Jacob's Ladder

2 The Watchmaker’s Shop on Mariinsko-Blagoveshchenskaya Street

(1905–1907)

Maria, later known as Marusya, was born in Kiev. Her father, Pinchas Kerns, had moved there in 1873, seventeen years before her birth, from a small town in western Switzerland called La Chaux-de-Fonds. Her father was a third-generation watchmaker, and he intended to open his own branch of a Swiss watch works that by that time had already begun its victory march around the world. Pinchas was on good terms with Louis Brandt, his employer and the owner of the watch works that would later become known as the Omega Company. Pinchas was a first-rate watchmaker, and, given his assiduity and conscientiousness, he could have begun importing Swiss watch parts to Kiev and reaped a rich harvest and hard cash in his new home. Louis Brandt even contributed to financing the initiative.

His noble mission as one of the promoters of Western capitalism gradually fell apart, although he put down roots in the new place, marrying a local Jewish girl and fathering three sons and his daughter, Marusya. In time, he learned both of the official Slavic languages (Russian and Ukrainian). He was used to such linguistic pairings, since in his native La Chaux-de-Fonds German was also spoken, along with French and nearly on equal footing with it. To this bilingual mix were added the two reigning tongues of his Jewish community—Yiddish, which was spoken at home, and Hebrew, which every educated Jew knew how to read.

The Swiss money he invested in the move and in basic amenities did not slip entirely through his fingers, however. Quickly realizing that commerce did not come to him as easily as craftsmanship, Kerns started a watchmaking-and-repair shop that dealt primarily in homegrown, nonpedigreed specimens on Mariinsko-Blagoveshchenskaya Street. He placed a high value on his craft, and viewed commerce almost with contempt, considering it to be a variety of swindling. Although Marx’s Das Kapital had already been written by this time, and the soon-to-be world-renowned genius mentioned Pinchas’s birthplace, La Chaux-de-Fonds, in a flattering light, considering it to be an exemplar of capitalist specialized production, the watchmaker never read this bible of communism. He remained a craftsman all his life, and never quite grasped the finer, or even cruder, points of communism, much less capitalism. His children, however, assimilated from an early age the progressive ideas of humanity, and, though adoring their kind, cheerful father, with his multifaceted goodness, they continually teased him about his archaic habits, his French accent, and his old-fashioned Swiss frock coats, which he had been wearing upward of forty years.

All the Kerns children could chatter away in French, and this circumstance made them rare birds in the neighborhood—their local tribespeople spoke a different idiom. The watchmaker’s descendants, although they spoke their mother tongue perfectly, loved to bandy words about in aristocratic French, which was never otherwise heard on their street. They were all educated at home. The tutor of Mark and Joseph, the older boys, was engaged when the family was still relatively prosperous. After their financial ruin, the older boys taught the youngest brother, Mikhail. And he, in turn, taught Marusya, when he grew a bit older. In the early years, when they still lived comfortably, they even received music lessons from a teacher, Mr. Kosarkovsky, who eventually became a family friend. Marusya had always shown a keen interest in learning. The Kerns children were close-knit and fond of one another, but Marusya, as the youngest, was an object of adoration. Her confidence in the love of those around her, in particular men, betrayed her from time to time in her adult life; but in her youth, it only added to her charm.

The preparatory school, because of the quota system for Jews in place at the time, was off-limits for the Kerns children. Joseph, the eldest, had joined the proletariat early on. The second brother, Mark, didn’t make the cut for the quota. Mikhail didn’t even try. Both Mark and Mikhail completed the preparatory-school academic program at night school.

Pinchas’s business plans with the company owner, Louis Brandt, had long before ground to a halt, but their good relations continued in epistolary form, now with the heir of the firm, Louis, Jr. Pinchas had paid off his debt on time, and now and then he would order watch parts from Omega. Slowly but surely, the family lost all their wealth. Nevertheless, in spite of their poverty, their home remained a hospitable one, with constant tea parties and musical evenings that attracted assorted youth of every stripe and color. They were freethinkers. Their gatherings in the warmer months of the year, when they would set up a samovar in the little yard behind their building, were especially popular. Poverty did not cancel out amusement.

In October 1905, a pogrom against Kiev’s Jews raged through the city, hastening the ruin of the family. The watchmaker’s shop was completely destroyed, and the family’s property plundered. What the marauders didn’t take away, they smashed. They even managed to render the samovar unfit for use.

Kiev’s Jewish tradespeople and craftsmen had been ruined, but the consequences of this pogrom were not only material. The Jews who lived through it felt that there was just a thin barrier between them and their utter demise. Talmudic teachers and scholars, living repositories of divine texts and thousands of years of history, sank into sorrow and desperation. Zionism came into vogue, promoting the return of the dispersed Jewish exiles to the Holy Land to establish the historic Israel. But the ideas of socialism had no less appeal for Jewish young people. The 1905 Revolution failed, but the idea of a new, purifying, and liberating revolution took hold of them and troubled their hearts. Politics was all the rage. Only Pinchas Kerns, who had always loved reading newspapers in all the languages available to him, had lost the taste for dispute and argument carried on by journalists and politicians. He abandoned his habit of reading newspapers, and instead took to repairing an old music box left crippled by the pogrom thugs. He only sighed, listening silently to the endless conversations of his sons and their friends about the rebuilding of this unjustly ordered society, about the coming changes, and the struggle, from which old Pinchas didn’t expect anything but trouble and new pogroms.

Fifteen-year-old Marusya, whom their good neighbors, the Yakovenkos, had sheltered from October 18 to 20, during the pogrom, hiding her in their bedroom and, during the most dangerous moments, in their cellar, emerged from this experience as an ardent Christian radical. Her character had matured completely during those dark, shameful days of Kiev’s history. The formerly hospitable, affable world now divided itself into two halves, without shades or nuances. On the one side were the fighters for human dignity and freedom; on the other, their enemies, exploiters and the Black Hundreds.^*

The Yakovenkos, who had sheltered Marusya, who fed her and protected her throughout those horrific days, belonged to neither one side nor the other. To simplify matters, she counted them as relatives, for whom you feel an affinity dictated by nature.

While Pelageya Onisimovna Yakovenko was removing the small icon of the Holy Mother and Child from where she had placed it between the two window frames, Marusya looked at the piece of painted wood and felt a confused sense of gratitude to both of them—to the statuesque Ukrainian neighbor, with her tiny eyes and fake crown-braid, and to Miriam (Maria) the Jewess (who bore the same name as Marusya), holding her little Christ Child. Together they had defended her from the screaming crowd of wild beasts who called themselves Christians. In this place, her thinking underwent some sort of turbulence. Her inner certitude faltered, and the world no longer divided itself into two parts, with bad people and good people, but in some other, more complex way. Pelageya Onisimovna and Uncle Taras were monarchists. They owned two apartment buildings and a tavern, and so they were exploiters. But they were good people, even heroic. Rumors were making the rounds that, during those awful days, a Russian family that had sheltered an elderly Jewish woman had been killed. The Yakovenkos had certainly risked a great deal by taking Marusya into their home. None of this accorded with the terms of her understanding, and one thought unsettled another. There was neither clarity nor order in her mind—only agitation, disturbance, and the feeling that drastic changes would be necessary before life could continue. And, with or without Marusya’s help, things were already changing. Her elder brother Joseph, a member of the Jewish Self-Defense Organization, was banished for three years to the Irkutsk region in Siberia, like all those who had taken up weapons during the days of the pogrom. Mark had left the family even earlier. After graduating from the Faculty of Law at St. Petersburg University, he stayed on in the capital to take up an insignificant position with a law firm. To his father’s bitter disappointment, Mark received his “higher” education at a shamefully low cost: he had become a Lutheran. The family refused to talk about it, as though it were some kind of shameful disease.

Old Pinchas, who had read newspapers his whole life, never became a religious fanatic. He did attend the synagogue now and then, however, and never broke off relations with his religious brethren. He did not approve of his elder son’s choices; he simply remained silent, and mourned. Mark put a great deal of effort into trying to help his younger brother join him in Petersburg to study. Soon Mikhail left Kiev, to enroll in St. Petersburg University as an auditor.

Although none of them had perished during the pogrom, the family’s circumstances were still dire. But life began improving of its own accord. The Jewish Relief Committee, which had been set up to aid victims of the pogrom, sent them money and clothes, somewhat the worse for wear, but still in perfectly good condition—though, unfortunately, several sizes too big. Mother sat down at the sewing machine with one of the garments, then ripped out the seams, cut off the excess fabric, and took it in. The result was the most beautiful dress Marusya had ever worn—chestnut-colored flannel wool, trimmed with silk lace. They bought her some little button-down boots with small heels—the first time she had ever worn boots that weren’t made specially for children. Marusya had become a young lady.

When her brothers scattered and went their separate ways, Marusya, spoiled by the attentions of the numerous boys and young men, and used to stormy discussions and to domestic amusements, joking, and games, discovered that she had been feeding on other people’s lives. She herself had meant nothing to them, and now no one visited their house except rather boring distant relations, Mikhail’s friend Ivan Belousov, his former classmate, and Bogdan Kosarkovsky, the erstwhile music teacher, who was now a clarinetist at the opera theater.

Ennui, ennui … Music was no longer heard in their house. The old piano had been smashed to smithereens by the pogrom thugs, and there could be no thought of buying another. In place of lively shared meals, there were infrequent letters from her older brothers, and many postcards from Mikhail, describing the colorful, exciting life of the capital. Marusya only felt more despondent after reading them.

Her father replaced the shattered windows in the shop and in the apartment, whitewashed the walls, and repaired his box of watch parts, full of wonderful little rods and springs. Then he attached it to the wall next to his desk. Her father spent most of his time here in the shop, though there weren’t any customers to speak of. Instead, he busied himself with repairing the music box. Pinchas lovingly restored the crumpled cylinder that played the roll of sheet music. The task was finicky and arduous: he had to replace the missing pins on the cylinder and align it with the tuned teeth of the comb, which had sustained damage.

Marusya, who had always preferred the silent company of her father to that of her constantly fretting mother, made herself a little nest in a corner of her father’s workroom and, drawing herself up into a ball in an armchair, read, one after another, the books her brother Mikhail had miraculously acquired. This gift, an entire library of two hundred tomes, had been sent to their home by the writer Korolenko when he learned that all the books that belonged to the Jewish student had been destroyed during the pogrom.

Who could have imagined that these very books would accompany Mikhail to the end of his life, and form the basis of the collection that to this day has been preserved by his granddaughter Lyuba, Nora Ossetsky’s third cousin, in the apartment on Tverskaya Street in Moscow?

Marusya, grown thin, with large blue moons under her eyes, had buried her nose in an issue of The New Journal for Everyone from the year 1903 with a blue stamp on the cover: “From the library of Vladimir Galaktionovich Korolenko.” For the third time in a row she was reading Chekhov’s story “The Betrothed.” How could he understand so much, not only about the main character, who had escaped the wretched dullness of provincial life into a new, elevated form of existence, but about her, Marusya, who also wanted to break out of this boredom and ennui, into a life of freedom, meaningfulness, and inchoate beauty?

Her mother called her to dinner. Marusya refused to budge. Her father, wiping the metal dust off his hands with a clean rag, called her, too, but she shook her head. Just looking at the chicken soup brought on nausea. The smell alone, which wafted in from the back room, made her feel sick.

“Fine, just stay here, then. If someone stops in, call me.” Her father sat in the shop nearly without a break, afraid to miss a customer.

As soon as her father left, the bell over the door tinkled. Marusya put her journal down on the pile of books that had amassed around the armchair over the past week and opened the door. A woman in a heavy wool coat trimmed with velvet stripes entered. She wore an elegant hat that looked like a cylinder with wings, something that wasn’t worn in Kiev, or in any other city as far as Marusya knew. Marusya let the woman in and invited her to sit down and wait for a moment so she could call her father.

While Marusya was gone and her father was washing his hands, the lady examined the pile of books lying on the floor next to the chair. She wasn’t interested in The New Journal for Everyone; but the cover of another book caught her eye. Was it possible that this frail young girl was reading, in French, the recently published book by the fashionable author Romain Rolland, La Vie de Beethoven?

The woman directed this question to the aging watchmaker, who appeared a few minutes later.

“That is my daughter, a book lover.”

The clock the woman had brought in for repair was of course that round gold Omega, one of the first models, so familiar to the watchmaker. They struck up a conversation. Madame Leroux turned out to be Swiss herself. Her parents were from the Upper Jura. Like Pinchas, she had left her native parts long ago; but just the mention of the names of rivers and valleys gave them both pleasure. During their lively conversation, the watchmaker opened the back panel of the clock and, placing a round piece of glass in a frame made of bone on his eye, like a monocle, extracted a trifling screw with his tweezers. Then he rummaged through his desk drawer and found one just like it. The watch face was missing a single tiny stone. Pinchas asked what color the stone had been.

“It was red,” the woman said. “They’re all red.”

Pinchas nodded. He’d have to order the stone from Switzerland; he didn’t have a supply of ruby splinters on hand.

The book lover who had shunned chicken soup glided into the workroom like a silent shadow. The visitor, losing all interest in her clock, turned to the young lady.

“Do you read French? Do you like the book?” she asked in French.

“Yes, very much.”

“Do you like Beethoven?”

Marusya nodded.

From this moment began that new life Marusya had been longing for. After conversing with her for ten minutes, Madame Leroux, secretary of the local Froebel Society, director of a public kindergarten under the society’s guidance, invited her to visit their exclusive organization. In January, a week after her birthday, Maria (Marusya) Kerns started her first job—as an assistant teacher in a recently opened school for children of poor parents and domestic workers. In the autumn of the same year, she entered the newly opened Froebel Courses at Kiev University. She became a Froebel Miss, a “children’s gardener,” as they were called.