Vera by Stacy Schiff Page A

already embarked on his literary career in Petersburg when Véra Slonim was a child, but whose background was in many respects similar. Véra Evseevna remained as areligious all her life as her family appeared to be in Russia, but knew well that her existence was predicated on a hard-won—and flimsy—right. She offered only one view of her distant ancestors, asserting that her father “traced his descent in direct line from a celebrated though abstruse commentator of the Talmud who flourished in Spain in the XVII century, and who traced
his
descent in direct line from the Ancient Judean Kings.” None of this can be documented, though Véra Nabokov’s was neither an unlikely nor an unusual claim. The most telling thing about it may be her simple assertion of the fact. It is what she believed, or what she wanted believed, or—at best—both. It is also not something she might have asserted in quite the same way in Petersburg. It was possible to feel affluent, even, to an extent, acculturated, but never entirely at ease. Mandelstam wrote ofthe Jewish tutor who first introduced him to the concept of Jewish pride and whom he failed to believe, as he could see the tutor put that pride away as soon as he set foot again in the street.
    This vulnerability turned, on steely principle, to a point of honor, which Véra Evseevna handled decades later with show-stopping directness. In mid-conversation—in the south of France, in Switzerland, in New York—she would ask her interlocuter, often someone she had known for years, if he was aware that she was Jewish. She tossed this query out as if throwing down aglove. It was as if she needed the air-clearing before the conversation could proceed; honesty very nearly constituted a religious principle for her. * She believed in full candor, which was not the same as full disclosure. At one tender point she warned her sister Lena that her religious identity had better be made perfectly clear, “since for me no relationship would be possible unless based on complete truth and sincerity.” The pro-Semitism of her future husband and his father is well documented (it could be termed philo-Semitism in the case of Vladimir Nabokov, whose previous conquests included a disproportionate number of Jewish girlfriends), but the matter was clearly much more personal for Véra. Great numbers of inaccurate things were written about her over the years but the single one she found it incumbent upon herself to correct was a line in the
New York Post
that made her a Russian aristocrat. “In your article you describe me as an émigré of the
Russian
aristocratic class. I am very proud of my ancestry which actually is Jewish,” she alerted the paper in 1958. Asked if she was Russian her reply was simple, “Yes, Russian and Jewish.”
    There were lessons in deportment as well to be drawn from the years in a booby-trapped world. Evsei Slonim appears not to have dignified the obstacles by acknowledging their existence, a quality he shared with his daughter. Calmly, quietly, he went his own way. His name shows up nowhere among the lists of those who were lobbying for reform, for Jewish emancipation. It was Nabokov’s father who—in a speech condemning the 1903 pogroms—made the point that the Jews of Russia amounted to a caste of pariahs. In a notebook she could not have expected anyone ever to read, fifty-six-year-old Véra Nabokov remonstrated: “I loathe people who push themselves and to see Jews do this disgusts me even more—for we owe it to our honor not to give support to the slander that this is a Jewish trait. God knows, I have seen many, many Jews who were dignified, and proud, and modest—but who takes notice of them?” At no point in her life would she make an entrance that could be described as anything other than “gliding across glass.”
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    The Petersburg of Véra Slonim’s childhood was a