1958 (Read On)

In 1958, I could have bought and read "Eastern Exposure" by Marvin Kalb, and "Days of Our Lives" by Rose Pesotta. I didn't however, and I bet most others didn't either.

But I have read them now and enjoyed them both.

Here is a brief reprise.

"Eastern Exposure". In 1956, journalist Marvin Kalb was a Harvard graduate student in Russian Studies (or some such field), doing his dissertation research under the auspices of Harvard's Russian Research Center on the subject of Count Sergei Semeonovich Uvanov, an early 19th century Russian government official. He learned that the U.S. Embassy in Moscow wanted to hire two press attaches. He applied for the position and was accepted. He had never been to the U.S.S.R., but knew the country from afar and spoke the language well enough to get along.

"Eastern Exposure" is his journal of his year in Russia. Whether he had any responsibilities at the embassy is unclear, because the journal is full of wanderings through the city, brief descriptions of people he met, theatrical and musical performances, short excursions out of town, and travel to such places at Leningrad, Baku, Samarkand, Tashkent and Tblisi. He carried a U.S. diplomatic passport.

Russia had long been closed to foreigners (at least Russia outside of Moscow and certain specified tourist locations). You still could not wander at will, but with the help of the diplomatic passport and Intourist guides, you could do much more than you could just a few years earlier. And 1956, to Kalb's benefit, turned out to be a tumultous year in Soviet history. It was the year in which Khrushchev gave his famous XXth Congress secret speech denouncing Stalin, and it was the year of the Hungarian Revolution. It was also, as a consequence of mainly the latter, the year that the USSR tightened up its loosening regulations for foreignors, so that the 1956 experience might not have been replicable in 1957 or 1958.

What effect this book had on Kalb's career as a journalist, I am not sure. It is mainly a blog, no better and no worse, but because of the subject matter, even today makes for fascinating reading, as Kalb sees modern Moscow, European Leningrad, and variations of Asiatic Soviet cities that range from the lively (Tblisi) to the overly depressing (Tashkent). He meets people afraid to talk,and people anxious to talk, He goes to churches, and synagogues, and libraries, and hotels, and museums. He travels on Russian airplanes, and trains. He hears a lot of sad stories, he hears stories of hope. He is very happy to come home.

"Days of Our Lives" was written by a woman who became a high ranking AFL-CIO figure, but who lived in the Ukraine in a shtetl called Derazhnaya until she was 16 when, just before World War I broke out, she and her grandmother took a boat to the U.S. Her town had about 5000 Jews (and a fair number of gentiles), and was, if not idyllic, certainly a more than satisfactory place to grow up. Especially if you are one of 8 children, and part of the economic elite (in our terms, this would probably mean middle class, no better) of the Jewish community, so that you did not have to worry about food or shelter, and your family was always respected by the overall community.

Her story of life in Derazhnaya, day to day, holiday, Shabbat, etc. is set out with clarity and a little humor. To the extent it is typical, it makes for good reading as a primer on shtetl life. This was clearly a period of transition, where the old ways were being transformed by modernity, where there was communication with the outside world, and relatives already sending gifts from America, but where Jewish life still kept in its basic form the aspects of the past several hundred years. I recommend this book, because of its straightforward description of this life. Not over sentimentalized, not over dramatized. Just day to day life.

What stands out? Probably, doing the laundry, something that happened every two weeks. Read on:

"If the weather was good, the pair would take the soiled linen into the back yard and wash it in wooden tubs. In winter they would do this in the kitchen. When the clothes had been painstakingly soaped and soaked and rubbed on a a washboard with white lime, I would accompany the two down to the river, three or four hundred feet away, and we would rinse each peice thoroughly, a slow and arduous process. We knelt at the river's edge and dipped each piece into the water, beating it with a wooden paddle on a flat stone, then dipped it in again and wrung it out with our hands. Aches and large areas of chapped skin were the result.

"The next step was to bring the linen back, give it a sudsy bath, and put it into a zelnitzya, an improvised sterilizer, made of a large hollowed out tree stump, about four feet high, with a wooden lattice fitted into the bottom. On this lattice, the clothes were placed and covered with clean sifted wood ashes.

"Then we would pour in several samovars of boiling water, using our extra large samovar, designed for special occasions. The water would trickle down through the compact mass of bedding, towels, table cloths, napkins, underwear, and other articles, and would flow through the lattice work at the base of the stump. Then we would put a wooden cover on top of the sterilizer, and let the hot steam and wet ashes do their work overnight.

"Returning next morning, mother and daughter would pull the plugs, remove a layer of soft, warm lava-like substance into which the ashes had turned, and take out the clothes, by this time sterlized and bleached. To the river again for another thorough rinsing, and then home once more, to blue and starch the white pieces and hang the whole wash outdoors to dry.

"This part of the process had its vicissitudes. Wind would blow dust from the street, rain would fall....From the hour we began washing until the next day, and sometimes the third day, when all the pieces were finally ironed and put on the shelvesin the linen commode, we were never certain of the outcome of our joint labors."

Another interesting subject in the book was Pesotta's discussion of three different young Jews whom she met while still in the Ukraine - one who worked as a gardner, one as a housekeeper, and one who helped escort small children to school. Each was described as "simple" and not quite all there. Each remained in her town a while, and then disappeared.

After she left the Ukraine, she ran into all three, one in America, one on the boat and one 20+ years later when she was on a trip to Europe. None were "simple" at all. It turned out that each was a political radical, in hiding from the Russian government until they could get out of the country. It was as if there were some sort of "underground railway" in operation that moved them from town to town and gave them a different, and presumably non-attention getting persona. I had not seen discussion of this elsewhere.

Finally, when she came to the United States, she and her grandmother (who had gone through all sorts of life adventures only to be killed by a hit and run driver in Chicago)came on a second class ticket. She said that this way they avoided Ellis Island, which was only for steerage passengers. I did not know that either. Do you think it is true??