Aaron
From Kovno Aaron Markus traveled to Zurich where he enrolled in chemistry at Zurich's Higher Polytechnical School. Later he attended the university of Koenigsberg and became an engineer. Now married and father of young children, he got a job from the famous and enormously wealthy Russian textile manufacturer, who hired the young engineer to build and manage new factories for the sprawling cotton, linen, silk, and wool empire.
The family settled in the small town of Bogorodsk.
Aaron's new job required frequent trips to Moscow for meetings with the owner of the factories, one of the richest men of the early 20th century, the man who had very little free time as he was routinely putting in nine to twelve hours of work a day. The reward for his hard and monotonous daily work came each time he traveled to Paris. Paris of art auctions, art dealers, art galleries, and art studios.
For Aaron Markus each trip to Moscow was a treat. Aaron's descriptions of the big boss' Moscow mansion to his wife Shaina were precise and lengthy. The main enfilade with its grayish green walls. The Concert Salon where the six meter high ceiling featured a beautiful glass skylight. The halls lit with natural light reminded Aaron of the best picture galleries in European cities that he loved to visit during his student years. But the Moscow mansion certainly was a modern picture gallery with the Cezannes and Van Goghs, the Bonnards and Gouguins, the Matisses and Picassos, the Monets and Sisleys, and the large-scale canvases by the Nabis covering the walls. A blank space on a wall meant that the right painting had not entered the collection yet.
The heavy furniture was sparse but enormous bunches of lilac, bouquets of lily of the valley, arrangement of hyacinth and cyclamen were in abundance around bronzes by Maillol, Degas, and Rodin.
On certain days of a week, and every week of the year that was, the collection was open to public, and Aaron admired his boss' dedication to art and education as he watched a flow of quiet visitors moving slowly between young artists with easels who were absorbed into copying the modern Masters.
Shaina
Having some good help at her disposal, Shaina started a small Jewelry Shop in the brick part of the house that they rented on the main street. The family lived upstairs. The nanny was excellent with the girls. The cook catered to Aaron's taste with perfection, while meticulously adhering to the Laws of Kashruth. A hired maid in the house and a hired helper in the shop completed Shaina's team. Tall and stout, always smartly and fashionably dressed, fluent in Russian, Lithuanian, Polish, German, French, and, of course, Yiddish, Shaina had a gift of creating spaces, and that was in addition for her fine taste and good business sense. Her shop was more like a Salon, an elegant sitting room where guests liked to stop by often and linger for a while. Shaina's shop was filled with comfortable well padded arm chairs cleverly organized in sets of two or three near small display tables, and Shaina moved freely amongst her customers showing them jewelry, discussing the weather, a new Gymnasium for girls, or the traveling theater's performance. The business was very fulfilling, and a new pregnancy came as a total surprise. Ten year old Channa thought her mother was too old to have a baby, but she was wrong, and a healthy baby boy Shimon was born in 1915. He was the first Shaina's child born in a hospital and not at home. He wasn't her only child born in a hospital, as Shaina gave birth to a healthy baby girl one year later. They named her Bluma.
Great Russian Revolution
The Great Russian Revolution broke out on Channa's twelfth birthday. According to the Jewish tradition, a Jewish girl stops being a child when she reaches the age of twelve. So Channa, the oldest, stopped being a child on the day when Russia stopped its attempt as a moderate state. On the 25th of October 1917 Lenin led a successful coup to overthrow the eight month old Provisional government of moderate liberals. That provisional government was formed back in February, after the revolt which did away with the Czarist Empire and ended the House of Romanov.
And so it happened that the day of the second revolt, the 25th of October 1917, became a turning point for everybody, whether they knew it or not.
Aaron's job was redefined by the revolutionary workers. However, they still wanted him around as the factories needed their chief engineer in charge of all machinery. There were no more trips to Moscow since the factories and the vast art collection, along with the palace that housed it, were expropriated by the victorious revolutionaries, and penniless Aaron's boss emigrated to Paris where he died two years later.
Shaina's shop ceased to exist and much of the inventory was expropriated. Fortunately, some of the most valuable pieces of jewelry Shaina kept upstairs, and when the Revolutionary soldiers and sailors came to search her home for treasures that they thought were rightfully theirs, Shaina took her chances as she vehemently, albeit silently, disagreed with the assertion of the conquerors.
Shaina slipped the most valuable jewelry into a potty that stood upon an old but clean blanket in a baby crib. Feverish Shimon sat nonchalantly upon the potty busy pushing and noisily passing gas. It happened so that when the intruders appeared, Baby Bluma started crying on the top of her lungs as she needed a change of diapers. Mama's helper Channa picked her baby sister up, placed her on the table next to the Shimon's crib, and casually unwrapped Bluma totally ignoring the Revolutionaries. One of them was not amused and complained loudly about the stink, and others also seemed to be loosing vigilance. They hang out for a little longer and then left taking with them a large shiny brass samovar and three sets of silver spoons, which included tea spoons, dessert spoons, and soup spoons, twelve of each. They also help themselves with a letter opener and a magnifying glass with a silver handle, and a large silver bowl that stood on a small Victorian table in the entrance hall and was used for little cards that visitors were in a habit of dropping when they visited. Different visitors and different times...
The Revolutionaries stomped out loaded with shiny objects that the Bolshevik Revolution seemed to need more than the family that owned them possibly could. The Revolutionaries warned that they would try to come again, and Shaina had no doubts that they indeed would. But they didn't. And because they didn't and also because Aaron was still employed at the textile factories, Shaina and Aaron chose to stay and make it work in Russia instead of joining Shaina's sister Gitl and her family in emigration.
Not to say that Shaina and Aaron made their decision lightly. In fact, they gave it plenty of thought, secretly, trusting only each other, always making sure no one was around when they ever discussed Asher Adler's formidable conviction. They certainly could see his point. But with the babies? And things might not be so bad, really. True, Shaina had no help anymore. But she didn't have the shop either. That shop certainly consumed much of her time and energy. In addition, they didn't have the whole house for Shaina to take care of. Shaina's family occupied only one room now. It used to be a nursery, now all six of them lived there. The rest of the house was liberally populated by strangers. Each room housed a family of some kind of formerly homeless Revolutionary. Honestly, their life had become utterly strange. Surreal. And hard too.
The house didn't have running water. With no hired help, Channa got plenty of new responsibilities carrying pails filled with water from the well, scrubbing the floor and washing clothes. She also was instrumental in taking the trash out, splitting wood for the stove, keeping the stove burning. That little tin stove was a disaster, producing little warmth and more than generously filling the room with smoke. Menucha was helping of course, but Channa learned early just how much she could expect from her small and fragile younger sister Overwhelming domestic demands on Channa didn't leave time for school. Not that schooling was of any value anymore. What with old teachers disappearing and a simply ridiculous new curriculum filled with revolutionary marching and singing and free of old fashioned and downright bourgeois subjects like mathematics and languages. Having analyzed all these new developments in her life and the life around, Shaina decided to teach her older daughters herself, and that was what she did, in her own creative ways. The girls took turns reading aloud from Tolstoy, Turgenev, Pushkin, Lermontov. That took care of Russian language and literature.
Counting money to figure out how to feed the family comprised lessons in arithmetic. Shaina spoke French to her daughters most of the time and helped them gently when they needed help, thus exposing even the little ones to the language. Although the French lessons didn't last long. They had to stop. The occupants of all rooms other then the former nursery were highly suspicious about the language they didn't understand. Some rumbling about foreign spies had been overheard by always cautious Shaina. This message didn't have to be repeated. French was reduced to a whisper, and how comprehensible that French whisper could possible be in one room filled with six people and various household noises.
Anna
As we already know, Channa, Shaina's oldest daughter turned twelve on the day when Lenin turned Russia around. It does not mean though that Channa's birthday was celebrated on October 25th. Not at all. Because before February 1918 the Russians lived according to the Julian calendar, which is different from the Gregorian calendar that had been adopted by the rest of Europe. Actually, the Gregorian calendar was introduced in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII. England adopted it in 1752, 170 years later. It took Russia 166 extra years to catch up. The difference between Julian (the old Russian) and Gregorian (European) calendars was 13 days. So when the Soviet government did switch to Gregorian calendar the Russians started to celebrate an anniversary of the Great Russian Revolution of 1917 on November the 7th.
Having experienced a few anniversaries with loud music and celebrating crowds, Channa liked to think that she was the reason for all that commotion. She also decided to change her old-fashioned distinctly Jewish name Channa and replace it by more common and easily accepted Anna. Many people altered their name in the same manner. Even in her own family, Menucha became Masha. But little Bluma kept her rather unusual name for the rest of her life.
In 1937 Anna was a married woman taking care of her infant son in a little room that she shared with her husband Misha. The room was one of seven in what used to be a posh one-family apartment. Fancy molding on extremely high ceiling featured two cute angels in one corner of Anna's room. The molding ended abruptly as it ran into walls that cut a formerly large room into small quarters of families unrelated to each other. Having a bit of an impressive molding in a room was rather common in stately buildings in the center of the city of Leningrad.
Shimon
Anna lived on the street named after Jean-Paul Marat, the hero of the French Revolution. Shimon, Anna's brother, a history buff, often mused about Marat, quietly and but not too guardedly. According to Shimon, Marat had unsuccessfully tried many occupations before becoming a Revolutionary. "He started with Astronomy, found it boring and quit," Shimon told Anna. "Marat's attempt on Physics amounted to criticizing Newton demanding a revolution in Science. He didn't get far with it, and feeling unappreciated, decided to try Anatomy, which in his mind amounted to cutting up animals in search of a soul. "Since a soul was nowhere to be found, victimizing Medicine was the next step. Writing was still another one. You, Anna, can see it now, can't you? It was his bitterness of a loser that prepared him for a fine bloody role in the French Revolution. Here he was adept, a whiz, a genius, a virtuoso! Successfully executing a huge number of "the enemies of the Nation," most of whom, by the way, were the driving force of his own Revolution."
Anna shivered when Shimon shared with her his knowledge of history, even though Shimon stopped short of drawing parallels between various Revolutions or between assorted leaders of different nations and times. He just presented historic facts. But what kind of facts! Anna's only hope was that Shimon didn't share such facts with anyone else. Shimon himself was well aware of the fact that history musing in Soviet Russia may very quickly lead to an arrest followed by death. He freely shared his knowledge of Physics with others, not History, but still History was amusing, and poor Anna was his calculated choice of audience for outrageously dangerous historic facts.
As far as Physics was concerned, Shimon had just finished his studies in Polytechnical Institute, and was invited to work in the building across the street. That building across the street from his Alma Mater was occupied by the famous Leningrad Research Institute of Physics. The job offer was exhilarating. He accepted on the spot and immediately immersed himself into research in Nuclear Physics. Since he was new, Shimon simply didn't know many people. In addition, his work absorbed both his time and his energy. Nevertheless he quickly became chillingly aware of the speed with which Stalinist purges were decimating the Institute.
Several months after he started, Shimon was transferred to Kharkov. This time that was not an offer, it was the order to move to the Ukrainian city far away from Leningrad. He moved willingly though. Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology had an outstanding library, favored by many physicists as the best place to work. Shimon could be seen there at all hours of day or night working. He continued his research in spite of perpetual loss of colleagues to the Great Terror, in spite of constant fear of being arrested. Some of his papers appeared in the short-lived Kharkov Journal of Physics that was published in German and thus made the Soviet research accessible to the scientists in the West. By the time the Journal ceased to exist in 1938, any contacts with foreign physicist or any foreigners, for that matter, had been absolutely forbidden.
Of course, with Shimon'e move to Kharkov, his musing on topics of the World History was only verbalized during his short visits to Leningrad where he stayed with his sister Anna.
In 1941 as the Germans rapidly advanced, the Soviets started massive evacuation of heavy industry from the war front to areas further east. The Kharkov Physicists were evacuated to the Ural Mountains. The Ural Mountains stretch from the Arctic tundra in the North to the deserts in the South, and connect, or you may say, divide, Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. Ufa, the city where Shimon's group ended up, occupied an elevated plateau surrounded by rivers on three sides. Forests and steppes around the city could have provided for quite nice outing sites, should Shimon ever f ree up some time. He hadn't. He couldn't. Definitely not when working very long hours was a norm. Nevertheless, it was in Ufa where Shimon met Lily, an evacuee from Leningrad, a young construction engineer with huge eyes, a big smile, and sharp tongue. The two married by the end of the war and came to live in Moscow where Shimon's new assignment took him. When Shimon was sent to the United States to work for the Soviet Government Purchasing Commission in New York, pregnant Lily was to stay behind. It was Shimon whom the Soviets needed there in America, not his wife. Anna invited Lily to stay with her family in Leningrad, in a three room apartment where Anna's family were allowed to occupy only one room. With Lily moving into the second room, and widowed Shaina into the third, Anna's family managed to avoid sharing the apartment with families of total strangers. So this is how it happened that Shimon's daughter Ella was born in Leningrad while her dad was in America.
And what exactly was Shimon doing in America? Lily had no idea. Neither did Anna. But they were of the generation that didn't ask questions. The less you know the better you sleep, they say in Russia. Many years later Ella would ponder this question. The fact that her father was working at the Soviet Government Purchasing Commission, the hotbed of Russian espionage, made her wonder what his actual role could be. He was a technology lover, he had never joined the Communist Party, but he did seem to be a loyal citizen. His English was good albeit heavily accented. So was he a spy, or just a scientist who loved his work?
Ella was nearing her second Birthday when her father came back home but then disappeared again. Ella's early childhood was secured by her mother's care, warmed by constant presence of her Grandmother, strengthen by loving attention from her Aunt Anna, and adorned by rare short guest appearances of her father who was working on on a super secret project, always far away from home.
In a secret ceremony in the fall of 1949, shortly after the successful test of the Russian Atomic Bomb, Shimon Aaronovich Marcus was awarded the Stalin Prize. Shimon and other researchers had been working under tremendously threatening pressure. The reason these scientists were spared the ongoing decimation (so common everywhere else in the country) was the order given by Stalin himself to the head of the Secret Service, "Leave the physicists alone. We can always shoot them later." Luckily for the scientists, the team managed to produce the Russian first atomic bomb that was tested on August 29, 1949.
When the time of awards arrived, the decisions were already in place: he who would have been shot in case of failure of the project, got now the highest honors, an automobile, a dacha, and a bundle of money; he who would have been sent to Gulag for 25 years in case of failure of the project, got very high honors but no dacha or automobile...
Along with the Stalin prize, Shimon Aaronovich Marcus was given many various perks. One was the right to free travel any place within the Soviet Union, at any time, by sea, land, and air---for himself and his family. And they did travel, they often went to resorts on Black Sea and Baltic Sea. and once Shimon, Lily and Ella went on a Black Sea cruise. Ella was one of a very few kids on a posh liner "Rossia" with a swimming pool on the top deck.
Among the awards there also was a document that entitled Ella, Shimon's daughter, to an enrollment in any school of higher learning upon simply passing the entrance exams and regardless of competition. It was not like the exams would be waived for Ella, no, in fact, she would be expected to take all entrance exams and pass them. Having passed them, however, she would be accepted immediately, even if her performance were the poorest of all, thus bypassing the competition. Anyway, Ella she was still a tiny little girl when Shimon got his perks, and the privilege didn't last long and was taken away long before Ella was ready for college.
Best of all, Shimon had been working in Leningrad since that successful test of the Russian Atomic Bomb in 1949, and although he still went on business trips quite often, it was nothing like secret disappearances with infrequent returns of the bomb making years.
At home Shimon spoke English to Ella, made sure that she had English books around her, and she started building up her vocabulary very fast, the way young children do.