Child of a Turbulent Century

by Victor Erlich

Overview

Victor Erlich was born in 1914, at the threshold of what the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova called "the real twentieth century," in Petrograd, a place indelibly marked by that century's violent dislocations and upheavals. His story, begun on the eve of the First World War and taking him through Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Germany, and the U. S. Army, is in many ways a memoir of that "real twentieth century," reflecting its lethal nature and shaped by the "fearful symmetry" of the age of totalitarianism. Erlich's grandfather, the legendary Jewish historian Simon Dubnov, was felled in December 1941 by a Nazi bullet; his father, Henryk Erlich, a leader of the Jewish Bund and a prominent figure in Russian and Polish socialism, took his life in Stalin's prison in May 1942. To read about Erlich's life growing up at the intersection of the century's darkest currents is to experience history firsthand from the Russian Revolution to the end of the Second World War-and to know what it truly is to be a child of the century.

Erlich conjures up what it was like to be a Bundist, the intensity of Socialist life at the time, the thinking after the Nazi invasion of Poland-before the pact between Hitler and Stalin became apparent. Figures such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Wendel Wilkie, Marc and Bella Chagall make appearances, as well as the famous logician Tarski, flunking Erlich in math. Throughout, despite the darkness, even the horror, of much of what he describes, the author maintains the beguiling tone and the warm manner of one who has reached the new millennium with rare and hard-won insight into the human comedy of his time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810123502
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	08/22/2006
Series:	Jewish Lives
Edition description:	1
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.75(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

VITOR ERLICH (1914-2007) was a distinguished literary critic and the Bensinger Professor Emeritus of Russian Literature at Yale University. Erlich's grandfather, the legendary Jewish historian Simon Dubnov, was felled in December 1941 by a Nazi bullet; his father, Henryk Erlich, a leader of the Jewish Bund and a prominent figure in Russian and Polish socialism, took his life in Stalin's prison in May 1942. He is the author of several books including Modernism and Revolution: Russian Literature in Transition (Harvard, 1994) and the much praised Russian Formalism: History and Doctrine (Yale, 1981).

Read an Excerpt

CHILD OF A TURBULENT CENTURY

---

By VICTOR ERLICH
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2006
Northwestern University Press
All right reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8101-2351-9

---

Chapter One In a World of My Own

Life with Grandfather

My first memories, which hark back to the fifth year of my life, are inevitably dim and often derivative, that is, largely shaped by what I was told later by adults. Since I was barely three when Russia careened from the nearly bloodless democratic February revolution to the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917, I was too young in those turbulent days to hear "the noise of time" (as Osip Mandelstam's remarkable memoir was titled). Like all of the progressive Russian Jewish intelligentsia, my parents welcomed the collapse of the czarist regime with enthusiasm. Nor were they merely cheering spectators. My mother, Sophie Dubnov, was a contributor to the independent socialist journal Letopis (Chronicle), edited by Maksim Gorky, and an active member of the Jewish Labor Bund, an influential political party that campaigned for socialist revolution and endeavored to unite the aims of Jewish workers with their Russian counterparts'. The Bund was founded in Vienna in 1897. My father, Henryk Erlich, was born and raised in Poland but settled on the eve of the First World War with his wife in St. Petersburg. He was a rising star in the Bund and an influential spokesman for democratic socialism in what was in 1917 a left-wing alternative government, the Petrograd "Soviet" (Council) of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. A principled opponent of Bolshevism, he joined the Menshevik faction in walking out on the historic meeting of the Petrograd Soviet, described by John Reed in Ten Days That Shook the World, in protest against the October coup.

My brother, Alexander, two years older than I, proved more responsive than I could be to revolutionary rhetoric. It seems that several times in the course of the fateful summer of 1917, our nanny, who was supposed to take Alex for walks, would schedule trysts with her Bolshevik sailor friend in front of the balcony of the famous palace from which Lenin would harangue the crowds, proclaiming his vehement opposition to the Russian "imperialist" designs on Constantinople and the Bosporus straits. I understand that after one of these excursions, Alex urgently claimed my parents' attention to declare in no uncertain terms his total disinterest in the "straits." It took my parents a while to decode his deeply held beliefs.

Father's, and the Bund's, critical attitude toward the new regime made his, and his associates', position increasingly precarious. Another matter of concern to my parents in 1918 was the acute food shortage in civil war-battered Petrograd and its impact on the two "growing boys"-Alex and me. This, I was told, was the main reason why, after some soul-searching, my parents decided to accept a rather urgent invitation from my paternal grandfather, Moses Erlich, who owned a flour mill in Father's native Lublin, in central Poland. The immediate objective of the visit was to build up the emaciated "kids." The westward move was apparently seen as temporary, but by the end of the year, it became clear that Poland would be our home for an indefinite period. The political situation in Soviet Russia was rapidly deteriorating. While a few Bundist activists seceded from the Jewish socialist mainstream to join the Yiddish-speaking section of the Russian Communist Party, the bulk of the movement stood firm and was about to share the fate of other opponents of what was in effect a one-party dictatorship. As my maternal grandfather, Simon Dubnov, who at the time was still unhappily trapped in Petrograd, was signaling to my parents, most of Father's associates were either under arrest or forced into emigration.

No less important, in November 1918, after a century and a half of tripartite occupation, Poland regained its independence. With the Jewish labor movement being reconstituted on the territory of the new nation, Father's proven skills and commitments were sorely needed. I was told that in the fall of 1918, Vladimir Medem, one of the most charismatic figures in the movement-he was to become subsequently my special hero-journeyed from Warsaw to Lublin to urge Father to assume a leading role in the Polish Bund. "We are in greater need of living leaders," he is said to have argued, "than of martyrs or prisoners languishing in Russian jails."

For Father, the decision to remain in his fatherland was, to coin a phrase, overdetermined. Mother, who was steeped in Russian culture and whose best years were spent in prewar Petersburg, reluctantly recognized the inescapability of this choice but found permanent separation from Russia wrenching. Though she fully mastered Polish and became an active participant in Poland's cultural life as a literary and drama critic, essayist, and educator, she never ceased pining for her homeland. Toward the end of her long life, she was to put it succinctly in a deeply personal poem:

An émigré? No, simply a daughter Torn away from her mother.

With Father shuttling between his native town and the capital, the project of feeding the underfed was proceeding apace. The standard Jewish mother's injunction "Eat, child, eat" (Es, Kind, es) was being vigorously implemented by three Jewish mothers on the premises-our somber grandmother Sarah; Father's oldest sister, the kindly and placid Gustava; and our youngest aunt, Manya, a warm and vivacious brunette who promptly became Alex's and my favorite. After a couple of months of this regimen, we were no longer the "skin and bones" lamented by Father's family after our arrival in Lublin.

One of the early episodes of our becalmed Lublin existence involved my impressionable brother. I have already mentioned his formative exposure to Lenin's forceful speechifying. At the time, Alex was given to talking in his sleep. Once, in the middle of a dark Lublin night, he got up on his bed, cried in Russian while still asleep, "Long live the proletarian revolution!" and went down. I can only speculate, in retrospect, about the impact he made on our stolidly "bourgeois" relatives.

Though it is naturally the ladies who were in charge of building Alex and me up, the key figure in this patriarchal household was my paternal grandfather. The image of Moses Erlich which I have been harboring for many decades rests in part on early exposure and in part on what I was told later or was able to piece together during our annual visits to Lublin through the 1920s and the early 1930s. (Every April we would repair to Lublin to attend large-scale family seders.) My first impressions are dominated by the sense of a vaguely agitated presence. The habit of Moses Erlich, which I recall distinctly, was getting up every morning at the crack of dawn and, without rousing anyone in so many words, racing through the house several times so as to make it extremely difficult for anyone to remain asleep. I figured out somewhat later that this morning restlessness was closely related to my grandfather's going to bed very early, which in turn had something to do with his diabetes, which by the time I got to know him was a major concern and an important aspect of his identity.

It seems that diabetes, or rather its detection, proved to be a turning point in Grandfather's spiritual life. He had been for years a fervent Hasid; as a typical true believer, he would make regular pilgrimages to the court of the "wonder-rabbi" (rebe). On such occasions, along with the somewhat unsanitary custom of eating "leftovers" (shirayim) from the rebe's dish, one would imbibe significant amounts of kosher vodka known as peysakhovka. At some point during a regular checkup, the family doctor detected in Moses Erlich a strong proclivity for diabetes. Kosher vodka had to be eliminated from his diet forthwith. I am not prepared to claim that the prospect of a good swig was a major motive for Grandfather's ritualistic attendance of Hasidic get-togethers. It appears, though, that shortly after the diagnosis, his religious zeal visibly abated. He dropped his habit both literally and figuratively (a Hasid could be recognized by his distinctive black garb) and became a secular thinker by exchanging a rather zealous brand of Orthodox Judaism for "spiritual Zionism." This secular doctrine, formulated by an influential Russian Jewish thinker, Ahad HaAm (Asher Ginsburg), in contradistinction to the political Zionism of Theodor Herzl, disposed with the concept of the Jewish state to postulate a cultural "radiation"-to use de Gaulle's phrase, rayonnement français-of the exemplary Palestine settlement (yishuv) upon Diaspora Jews.

The way Moses Erlich presided over the many Passover meals our family had occasion to attend in Lublin was a characteristically counterproductive compromise between a residual attachment to the Jewish tradition and a recognition of the impinging secular realities. He would read the entire Haggadah text prior to the meal without skipping a single word, but with ten grandchildren-more keenly interested in matzo balls than in the ritual-breathing down his neck, he would deliver the text at breakneck speed so as to make it virtually unintelligible.

Sometime in 1919, the Lublin prelude to my Polish period drew to a close. The "eat, child, eat" project had by that time run its course. Father had lined up a modest but adequate apartment at the edge of Warsaw's teeming Jewish quarter. What with the party commitments piling up, he must have been eager to bring us all to the capital. Mother, though fully appreciative of the family's solicitude and hospitality, was becoming restless in the overstuffed Jewish provincial setting. I do not remember either our move to Warsaw or my first impression of the city. What stands out in my mind as one of my first authentic memories is a trying moment in the summer of 1920, which Mother, Alex, and I spent in the dramatically scenic mountain resort of Zakopane. I was ill and feverish. My condition was diagnosed as dysentery, an acute gastric disease. Mother was very anxious-the medical resources of Zakopane were vastly inferior to those of Warsaw. Since Father was away, my barely eight-year-old brother had to assume the role of the man of the house. He was dispatched to the other end of the village to fetch a doctor. I recall vividly the gentle face of a young pediatrician looming over me with visible concern. His intervention must have helped. The crisis was over, and we returned to Warsaw ahead of schedule.

Shortly after my bout with dysentery, I contracted scarlet fever. This time the family anxiety level was appreciably lower. Medical treatment was easily available, and the case was relatively mild. In fact, I think back to the leisurely recovery with some pleasure. I was reading Les Misérables in either Polish or Russian (my French at the time wasn't good enough). I fell in love with this panoramic melodrama. Jean Valjean, Cosette, and Javert became major presences in my childish universe. Above all, at this early stage of my involvement with fiction, I had the best cry of my entire life.

I dwell on my medical condition in 1920 since this sequence of events did much to shape my way of life for the following seven years. I must have been enfeebled by the siege, but I'm afraid the image of me as a physically vulnerable child lodged itself too firmly in Mother's mind. A person of luminous intelligence and considerable good sense, in dealing with her younger child she tended to be overanxious and overprotective. Thus, she overgeneralized what was a temporary condition and concluded that I was too frail to go to school. I have a distinct impression that Father was not entirely sold on this notion, but as an overtime public figure and a part-time lawyer, he was so swamped as to leave some domestic decisions to Mother.

My own feelings must have been mixed: I was being deprived of the company of my peers, enjoyed by Alex, who had been out in the world since the age of eight. But being tutored at home had its advantages: I never liked getting up in the morning (in fact, I still don't); also, I had lots of time to myself. My education was blatantly lopsided. My oldest and favorite cousin, who became a close friend of the family-he was in fact the only relative of Father's to become a strong Bundist sympathizer-taught me math and Latin. I was making considerable strides in French and imbibing history and literature, partly by osmosis. (Mother was a woman of letters-a fine essayist and a minor but good poet. Eventually, I grew to appreciate the spare, disciplined lyricism of her verse.) Natural science was a yawning gap. It remained so during my two years at high school because our chemistry teacher was an unmitigated disaster.

For Alex and me, reading became a consuming passion. We both managed to skip most of children's literature, though Alex in his "Russian" period managed to savor, and partly commit to memory, the delightfully whimsical poem "The Crocodile" by the splendid children's writer and all-around man of letters Korney Chukovsky. We had a brief exposure both in Russian and in Polish to deservedly obscure adventure writers such as the prolific hack Karl May, who spent much of his life in German jails fantasizing about cowboys and Indians. But early on we went for classics or near classics-Alexandre Dumas père, Victor Hugo, Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, and, above all, Charles Dickens!

Our birthdays were commemorated jointly. Father's friends and associates, members of the Bundist elite, would attend, bringing more or less appropriate gifts. On one such occasion-I may have been eight, Alex ten-one of our favorites, whose name will recur in these pages, the dashing, charismatic Victor Alter, sauntered in, exuding his usual joie de vivre. "Boys," he announced cheerfully, "I'm bringing the best thing there is." Even though his hands were unmistakably empty, in total denial of reality, we cried in unison, "David Copperfield!" "No," said Alter. "Hope." (I'm afraid this hope never materialized.)

A few minutes later, another Bund leader, a popular if occasionally maudlin orator, Beynish Mikhalevich, a man of remarkable sweetness, entered carrying a good-size package. It clearly did not look like David Copperfield. We opened it somewhat apprehensively; it contained a soccer ball. My brother could not suppress his disappointment. "What a fool you are," he said to the gray-haired revolutionary. "You couldn't bring a book?" Father, who was generally slow to anger, was properly outraged by Alex's wanton rudeness.

Predictably, in our involvement with literature, Russian classics had the pride of place. When I turned seven, Mother gave me a precious volume-the Selected Works by her favorite Russian fiction writer, Nikolai Gogol. I was spellbound. Naturally, I was responding more readily to Gogol's early romantic goblin tales, too airily dismissed by Vladimir Nabokov in his brilliant but willfully lopsided Nikolai Gogol, than to such later masterpieces as "The Overcoat," where the fantastic obtrudes upon the quotidian. In any case, I was so taken with the volume that I found reading and rereading it too passive a response. At some point, I began to copy the book page by page. By the time I reached page 100, my older cousin dropped by; he was about five years my senior, a bright and witty teenager, who was considerably more reality-oriented than I. Having witnessed for a while my medieval monk-type labors in silence, he inquired, "What are you doing?"

"I'm copying this book," I answered.

"Why are you doing this?" he wondered.

"I really like it," I confessed.

"But you've got it," he insisted, pointing to the hefty volume.

Unable to produce a single plausible reason for my activity, I muttered, "Suppose the house burns down."

"So would the copy," retorted my cousin sensibly.

The fact of the matter is that my exertions lacked any pragmatic justification. They answered a need to do something about, or with, a book that meant a great deal to me, to get inside the text. It occurs to me it is this sort of need that at a considerably later stage of my development guided me toward literary criticism.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from CHILD OF A TURBULENT CENTURY by VICTOR ERLICH
Copyright © 2006 by Northwestern University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Author's Note
In a World of My Own: Life with Grandfather
Between Socialist Politics and Neo-Romantic Literature
On the Road
On the Other Shore: A Tale of Two Leaders
"You're in the Army Now"
Back to School: Russian Formalism with Roman Jakobson
Academic Pioneering in the Pacific Northwest
A Year on the East Coast: Beyond Formalism, Isaiah Berlin
Outreach in Seattle and a Continental Interlude
From Seattle to Yale, with Visits to Israel and Russia
Russia Revisited
Heartwarming Closures: "All Is Powered by Love"
Notes

Editorial Reviews

"Victor Erlich has added magnificently to our sense of what once was, and will never be again." —Forward



"Set forth in lively prose, [it] greatly enhances our understanding and adds significantly to the annals of recent history." —Buffalo Jewish Review

From the Publisher