East of Time by Jacob Rosenberg Page A

instance, if you were to state that Mr Samuel Haberman had passed away, no one would know to whom you were referring; but should you remark that lame Shmuel had kicked the bucket, a shudder-sigh of recognition and grief would run like an evening whisper through the minds of our tender-hearted citizens.
    Yankl Zelmanowicz, father of my school friend Laibush, and the man who had taught us to play Five Hundred (not that I needed any coaching), was known as Yankl Bolshevik. I am not sure that he was ever a true Communist; rather, from his political jargon I would conjecture that he was a member of the legendary SR, the Social Revolutionaries, a party that sometimes resorted to terror — though one should not equate that with the random banditry of more recent times. If, for example, the committee decided to take out a man for murdering his comrades, it had to be that particular individual alone; should the potential victim have even a dog beside him, the assassination would not take place.
    Our Yankl had an analytical mind, and he loved to measure everything against his beloved Russian Revolution. ‘You know, children,’ he told us once, watching his son Laibush shuffle a worn-out deck of cards, ‘I often recall those monumental October days. History dealt the Russian people a terrific hand, yet some of our major players — like Zinoviev, Kamenev, even the great Victor Chernov, leader of the SR, a man I loved like a father — all of them pulled back at the crucial moment. It needed the ingenuity of an Ilyich Lenin, who took one look and declared: “Comrades, Red is our winning colour. Let’s play!”’
    Yankl Bolshevik was soaked in fascinating stories — stories of night battles in snowstorms against White armies led by the bloodthirsty Denikin, Kolchak and others. But to me, the most unforgettable of all was the story of Maria Spiridonova’s return from Siberia; when he spoke about her, his eyes were aflame with black fire. Perhaps there was something more between him and the legendary great lady of the Social Revolutionaries!
    â€˜I was amongst a thousand men or more,’ he would begin, ‘who awaited her on the outskirts of Moscow. As the train, itsface draped with two red banners, came into view, we ran towards the driver, asked him to unhook the engine, and joyously harnessed ourselves to her carriage. Beholding that spectacle, Maria, this humble heroine, jumped from the train to haul our load with us; then, at the top of her lungs, she sang out the great opening words of the Internationale :
    Arise ye workers from your slumbers
    Arise ye prisoners of want...
    and, like a mighty peal of thunder, a thousand voices responded as one:
    So comrades, come rally
    And the last fight let us face;
    The Internationale
    Unites the human race.’
    Yankl would spend his Saturday mornings at the barber’s. Here, Jews who could hardly make ends meet argued richly and passionately about Sacco and Vanzetti, Hitler, Spain, Mussolini and the war in Abyssinia, the famine in China, and a hundred other topics. A barbershop in those days was a political marketplace, and Yankl was always in the thick of the debate.
    Although, in the wake of the Moscow trials, Yankl became a disillusioned man, come May Day he would still stand in front of the barber’s — dressed in a black dinner-suit with a red flower in his lapel — and as the procession passed by, he, the old Bolshevik, would shine once more. I saw him taking the ‘salute’ during our last May Day parade. He already knew that Russia’s revolutionary spirit had been imprisoned in Stalin’s gulag, that the children of Ferdinand Lassalle were wearing swastikas, thatEurope was tensed for imminent war. Yet as the Internationale burst forth from the throats of ten thousand marchers, his face lit up again with that incredible romantic light. A light that, soon enough, would be extinguished forever.

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