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Life At Home After School
CHAPTER 3
I learned to mend socks and stockings when I was 10. I saw Tusya doing it and tried to do it myself. I have always tried to do my mending accurately, so that only the horizontal stitches were seen. It looked very pretty. When I mended my own stockings I always made the mending stitches in one direction and it looked like artistic stitching. I never made clothes for my dolls. Mother "dressed up" Vera, my doll, by making a dress for her and a black "school apron". I did still play with dolls. I remember that when I was 11 I played with other children in our yard and I brought my smaller dolls with me. There was another girl called Irmgard and several other children. I still loved my larger dolls, Vera and Baby, but I did not play with them anymore by then. Our Birthdays As far as I remember, birthdays were not celebrated, except Tusya's 16th birthday and Sashen'ka's 1st birthday. Therefore, I do not know when Benno's birthday was and neither do I know when my parents' birthdays were. We were not given birthday presents either. One of my birthdays was special though. It was in 1924, when I became 10 years' old. We were already living on No. 2 Dzirnavu St. Someone rang at the door and when I went to open it I saw a woman who was holding in her hand something large and wrapped in white paper. She opened the wrapping and I saw a large rose of a very pale yellow, almost white color, in a flowerpot. It was from Father. I was very happy and very proud: the first time someone had sent me flowers. It was the first and only present I received from Father… Music I have already mentioned that I had played the piano a little, studying with the "Matushka" (the local priest's wife), when we lived in Mayori. Later, in Riga, a very fine Bluthner grand piano was bought and Mother wanted me to continue my music studies. Frau Rabinson, a piano teacher, used to come to our apartment to give me lessons. She was an impatient and a mean woman. If I struck the wrong key she grabbed my finger and hit with it the correct key, repeating angrily: "B' flat! B'flat!" I quietly swallowed my tears and grew to dislike these lessons. I remember playing Chaikovsky's "Neapolitan Melody" and his "French Melody", but I disliked these pieces because of my teacher. I loved music, I loved these melodies but I disliked playing and the lessons went on. They did not continue for long because either we did not have the money or I must have said that I did not want to go. I started learning the piano again twice more. I studied with another teacher, Frau Beitke, (who also taught Kholya Zolotonos, who later became a real piano player and a composer known in Latvia as Nikolay Zolotonos), when I was about 15 or 16. I gladly came to her lessons but they did not last long either. I then starting piano lessons again, when I was 21, studying with Freulein Bakharakh. She started working with me on Bethoven's Menuet and Schubert's "Musical Moment", which I loved ever since I had heard it played by Marusya Novik during a school concert. Zhenny Bakhrakh taught me how to control my voice and she made a wager with me that she shall teach me how to sing correctly. She assured me that I had a good musical ear but that I lacked proper singing skills. Her lessons were of great use to me. When I later conducted "music lessons" for kids in my group or taught them "rhythmics" I used to play melodies by the ear or provide musical accompaniment for the children's exercises. I even composed a couple of melodies for some games I had invented, where the children played and sang at the same time. Learning English After we came back to Riga Tusya and Benno started taking English lessons from a Miss Brezerik. She was an elderly lady who lived alone, not far from us, and we used to come to her house for our lessons. I said "we" because Mother convinced her to allow me to attend the lessons she gave to Tusya and Benno. I was only 10 at that time and Miss Brezerik did not teach such young children. It transpired later that I had remembered everything even better than Tusya and Benno did and Miss Brezerik agreed to teach me separately. I liked those English lessons: she was a good and a patient teacher and was never angry. After her lessons she allowed me to play with her white dog, Lassie, whom she loved very much and whom she always took along when she had to go out. I studied with Miss Brezerik for one or two winters and when in the summer of 1929 we again moved to Karlsbad I for the summer, Miss Brezerik came there with us. Every morning she went for a walk with me and Lassie, while conversing with me in English. During the summer when we did not move to the seaside, I spent some time with Miss Brezerik at her summer house. I had a separate room, we went for walks together and I remember having read Walter Scott's "Ivanhoe" in Russian that summer, even though Miss Brezerik wanted me to read it in English. Many years later I met her again and learned about her loss: Lassie had died. Later on I heard that Miss Brezerik died too… Rhythmic Lessons Many of the children we knew used to attend Anna Antick's rhythmic' studio. There were many other studios that provided lessons in what was called "plastics" but only Anna Antick's studio gave "rhythmic" lessons. After we moved to Riga, Mother took me to that studio. According to my age at the time I should have attended the older children's group, but it consisted mainly of children who had been studying music for years (such as Lena and Marusya Novik, Kholya Zolotonos). The group I joined therefore contained mostly children younger than me: Dusya Kreditor (this is her surname after marriage, I do not remember her maiden name), Bubi Brown (or as he was later known, Herman Brown, the well known musician), Sophy Giller (the younger sister of Monya Giller,) who died during the German occupation, Zhenya Rabinovich (later known as Zhenya Ars; she became a lecturer in English at the University) and several others with whom I am still in contact. The rhythmics lessons were very special and I found them fascinating. They left quite a trace in my life and much of what I had learned there became of great use to me later. I attended Anna Antick's studio for two years, until she left Riga. Much later I used many of the games we had improvised during her lessons; I played them both with the children in my kindergarten and with my own children, even with little Lilin'ka. I would like, therefore, to describe our lessons in more detail. We all wore black tunics with a shoelace-type belt and exercised barefoot. At the beginning of the lesson we marched, ran and did various kinds of jumps, all these according to the music played by Anna Antick on the piano. She gave us directions and she also corrected those of us who made mistakes. Our arms were usually at our hips. We were supposed to change our steps according to the music. Then we were supposed to use our arms to mark the beat, like conductors, and to change their movements accordingly. We were expected not only to listen carefully to the music, but to coordinate the movements of our hands too. Then we sat in a circle near the piano and sang various musical exercises. This was called "a musical dictation". (Later Tusya, my daughter, used to do something similar when she attended musical school, but we did not use written music in our exercises as she did.) Then there were the games: the Little Birds and the Hawk, the Rain and the Sun, the Hares and the Wolf, the Children and the Storm. One had to listen to the music and to behave according to one's "part" in the game. Thus, one could run and jump and move as one wished, but, if there was the sound of a thunder, one had to "take cover", or when one of the children acting the hawk started his "attack", the others were supposed to escape - all according to the change in the rhythm and the music. These were wonderful moments, full of movement, music and inner emotions. I also remember our preparations for a special concert… We were performing to the accompaniment of a Bach fugue. There were rows of us, children, with each row representing a certain melody, one of the leading voices. … It became a complicated musical performance. Those who saw it said later that it was a beautiful sight: the black tunics and the naked arms moving according to a rhythmic melody, the rows of children separating and converging, the children sometimes sitting and sometimes standing, making up a kind of a pyramid on stage. There were also some individual items in that evening's performance with two or three of us performing. I was in one of the trios. The concert was held at the Drama Theatre in Riga and it was a grandiose spectacle. There were special booklets printed that contained the program and I remember that after the war someone showed me one of them. It mentioned the item which I performed and it mentioned my name, Luba Eidus, among the other performers. The Summer of 1925 All the winters spent at Mrs. Lishina,s school seem similar, but each of the summers seem different, most probably because we lived in different places. After I completed my Form 3 we moved to Dubulti for the summer. Our summer house was very close to the beach: only a large clearing where I loved to gather wild flowers separated our yard from the beach. In front of the veranda there was a small garden and on the other side of the house there was a large yard where we, the children, used to play. Children who lived in the houses around us came to play and there was also a girl called Erna, the daughter of the woman caretaker who lived in a small house at the end of the yard. I remember this summer very well because of several events that left a mark in my heart. I already wrote about one of them: it was Tusya's 16th birthday. I also mentioned that a very pretty white dress was made for me for this occasion. The second event was the fact that I had learned to ride the bicycle that was given to Tusya as a present. The third event had to do with Sashen'ka. He had a governess at that time whose name was Freulein Kron, who spoke German. This is what happened one day when Mother went to Riga in the morning. Sashen'ka wet his pants and Freulein Kron decided that he should be punished. She ordered him to stand in a corner as a punishment. He started to cry. I found the word "punishment' and "to punish" as distasteful as the acts they described. I could not "save" Sashen'ka from Freulein Kron, I could not get him out of that corner and therefore I found myself fiercely rebelling against what had happened and, at the same time, feeling both helpless and desperate. I ran away behind the house and started crying. Zyama ran after me and started crying too. This is how all three of us cried together: Sashen'ka in his corner and Zyama and I behind the house. In the evening, when Mother came back from Riga, I told her what had happened. She did not say anything but I saw that she was talking to Freulein Kron without anyone else present. Since that day no-one ever punished Sashen'ka. For years I could not forget him standing there crying, the poor little boy, and I remember how angry and desperate I was. I have hated "standing in corners" and other such punishments ever since. There was also something else that happened that summer: Erna told me that Tusya and Benno were not really my sister and brother. She must have heard something the grown-ups were talking about. I did not believe her and went to Mother… I have already written what a shock it was when I had heard the truth. Somehow it seemed to me that the family "was not a real one". On the whole, though, the summer was filled with tranquil games. The game we played first and foremost was "hide-and-seek". We played it all days long and the days were long indeed. We closed our eyes "for real" and the condition was that one had to run all around the house in the effort to find everyone. There were plenty of good places to hide: behind the thick trunks of trees, behind the pile of firewood, behind the tool-shed, etc. The Summer of 1926 After I completed Form 4 we rented a summer house in Karlsbad I once again. The house was on the same street and belonged to the same landlady, but it was a house next door to the one we had lived in last summer. Again there were lots of children playing in the yard, but it was not an especially interesting summer. There were two boys named Benno (one was Benno Talrose. Did he later become a doctor?) were "making rounds" around me, but I did not care about that one bit. I was much more interested in a game called "johnchas": a railway ticket (made of cardboard) was placed on the ground and one had to hit it with a "favorite" stone. If the ticket turned over, one had the right to take it, if it did not turn over, someone else hit it with his stone. At first, I think we used to hit a whole bunch of tickets together and then, as the game went along, we hit individual ones. We used to ask the grown-ups for used railway tickets and sometimes we even went to the railway station and asked the guards to give us the tickets they took from passengers leaving the train. A second-class ticket was considered twice as valuable as a third-class ticket and tickets for far-distance trains had several "prices", according to their routes. One day Zyama and I "got lucky": a family acquaintance gave us two boxes of far-distance train tickets, many of them second-class ones. We were both overjoyed, but at the same time we had the feeling that these tickets were much less valuable than the ones we used to get from people who just completed their train journey or the ones we found on the ground near the trains…
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These three years, from Form 3 to Form 5, at home,
after school, were also full of all sorts of studies and other things.
I have already mentioned drawing. I also made little dolls from
threads. The dolls were of two kinds, the simple ones and the more
complicated ones. The simple ones
were made of wool threads while the more complicated ones were made
of wool threads and metal wire that was use as the basis for the
dolls' body. I embroidered the dolls' faces and their hair on their
woolen heads and I also made a wide skirt for each doll. I gave
them away as presents and the more complicated ones were attached
to the lampshade at home. They must have been pretty because I remember
having been praised for making them.
