Volodya’s first school was on Starosadsky Pereulok, not far from where he lived on Petroverigsky Pereulok. Schools had no names, only numbers: his was number 329. Because of a citywide shortage of school buildings, there were two shifts for the school’s total student body of about eight hundred. When a school building was completed nearby, half the students of school 329, including Volodya but not his sister, were sent to the new building, number 617. It was a four-story brick building located on Spasoglinishchevsky Pereulok (now Arkhipova Street) opposite the Moscow synagogue, the city’s only remaining Jewish house of worship. For Volodya the synagogue was connected “not with Jewishness but with religion,” and as he had no interest at the time in anything religious, he has no recollection of ever seeing anyone entering or leaving it. Today school 617 is a hospital.
Most of the teachers in the schools Volodya attended were the sons and daughters of illiterate peasants, the very first educated peasant generation. He studied arithmetic, Russian language, Russian literature, geography, natural science, history There were about thirty to forty students in each classroom. The walls were painted a light color; a blackboard covered the wall behind the teacher’s chair and table. In almost every room there was a photograph of Stalin above the blackboard, and in some rooms, of Lenin too. Every student was required to join the Young Pioneers at the age of ten. They wore red ties and marched with red flags and attended meetings at which one of the teachers, a party member, spoke about events in the Soviet Union; about the international bourgeoisie who were the enemies of the people; about the fascists in Hitler’s Germany who persecuted the Communists, arrested them, sent them off to concentration camps, shot them. No one ever mentioned the Jews.
Two of the apartments into which the Slepaks moved-on Neopalimovsky Pereulok and Bolshaya Serpukhovskaya Street-were quite far from the schools Volodya and Rosa attended. Solomon Slepak took them along every day in the Tass car that brought him to and from his office, at that time on Armiansky Pereulok. From there the children would walk the rest of the way to school so no one would spot them using the car. Solomon insisted that they continue to attend those schools despite their distance from where the family now lived; they were among the best schools in Moscow, he said.
On occasion Volodya caught the word zhid directed at him by certain students, and ignored it. The first time he had heard the word, he asked his father what it meant, and his father explained that it was a bad word used by ignorant and misguided persons as a nasty and crude description of the Jews, an ancient and honorable Mediterranean people who had been persecuted all through history and to whom their family belonged, and, his father went on, when the dream of a perfect Communist state came true, that persecution would end and all the peoples of the Soviet Union would live in harmony as one great nation and as a sign to the entire world that Comrade Stalin and the Communist Party had finally put an end to religious hatred and bigotry.
Volodya was about eight or nine at the time. A Jew! He was a Jew! Apparently he had forgotten the Purim celebration he had attended in Mukden years before. Then again, perhaps there was nothing especially Jewish about that event; it may have been merely another party, unremarkable save for the costumes and the clamor.
There was no organized Jewish community in Moscow when Volodya discovered that he was a Jew.
Lenin had detested anti-Semitism. He thought it contrary to the socialist ideal of equality and believed, with Karl Marx, that the Jews would have assimilated and disappeared long since had it not been for the persecutions to which they were endlessly subjected. Indeed, he had approved the decree of the July 1918 Council of People’s Commissars condemning anti-Semitism as “fatal to the interests of the workers’ and the peasants’ revolution” and instructing all Soviet deputies “to take uncompromising measures to tear the anti-Semitic movement out by the roots.”
But Jewish Communists had other notions about the future of Judaism in revolutionary Russia. At the June 1918 Second Conference of the Jewish Communist Sections, the Evsektsia, in Moscow, they resolved that the “Zionist Party plays a counterrevolutionary role” by hindering the penetration of Communist ideas among the toiling Jewish masses. They urged “the promulgation of a decree suspending all activities of the Zionist Party” and concluded that the “communal organs, which are the mainstay of all reactionary forces within the Jewish people, must be suppressed.”
Lenin’s government immediately adopted the resolution. Two leaders of the Jewish Commissariat, Simon Dimanstein and Samuel Agursky-the former a onetime yeshiva student, rabbi, and Lubavitcher Hasid-were appointed to the task of tearing down the Jewish community.
In June 1919 the government issued a decree closing all Jewish establishments. The decree carried the signatures of Samuel Agursky and Joseph Stalin. Most synagogues were padlocked or turned into Communist clubs, schools, dining halls; their possessions became the property of the Soviet state. There is a photograph of a pile of Torah scrolls from desecrated Russian synagogues, and it is difficult not to wonder if somewhere in that heap there might be the scroll whose completion was once celebrated with music and recorded in the photograph of Dubrovno Jews assembled before the Ark in their synagogue. Youngsters under the age of eighteen were forbidden to receive religious education outside their homes and required to attend classes in which communism would be taught. The Zionist movement, which had once numbered about three hundred thousand Jews, was banned. Religious officials-now regarded as “declassed members of society,” individuals without civil rights-found it difficult to secure housing, jobs, food rations, and the admission of their children to schools. Circumcision-illegal. Marriage and divorce laws-repealed. The Hebrew language-suppressed. Jews were even warned against kissing the Torah; it was unhygienic. A secular Yiddish culture was what the Jewish Communists wanted for the Jews of Soviet Russia. Yiddish elementary schools; Yiddish newspapers and journals; Yiddish to be spoken at the meetings of the Jewish soviets. The Jews were to be a nationality culture, with Yiddish as their language, socialism as their secular religion.
The campaign to cripple Judaism and assimilate the Jews into Communist culture was waged by Communist Jews; non-Jews did not participate in it. It was a Jewish civil war, brutal and unrelenting.
Hastening the process of assimilation was the breakup of cohesive Jewish townlets and the displacement of Jews into Moscow and Leningrad as a result of the World War, the Civil War, and the pogroms in the Ukraine and White Russia. It is estimated that in the 1930s more than 3 percent of Moscow’s population of four to five million people was Jewish. To accelerate the process even further, Lenin urged the Jews to colonize certain areas of Russia, and thousands went. Some of the colonies were funded in part by the American Joint Distribution Committee, which had been established during World War I to bring aid to distressed European Jews. There are many photographs of Jews in those agricultural colonies: They shear sheep near Odessa; they eat breakfast in the fields of the Ukraine; they are on their way to a meeting in the Crimea; they live in temporary barracks; they raise pigs, as a way of demonstrating their rupture with the Jewish religion; they drive a John Deere tractor; they celebrate May Day.
But few Jews seemed interested in becoming part of a Yiddish-speaking nationality or in colonizing Russian land. Most secular Jews preferred assimilation into Russian high culture. In only a few years the intermarriage rate of Jews in the heart of the Soviet Union reached 25 percent. Zionists and religious Jews quickly came to regard Communist rule as a grim continuation of the repressive regime of the tsars. Indeed, many Jews believed themselves worse off under the Communists than they had been under the cruelest of the tsars.