Another Life (25 cents)

I have just finished reading about another life. This one belongs (perhaps now it belonged, I am not sure) to Leo Saal, who wrote about himself in a very interesting book which no one has read called "Crossings". Published by a small Washington press in 1996, it tells the story of a young man, born in St. Petersburg in 1912, but whose mother was German and who was identified as German on his Russian internal passport, who was raised in middle class circumstances. His father was an officer in the Czar's army, but who preferred his side business of buying and restoring residential real estate in what became Leningrad.

After the revolution, which the family (and according to the book many middle class families) did not necessarily oppose, his father worked for the German Red Cross, which operated for several more years in the USSR. And during the 1920s, the time of Lenin's NEP (New Economic Policy), according to Saal, everything seemed pretty normal. The shops were open, the economy was strong, they even traveled to see his grandmother and other relatives in Germany. But in 1930, first his father and then Saal himself was arrested ("It was a high class crowd in this prison: intelligentsia, medium rank officials, and a few party members. Mostly 'fifty-eighters-, article 58 of the old criminal code with its fourteen paragraphs covered all political crimes"). And by the time the 1930s ended, Saal had been sent into the Gulag (for reasons unclear) working in various prison towns in Siberia, his father had died in prison, and his mother was exiled to a distant town ("In December 1934 Kirov was assassinated. He was Leningrad's popular Party Secretary and a potential rival to Stalin. As a reprisal, thousands of Leningrad residents were ordered to leave the city for faraway places in early 1935, among them were my mother and sister"). After his release from prison, when he was unable to live in Moscow or Leningrad (or several other cities), he led a hand-to-hand existence, marrying a Moscow medical student (with whom he spent surprisingly little time) and trying to keep in touch with his friends.

In 1939, after Germany's quick takeover of Poland, he was inducted into the army, his wife moved to Tblisi to escape potential fighting and, as he says, he did not see her again for 48 years. During the war, when it appeared that Germany was going to win, he switched sides (his first Crossing) and became a German (under German law he was automatically a German citizen) acting as an interpreter for the German army. When Germany lost the war, he remained a short time in West Germany (his mother was living there then as well), he married again (it was unclear that he was ever officially divorced), and eventually with his wife and children (probably sometime during the 1950s) came to the United States, where he finally wound up living in Chevy Chase. He was an artist; whether he did other work here, I do not know.

The book is interesting in so many ways. First, the issues of Jews and anti-Semitism play a small role in his memoirs. He knew that the Jews were discriminated against in Germany but, if you believe him, he knew nothing of the atrocities there or in Poland or the Ukraine when he was part of the German army. Second, he makes the NEP days in Russia look like capitalism without compromise ("In a short span of time, stores opened everywhere. On the Nevskiy Prospekt and Sadovaya Street the mile long arcades of Gostinyy and Apraksin Dvors again featured dozens of stores. Yeliseyev, the famous giant delicatessen store, offered an enless variety of foods; pyramids of Crimean fruit embellished many store windows. Lohr's bakeries and cafes sprangup everywhere."). Leningrad in 1930 was all culture ("Whenever there is a symphony concert and I am not at work, I got a ticket for Aleka and me. Bruno Walter, Klemperer, Zemlinsky, Knappertsbusch, Ansermet, Stiedry, Hindemith, Kuhlenkampf and others cam ein those years to conduct the Leningrad Symphony.") Third, his description of the Gulag and the various camps and work stations throughout Siberia ("Welcome to Bamlag!....the Baikal-Amur Correctional Labor Camp, situated between Lake Baikal and the Amur River, was organized in 1932 for the construction of a new railroad line to substitute for the Manchurian Railroad, now in the hands of the Japanese."), the type of work that was done, how much freedom one had, how sentences were arbitrarily extended or curtailed, etc. form a picture very different from what one might expect (I was not aware then of how lucky I was to have been arrested in 1933 and discharged in 1936. Had I been arrested after Kirov's murder, I would have served my full term until 1940 and most certainly would have received, without further trial, an extended term"). It reminded me a bit of the memoirs of Anna Lavrova, which I read earlier as it told the tale of her following her husband into the Gulag. And then of course, the ease with which he became Russian, German, American.

More than anything else, though, it tells the story of a life, very different from yours or mine, where somethings just seem very familiar. For example, his grandfather's nursery business in pre-war St. Petersburg ("He raised 50,000 roses. From Germany, Belgium, Holland and Japan he imported flowers in great numbers, including 70,000 hyacinths, 35,000 tulips, and 5,000 white lillies annually. At his peak, he employed a staff of 200"--how different from Russia under Communist rule). He visited friends of his wife ("Irina had arranged for us to stay with friends of her family, the Vereyskiys. ....He was a well known graphic artist and curator of prints at the Hermitage. His son Orest, also an artist, was a friend of Irina's. Orest's parents, although separated, maintained a common household which included their son and Mrs. Vereyskiy's new companion, a historian. Orest's mother was a well know writer of children's books.") It doesn't seem so different, does it? And I guess in some ways, it was not