His very first clear memory: swaying precariously in the air over the head of his Chinese nanny, and her muted cry.
The fabric of the years that follow is woven from little clues, from flashes of remembrance. Soon after the incident on the veranda, the family moved to the city of Mukden, some 350 miles northeast of Peking, where they lived in a large house with a flat roof inside a walled compound amid an expanse of flowers and trees. There were many servants. And Volodya’s nanny had come with them from Peking.
A community of Jews, dating from the twelfth century and made up mostly of merchants from Iran, had once existed in the Chinese city of K’ai-feng. The Chinese, lacking Christendoms perception of the Jew as the killer of Christ and the servant of Satan, lived on cordial terms with the Jews of K’ai-feng, whom they regarded as belonging to “the religion that extracts the sinews”-an allusion to one of the Jewish dietary laws which requires the removal of the network of blood vessels from the thigh of an animal before its meat may be eaten. Jews served in the Ming and Ch’ing dynasties as physicians, officials, and army officers, but in time they vanished, and by the end of the nineteenth century there were virtually none in China save for the small community in Shanghai led by the prosperous Sassoon and Hardoon and Kadoorie families, who made fortunes in transportation, construction, and banking. Then a new migration commenced after the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War. Many Jewish soldiers mustering out of the Russian Army chose to live in Harbin rather than return to tsarist Russia. The Chinese Eastern Railroad, built by the Russians, brought to Harbin European and Russian Jews as well as Jews from Siberia who had engaged in dairy production and cattle raising.
About ten thousand Jews lived in Harbin after 1917, and there were significant numbers of Jews in Tientsin, Mukden, and Shanghai. In photographs, we can see the staff of Bernstein and Sons in Tientsin, a company which exported furs from China to Europe and the United States; and teachers and students in the Skidelsky Talmud Torah in Harbin: skullcapped children, bearded elders, and on the blackboard, in Hebrew, the words “The study of Torah is good when accompanied by civility.”
The kindergarten Volodya attended in Mukden had probably been established by Russian Jews who had fled pogroms and the Revolution. Volodya recalls a Purim party he attended; the holiday celebrates the foiling of an ancient persecution of Jews planned by a Persian minister of state. An intriguing image: a Bolshevik sending his son to a Jewish kindergartens Purim revelry. Hadn’t Solomon Slepak left religion behind in Dubrovno and Kopys when he fled from home nearly thirty years before? Perhaps it was simply a good school for little children, and he regarded Purim as emblematic of his Bolshevik vision of universal equality and the end to bigotry.
One day in Mukden, Fanya Slepak and her children climbed to the roof of their house and stood looking out over the city. For a long time the streets were eerily silent and empty. Suddenly khaki-uniformed troops appeared everywhere and military police were directing army vehicles. In the distance a shell exploded, and there came the firecracker sounds of shooting. Bullets whistled past their heads. Fanya scooped up the children and ran with them down into the cellar of the house.
It was September 1931. On the pretext of protecting the tracks of their South Manchurian Railroad, the Japanese had invaded Manchuria and seized Mukden. They proclaimed the new state of Manchukuo in February 1932, and one month later, Solomon Slepak traveled to Harbin as a correspondent for Tass to attend the installation, as regent, of the last remaining member of the Manchu dynasty, Henry Pu Yi, a puppet of the Japanese. And that December, Solomon returned to Moscow to make his required two-year report to his chiefs. He visited his mother and remained in Russia through the following summer while his family enjoyed the beach at Pey-Tay-Ho near Port Arthur. The fair-skinned little Volodya came down with a bad case of sun poisoning. When Solomon returned to Mukden after the summer, he told the children he had been away so long because his mother had been ill and died and he had attended her funeral. Shortly after his return he and his family were ordered back to Peking, where they moved into the same house they had lived in before. At that time the Communists in China were being relentlessly rooted out and exterminated by Chiang Kai-shek. Young Volodya, attentive to his surroundings now, was aware of odd goings-on in the house: night meetings in his father’s study; doors and windows closed; hushed voices.
His nanny taught him Chinese songs. His sister, three years older than he, with curly brown hair and brown eyes, had her own circle of friends and saw little of her brother. He had a tricycle. In the pavilion were tables, chairs, a pool table, and he would watch the adults play. There were mulberry trees in the compound, and he would gather the berries and eat them. How his mother scolded him once when he smeared his shirt blue with berries! One day a wildcat got into the garden, and that evening he and his sister, while strolling through the compound, suddenly spotted it and watched with spine-tingling fear its swift leapings and glidings through the shadows. They raced back into the house. A wildcat in their garden! The thrill and dread of sharing a frightful secret.
His father enrolled Volodya in the American school for the children of diplomats, which his sister attended. There were some Chinese students in the school, but most were American. It was a good school, his father said. The best.
Volodya, who spoke Chinese as well as Russian, now began to learn English. And arithmetic. In school all morning. Home for lunch. More school in the afternoon. Classes, sports. Happy days.
In the spring of 1934 he suddenly fell ill. The doctors in the German hospital in Peking diagnosed the illness as amoebic dysentery. A swastika flew from the hospital flagpole, and a picture of Adolf Hitler hung on the wall behind the desk of the head nurse. The doctors spoke German.
Frightened by the hospital, Volodya told his father, “I don’t want to be here with fascists!”
His father said it was the best hospital in China.
That summer Solomon Slepak returned to Moscow. Volodya was in and out of the hospital, the German doctors unable to cure him. One of the doctors, Professor Krieg, a tall, grayish-blond man, with blue eyes behind gilded-frame glasses, told Fanya there was something in the food or water that was affecting the boy. He said he did not think the child would live and suggested that they consider leaving China.
In his hospital room, the seven-year-old Volodya lay very ill: diarrhea, blood and mucus in his feces, exhaustion. His nanny slept next to him on a narrow bed.
Fanya Slepak cabled her husband to inform him of Professor Kriegs advice. After a few days, Solomon cabled back: They were being transferred to Moscow.
Fanya cabled that she would not travel by train alone with the children through China. Solomon cabled that they were to go by boat to Kobe in Japan and from there by train to Tsuruga. A boat would then take them to Vladivostok, where they were to take the train to Moscow. The train traveled only through Russian territory. He would meet them when they arrived in Moscow.
Volodya vaguely recalls his parents’ large trunks filled with ivory sculptures, paintings, silks, Chinese kimonos, books. The trunks were sealed. In Kobe, Fanya Slepak, claiming diplomatic immunity, refused to open them for the Japanese customs inspectors. The stevedores dropped the trunks into the water and then fished them out. Still Fanya Slepak would not open them. As they left Kobe, the ships captain offered to clear a deck of all passengers so she could spread out the objects and let them dry. Politely she refused-embarrassed, perhaps, by the number of objects inside, their immense worth. The trunks traveled wet all the way to the Soviet Union. Many of the objects bore water marks all the years afterward.