of her love for Zyama. Tusya and Benno never 'counted' because they were much older than the rest of us. Once I said to Mother quite openly during a certain 'conflict': "Of course, you love Zyama, but you don't love me!" She did not say anything but in the evening she came up to my bed, sat down and started explaining that she loved both me and Zyama equally, but I may sometimes get a different impression. She went on to explain why this could happen. I remember that I felt great relief and did not go around with a heavy heart anymore. (I must have been about 10 or 11 at the time).

Thus, Mother knew how to talk to each one of us: she spoke softly about something to Zyama or she explained, as if by the way, something important to me, and I have already mentioned her relations with Tusya, but I don't seem to remember her speaking to Benno. He was the silent one, the most secretive one and the quiet one. Sashenka, the little one, was always near her.

I don't remember hearing any quarrels between our parents. They obviously managed to protect us from this kind of thing. I do remember hearing bits of conversations about money – I could not catch the exact words, but I understood what it was about. Money was always short and these conversations kept recurring. Either the tones were high or one could simply hear anger in the voices. I always found it very painful to hear this as I felt that I was powerless to help and I commiserated with my parents. I did not know who was right or wrong but I felt the strife and that made me very sad and my heart was heavy. On the other hand, when I heard them laugh together I felt like laughing too even though I did not know what had caused their happy mood.

When I was about 18 or 20 I became especially attached to Mother. Maybe by that time I understood her better or appreciated her more and, like a little girl, I missed her when she was away from home. It was during that period that she passed away.

When we moved into a new apartment in the Mariinskaya Street (now Suvorova St. ) in Riga and started renting rooms, in the autumn of 1934, Mother had an especially busy life taking care both of the family and the lodgers. Early in the morning she went to the market and came back with heavy baskets. I used to listen for the sounds of her cough on the stairs and ran to open the door for her. I could not help her with the housework: by then I was busy with my university studies, with working with a group of children and there were also my activities with the underground. I really don't know I had managed it all. So, Mother cooked and washed and cleaned and carried those heavy baskets too.

…Now comes the hardest part: I have to write about Mother's death. I have never been able to speak about it, but now I have to write it down. Mother was never sick and it seemed that she will always be with us…

In the summer of 1935 we did not move to the 'dacha' (summer house) near the beach. I finished my first year at university and at the end of June I went off to Aunt Basya at her dacha for a week or two. A few days after my arrival I said: "I want to go home", I did not really know why. It was a Wednesday and when I came home I suddenly saw Mother in bed. She said that she was not feeling well and that she had a headache. Nobody could have known then that this was a minor stroke. On Friday she felt very badly and lost consciousness. Father woke me up, we called for an ambulance and took her to the 1st City Hospital. Tusya was not at home by then, she and Pavlik were living in Skrunda. Later Father asked her to come home and she used to go to the hospital every morning to look after Mother, while I took care of the house. Mother never regained consciousness. When I sat near her bed in hospital she used to move her fingers as if trying to express something. She looked at me with what seemed to me a sorrowful face and it seemed to me that she was trying to say something I could not understand… The doctor assured me that these were not conscious actions as after her second stroke she was incapable of them, but I still tried hard to see and to hear something, following the movements of her lips in an effort to understand her last words, to guess what she had wanted to ask me… This was how this terrible last week had passed. During the night from the 5th to the 6th of August we got a telephone call from the hospital telling us about Mother's death. I remember how Zyama and I stood near her bed. She did not breathe anymore. Her wedding ring was on the little table next to her bed. I took it and kept it. (Later on it was left in Riga after I left for Moscow in June 1941 and, of course, it disappeared). I did not cry, I felt as if I had turned into stone. I saw everyone and everything around me, but I felt as if I had lost the capacity to feel anything. Zyama stood near Mother's bed in the hospital ward and cried. I said: "Zyama, stop that!" but he just waved me away… Everyone said that I should be the one to tell Sashen'ka the sad news. He was 12 at that time.

I came home, embraced Sashen'ka and said straight away: "Sashen'ka, Mother has died". He looked up at me strangely, his mouth turned sideways somehow and he repeated with what seemed a mixture of astonishment and sorrow: "Died???" He started crying. I felt a terrible fear.

I did not cry at the funeral either. I just stood there, my lips tight, without uttering a word. I don't know why… After the funeral a regular gravestone was placed on the grave (number 3390). After the war I found the grave and the gravestone. I remember changing the stone frame, but the grave covering remained the same.

After the funeral we all came home, feeling very much like the orphans that we were. A terrible year started for me. During the day I went on with my studies and my work and at night I cried and cried again. I cried for a whole year and had nightmares. I walked around as if in a dream. Another hard year followed and I think I had found some peace only after Iren was born. As if I took over Mother's function by having become a mother myself. Only then I got rid of the feeling that HEAVEN HAD FALLED ON EARTH AND SWALLOWED EVERYTHING. However, the feeling of having been left an orphan had remained for decades. I used to dream about Mother and woke up in tears…

/The inscription on the gravestone reads: "Hai'she Zire bas Reb Zalman Moishe ishe Eidus" (The woman Zire, daughter of Zalman Moishe, wife of Eidus). This is followed by an inscription in Latin characters: C. Eidus. The years are marked by Hebrew characters. /

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