Little Genrikh shuttled between his grandmothers, each of them vying with the other for his attention. He didn’t see much of his parents. They both worked with ardor and enthusiasm, and Marusya, as was her custom, found some courses for increasing the qualifications of her tattered education, and from time to time took part in theater and dance groups. The provinciality of Kiev was dispiriting to her, and she longed for Moscow, where her brother Mikhail had permanently settled. By that time, he had married and was engrossed in family life. Her brother Mark, along with his entire law firm, had relocated to Riga in 1913. Joseph, who had disappeared after his arrest in 1905, turned up in America, and wrote them the occasional confused missive. He had been a fiery revolutionary as early as 1905, but after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, he never returned to Russia. From his infrequent letters, his relatives were able to make out that he felt he was more useful to the cause of world revolution in America.
In 1923, Marusya’s dream came true. Jacob received an appointment in the Central Statistics Directorate of the USSR Council of People’s Commissars, and the small Ossetsky family moved to Moscow. They were given a large room in a communal apartment on Povarskaya Street, which was soon to lose its original name and be renamed after a Soviet diplomat, Vatslav Vorovsky. It would keep that name for several decades. They created a little space for Jacob’s office. A desk was pushed right up against a window; a divan, which a carpenter hammered together any which way, was placed in the corner; and they bought a children’s bed. The room also accommodated a dining table and a buffet, and bookshelves. A week later, Jacob dragged home an absurd but very useful object: a folding screen. The room was a large one—about 215 square feet. Luxury.
They enrolled Genrikh in school, and after school he went to a playgroup on Nikitsky Boulevard with an older German woman they found through an advertisement. His future wife Amalia also took walks on that very same boulevard. A Moscow childhood had begun.
Marusya again took up her studies in education and self-education. In her spare time, she taught Genrikh to read, to do gymnastics exercises, and to make things with clay. All this she did according to the Froebel system, which, though it had not been completely forgotten, had already gone out of fashion. The boy began spending more time with his mother, and the grandmas and grandpas from his former life in Kiev quickly faded from memory. He was a difficult child for his parents—he ate poorly, was disobedient and naughty, and on occasion stamped his feet or had tantrums and threw himself on the floor.
Jacob finished writing the book he had been planning to write in Kiev, called The Logic of Management. In it he elaborated an idea he had long held about the general laws of management, which are equally valid for the organization of capitalist or socialist systems of production. Marusya, meanwhile, tried to find a teaching position; but in the new system there was no demand for schools of movement and dance. Other people now occupied the places where she might formerly have been able to make use of her skills. The breadth of her interests came to her rescue, however. A friend of hers from the Froebel Courses, Vladislava Korzhevskaya, with whom she had worked in the kindergarten for domestic workers’ children at the beginning of her career, introduced her to Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife.
They talked for a long time, discussing the organization of kindergartens of a new kind. A Moscow architect, Armen Papazian, was engaged to develop the idea. The principles of preschool education, according to the thinking of Nadezhda Krupskaya, should be the same as those in the Young Pioneers organization—“like the Boy Scouts in form, but communist in content.” Krupskaya was roundly criticized for taking the Boy Scouts as her inspiration when she was creating the Young Pioneers; but, though she publicly acknowledged her mistake, in her heart of hearts she held on to the idea stubbornly.
The conversation between Marusya and Nadezhda Krupskaya lasted more than two hours, and was replete with warmth and mutual understanding. They parted as kindred spirits, and Marusya was given the task of designing new toys for proletarian children’s education, with the assistance of the ingenious Armen Papazian. The new designs would be implemented in one of the Moscow-area wood-processing plants.
Armen turned out to be a jolly Armenian fellow, not much taller than a child, but with a thick head of hair and a copious beard. He was an artist, a bona-fide artist. Within two weeks, the room on Povarskaya, to Genrikh’s delight, was filled with construction sets, from which you could put together a hammer, a sickle, an automobile, and an airplane. The seven-year-old Genrikh was completely absorbed in building and taking apart wooden and metal pieces, and there was nothing sweeter to him. His parents, observing his single-minded concentration, were encouraged by this early awakening of his engineering abilities. It was hard to drag him away from his activities. He cried and resisted, and even insisted on going to bed clutching some sort of metal connector that Marusya was afraid would poke into him and injure him while he slept.
On Sundays, his parents tried to expose Genrikh to cultural influences—they took him to museums and theaters. He was absolutely indifferent to visual art. In the theater, he fidgeted and demanded to be taken to the bathroom or to the buffet. Only when he saw The Blue Bird was he interested enough to forget about the refreshment buffet. But when the play was over, he dragged Marusya up to the stage: he wanted to find out whether the bird had really been colored blue with electricity, as he surmised. The only museum that he always wanted to visit, rain or shine, was the Polytechnic Museum. The trip to the museum on Sundays was ample reward for all the years when the boy was not allowed to walk through the city alone …
Jacob, who didn’t have much faith in the abilities of the German nanny, tried to give German-language lessons to Genrikh, but his son was bored. The father sat him down at the piano, but it was a torment for both of them. One of the boy’s unique character traits was his ability to fall sick on the occasion of any externally enforced homework. His stomach really did start to hurt each time Jacob insisted that he do a chore or task. He also complained of stomach upsets every time he didn’t want to go to school.
Genrikh adored his mother and avoided his father. Whenever Jacob tried to force him to do something, he took refuge with his mother.
Marusya became overworked. She started losing weight again, suffered from insomnia, and coughed at night. The doctors diagnosed it as “nerves.” When Genrikh finished second grade, Jacob sent his family to recuperate in the Crimea for almost two months.
34 Yurik in America
(1991–2000)
The surface of life had changed dramatically. At home in Moscow, Yurik had hardly noticed the way the days passed. They went by evenly, and movement through them was mechanical, automatic. He woke up, washed, had breakfast, went to school, came home from school, grabbed his guitar; and then life was all about music: everyday discoveries; intense, endless enjoyment. But here in America, there was a new home, full of small alien sounds, clean rain pattering outside the window; Martha, with her eternal smile plastered on her face; the silent Vitya; and English, which he knew almost solely from Beatles songs. The world of old habits collapsed, and new ones—the defense of the psyche against unfamiliar agitations—had not yet been formed.