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Ilya Konstantinovsky

Hebrew text:

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Hebrew/Russian text:

In the early thirties, the city where they lived was not yet Soviet. During those years, the Vilkovsky brother left, but he still existed in the memories of a long-ago childhood.^[1]

Two newspaper lines changed everything.

Casting aside his regular activities, David rushed home and sat by the radio set all evening. Through the troublesome hum of the jammers, he strained to hear the latest news of the war that had begun. He didn't hear anything definite. His alarm increased throughout the evening; his hands trembled, and the back of his head ached. At two o'clock in the morning he turned off the receiver and went to bed. The distressing hours dragged on. He could not figure out if everything he was seeing was happening in his sleep or if it was his thoughts and memories.

For a long time he had dreams of a little town on a riverbank and his parents' home – empty, abandoned, with a boarded-up door and windows that were broken out. This was not just a dream. He had seen all of this in reality soon after the end of the war when he had gone to his hometown the last time. He knew that his mother and father had been deported and died on the journey, but he hoped to find people who had escaped death so that he could find out how everything had happened. The last return to his hometown was imprinted on him with such pain, and the memory tormented him for so long, that it transferred into his dreams. The things that happened to him in reality sometimes seemed to be memories of a nightmare, a frequently recurring dream, usually beginning with the sensation that he is falling, that he is flying in an explosion of white clouds under the powerful roar of a motor, and the earth is hurtling at full speed to meet him. All he can see is green fields, gardens, dark clusters of individual trees – it spins like crazy, causing his stomach to turn. Another moment, and he will crash into the earth. But suddenly the field beneath him begins to straighten, the trees, roads, and white houses, throwing off short black shadows, move aside, and he is flying above the level, bluish steppe and sees in the misty haze the ribbon of the river, and on its banks the little white town with all its streets, bell towers, and fire towers in the middle of an empty square… All of this was in reality because Vilkovsky made his last trip to his hometown on an airplane, an open two-seater Po-2 that he had managed to charter for one day. He did not want to go on ordinary transportation because that would mean he would have to spend the night in the town, where he no longer had any relatives.

Yes, it was the flight… Something about it was not only endlessly depressing but also fantastical: a man, having lived out his time, flew to his hometown and saw what people are not usually able to see – what happened after him. He might as well have returned to his hometown after one hundred years. In reality, he had only been gone for four years.

The airplane landed on a grassy field where people used to play soccer. Removing his helmet, the pilot looked back at his passenger and asked if he knew the way into town.

“I was born here,” Vilkovsky said.

“Great,” the pilot said. “So this is where you are your real self.”

Going to Bolshaya Dunayskaya Street, Vilokovsky realized that he was a stranger here. He didn't even immediately recognize the street where he had lived for many years. He looked at the overgrown trees, at the homes with red-brick and white fronts and couldn't understand why everything seemed unfamiliar and foreign to him. Then he figured it out: the signs, window displays, and little shops had disappeared, and a dead silence hung in the air. He remembered this street when every door opened into a little shop or store, office, or workshop. Now, however, all the doors were closed, locks hung in some places, windows were closed tightly with shutters with iron bars. The street was still the same, old, unforgettable, with the same familiar houses and sidewalks, but everything along it looked different now. The life that had gone on here before had disappeared before his eyes.

He walked, continuing to look at every home and every passerby. However, no one looked at him. He was a stranger here; no one had any association with him. He understood, of course, that he was unlikely to meet familiar faces, that Jews had lived on this street and were no longer there and never would be there. An old woman with a bag walked by, and behind her a guy in a striped vest was dragging a heavy sack, then girls with empty containers passed, and not one of them even glanced at him. It looked like the deserted Jewish homes still stood empty. Did no one need them, or was it not yet permitted to inhabit them? Only two of the biggest brick homes were occupied by some kind of establishment. Walking past, Vilkovsky heard the tapping of typewriters, and through the open windows he saw people drowsily working at office desks. But just like in former times, elderly women bundled in headscarves sat at the intersections with little benches, on which were arranged dishes with roasted seeds – white and yellow, pumpkin.

Happening to glance at the sidewalk, Vilkovsky froze: God, what was that? He saw ancient Hebrew characters beneath his feet. Taking another step, he stood on a gray tooled stone with the image of hands arranged for prayer in the manner of Jews from the lineage of former Jerusalem temple priests: four fingers fanned out in pairs and the tips of the thumbs touching, forming a closed triangle. He realized that this was a memorial stone for Cohen. Vilkovsky had heard a journalist's story that during the war in Polish towns, the Fascists surfaced streets with gravestones taken from Jewish cemeteries. Apparently, they had done the same here. It would be better for him to get off the sidewalk – the graves of his grandfather or great-grandfather could be under his feet. It was here that he thought that for the first time that he needn't have returned. He had run along this street as a boy, and then he had hurried along it to who knows where many times as a young man. Why had he come back? So that he could see that it had turned into a graveyard?

Nevertheless, he persistently went forward and felt the quickening of his heart. With every step, he drew closer to his home. When he saw it at last, he realized from afar that no one was living in it – the doorway was boarded up. Approaching it closely, he peered through a crack, and it felt as though something was gripping his throat. In the dim gray light, he discerned a complete empty, barren room with crumbling plaster on the floor.

His father's stationery shop was here… Little David had really loved it. Stationery supplies were not the only items sold here, but also magazines and books that he had learned to read without tearing the pages. The shop also carried cigarettes, tobacco, and even seltzer water. Confined to home by a long illness, Father could only sit at the counter and try to spread out the modest assortment of merchandise. It was no surprise that the shop was completely empty.

You could get into the house from the yard…

Vilkovsky went around the house and entered the yard. Here, all the doors had fallen off, the windows were broken out, and broken bricks and garbage were strewn everywhere. However, there were no signs showing that the house had suffered from the war. It was simply neglected and had slowly begun to deteriorate. It was, after all, a very old home, thought Vilkovsky. Father had gotten it as an inheritance from Grandfather, whom David barely remembered. Searching his memory, he now saw – or rather, made himself see – a gray-bearded old man with black eyebrows and a commanding look, and next to him, the kind face of an old woman in a lacy headscarf. Most likely, this was a memory of a photograph of his grandfather and grandmother. They had lived and died in this home.

From the glassed-in terrace, now with broken panes, the door opened into the apartment. Going through the kitchen, Vilkovsky entered the dining room, then the bedroom. It was dark in both rooms, but he immediately knew that they were completely empty, cleared out. A dim gray light came into his mother's and father's old bedroom from the windows leading into the hallway that belonged not to them but to one of his father's brothers – Uncle Aaron, who inherited the other half of Grandfather's house. From Uncle Aaron's abandoned apartment, a deathly chill blew and reeked of decay. Vilkovsky's heart stopped as he stood in the empty tomb of his family. His boyhood, his youth had taken place within these walls. Here, he had awakened in the mornings, cheerful, energetic, full of faith and dreams. Here, his parents had lived their lives with their happiness, with their joy and their pain, with their faith. From all that, the only things that were left were bare, damp walls, gray dust, and a terrible odor.

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Hebrew/Russian text:

He couldn't focus in on one thought, but suddenly almost with tangible clarity he recalled standing by this wall four years ago when he had come to see his parents the last time. The three of them had come out here to take a picture as a keepsake. It was already chilly on that autumn day. His father had gone out in a coat and hat, and his mother in a wool cardigan, and only he, David, stood out there in a suit and a bare head.

Vilkovsky opened his eyes and felt that they were filled with tears. And then from the brick home that stood separately in the same yard, closer to the gates, came a young woman, holding the hand of a girl with a bluc bow in her blond hair. When they saw Vilkovsky, they both stopped and began to stare at him. With surprise and fear, they looked at the strange man who had unexpectedly wandered into the yard and was weeping, leaning on the dilapidated wall of the old, neglected house.

The little house where the woman and girl came from had been built by the youngest brother of Vilkovsky's father – Abraham. Little David remembered the celebration on the day the foundation was laid. He had helped arrange the tables by the freshly dug pit, while Uncle Abraham's wife, Aunt Inda, opened a basket and pulled out dishes with refreshments and bottles of rose wine. Her son, Vova, a freckle-faced little boy, grabbed the knives and raced outside, shouting, “These are Vova's!” which was supposed to mean that the knives belonged to him, Vova, and he had no intention of giving them up to anyone. Vova probably already has children by now, Vilkovsky thought abruptly. And probably also his little brother Ida, who hadn't even been born yet when the house was built. What year had Uncle Abraham's family left for Israel?

If they hadn't left, then they would have been killed in '41. But they did leave, and their life was continuing. They have a different life now that I know nothing about.

He looked at Uncle Abraham's house. Again, his eyes clouded, and he realized that he was crying.

Returning to the street, he walked to the intersection and stopped, not knowing where he would go now. His eyes were still burning, but there were no more tears. Then he heard a tapping sound behind him, and turning around, he saw that a man on crutches was trying to catch up to him.

“Dudu, Wait up!” the handicapped person said in a somewhat breathless voice.

He called Vilkovsky by the name people called him on this street when he was a child, and Vilkovsky realized that the man was one of the sons of a neighbor. But he didn't know which one – Einek or Isaac. The last time he had seen them, they were little.

“Einek?” Vilkovsky asked uncertainly.

“Yes,” the one-legged man cheerfully responded.

“And is Isaac here?” Vilkovsky asked.

“No,” Einek said sadly. “Isaac was killed at the front in the first year of the war. I was wounded in Germany.”

“And where is your father?” Vilkovsky asked.

Einek was silent. His pale, gaunt face that seemed to have been drained of its color provided the answer. After a pause he said, “Everyone who didn't manage to evacuate was killed in '41 soon after the deportation.”

He stopped speaking and looked questioningly at Vilkovsky, who understood the unspoken question.

“Mine didn't manage to get out either…”

They stood on the corner near the old house with its blind windows. Five steps away was the door, which Vilkovsky remembered being lined with tin buckets, wash basins, samovar pipes, and gutters for rainwater runoff. Somehow Einek read Vilkovsky's thoughts and said, “Yes, Kupershmidt also died. With the whole family.”

Vilkovsky looked at the other home, and Einek again guessed whom he was thinking about and said, “The Tsalises also. And Borya…”^[2]

Borya Tsalis was a well-known soccer player in the town. Since his childhood he had kicked a ragged ball around this street, around the intersection where they were now standing.

“Yes,” Einek said again, although Vilkovsky hadn't asked him anything. “And Weinberg, and Boltyansky, and Krasnyanskne. And the Zeilikovich family. Everyone. Even crazy Gersh. You remember him?”

Gersh was a quiet, resigned person with a sad face, scruffy with gray stubble, skinny to the bone but wiry, who carried a heavy bag from morning to night; he walked only in the middle of the road with a rope across his shoulder, and jokesters said that he believed himself to be not a person but a horse.

“How did it happen?” Vilkovsky asked.

“I don't know the details,” Einek said. “At first all the Jews were ordered to gather at the Great Synagogue. They didn't release the men, but the women lived at home for a little while longer and prepared food.”

“Father was very weak when I came here the last time,” Vilkovsky speculated. “How were hundreds of people housed in the synagogue? Did they sleep side by side on the stone floor?”

“…And then came Antonescu's order to deport everyone to the east. That's where all of ours died.”

Einek stopped speaking and, leaning on both crutches, slightly elevated his healthy, visibly puffy leg. Then he suddenly said, “Two weeks after I returned here, something was returned to me…”

“What was returned?” Vilkovsky asked.

“Photographs,” Einek said. “Our family album. Someone took it out of our apartment, like all the rest that was left there, but when I appeared back in the town, it was dropped off for me.”

“Not a single person was saved?” Vilkovsky asked.

“Two or three people. The daughter of the dentist Axelrod, Tonya Zavadskaya^[3], Kuperman. He is sick and doesn't leave his house anymore.”

“And did anyone return from the evacuation?”

“Yes,” said Einek. “Doctor Volovich.”^[4]

After Einek left, Vilkovsky continued to stand at the intersection. He looked at the nearby houses, but it seemed to him that he could see the entire street, all the way to the river itself and even the ship dock and the remains of the old fortress on the river bluff. In the light of the bright morning sun, he looked at everything that he had seen countless times before: shops and stores, offices, the town cafe and sweets shop, barber shops, market kiosks, and wooden benches beneath the open sky in back of the cathedral. And the proprietors of all these houses, offices, and shops: the Kogans, Goldmans, Baranovskys, Kitsises and Katses, grocers and manufacturers, brokers, tailors, shoemakers, hairdressers, tireless dealers, reckless dreamers, modest laborers, and those unfortunate ones who flailed and knocked about for their whole lives but couldn't make ends meet. He grew up here, but from his boyhood he was afflicted with the desire to leave as soon as he could, to run away from here. Now, when he was standing on the emptied street, overtaken by a sickening sense of the irreparable nature of the tragedy that had happened here, he with an almost tangible certainty and clarity not only saw the habitants of Bolshaya Dunayskaya Street, but for the first time in his life he felt pity, tenderness, and a sense of affectionate closeness for these people who had disappeared from the face of the earth forever. You dreamed of some kind of different, proper life, he said to himself. But did you really find it after you left this street? Were the people you met later really better than the ones who lived here? They were extremely diverse, good and bad, selfless and greedy, rich and poor, impractical but kind, usually the poorer, the kinder.

The Jews were here not only as merchants. The Jews sewed inexpensive clothing and patched up shoes, fixed watches, and baked bread. The Jews were jokesters and freight loaders, bookkeepers and night watchmen. The Jews prepared medications and treated the sick… He recalled Doctor Rabinovich, stern in appearance, scoffing in conversation, but an exceptionally kind person who drove around on a motorcycle.^[5] He had a bad leg, and it was difficult for him to walk. How recklessly he tore along down this street, dodging oncoming carts, dogs, people. He was a good doctor. Washing his hands of gasoline, he set to work with his syringe and surgical knife. And he refused payment if he knew that the patient was in need. He didn't take anything from me for calcium injections when an early stage of tuberculosis was discovered in my lungs…

His conversation with himself could not distract Vilkovsky from his thoughts about the death that had come to every resident on Bolshaya Dunayskaya

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Hebrew/Russian text:

Street. It lay empty and quiet, and lifeless locks hung on many doors. The city continued to live some kind of different life, unknown to him, and he heard an indistinct noise, the whine of a saw, hammering, where a building was being repaired or built. He thought: new residents would be coming into those homes, and those that weren't suitable for living would probably be torn down, including my childhood home. And no one will even know what occurred here before. Someday an old man will just say, “A Jewish photographer lived here. He took this picture of my wife and me in '39.” Another old man will reply, “No, the grocer Kogan did business here, and the photographer was across the street.”

Vilkovsky slowed walked past the familiar houses and became aware of everything, including the anguish, the images he began seeing before him. It seemed to him that pudgy Kats was coming out of his office now, and in the doorway of the hat shop, owned by a man named Shapkar, stood his grown, loud-mouthed sons with their fiery red hair, who began to urge him to come buy a new hat, an incredibly cheap cap. Going by the hairdresser, he found himself caught up in the thought that he was looking for the leggy, long-haired Yana Margulisa, who usually stood on the threshold in a long white robe and gave unshaven passersby a shy, sad look. Why them?

He stopped by the Great Synagogue, a brick rectangular building with tall windows^[6] fitted with stained glass in the upper part. It had not changed. There was not a trace, not a hint of the suffering or disgrace that the people who were confined here went through at the beginning of the war. Looking at the synagogue walls, he tried to imagine his ill father. How had he lived through those terrible days here? Where did he sit, where did he lie down when they brought him here? He of course had not imagined then what awaited him. They probably all had hope, and if anyone suspected the end, the others would yell at him and make him be quiet. Well, his father was occupied with his own illness and, most likely, his prayers.

Turning the corner, Vilkovsky looked for the other synagogue that at one time had been constructed before his eyes. He saw charred walls, a caved-in roof, broken-out windows, and piles of garbage on the formerly tidy, green plot. He remembered when the structure was built, the dedication of it with a celebration lasting three days, when David and his peers hung around here from morning until night, rejoicing in the noise, the cheer, and the abundant food. Now everything looked as if centuries had passed since those days. Time always destroys, wears things down to dust and decay, but only fifteen years had passed, no more, since the synagogue had been built. The acacias planted back then hadn't even had time to mature. Where were the tipsy Jews who danced with scrolls of the Torah? Where were the boys and girls whom I ran together with around this yard? Why was their life interrupted and ripped apart? Why them?

Now these shadows followed him, awaited him around every corner, clustered in every home. And suddenly he thought that he had no right to run from the town as he had done once before. Then, he was running from the living, and now he wanted to get away from the dead as fast as possible. Maybe he shouldn't have returned, but now it was his duty to learn what had happened here… And he set out to search for people who had survived the nightmare.

Why did I come?! Later, it seemed to him that this was a waste. But he nevertheless kept going and looked for the house or apartment where Doctor Axelrod's daughter now lived. In her room stood a huge ficus with spade-shaped leaves, and various old photographs hung on the walls. Vilkovsky nearly asked “They returned your family album, too?” But he came to his senses in time and kept quiet. He tried not to look at the lady in the room, whom he remembered as a slender young woman with black braids; the woman sitting before him now was not yet old, but she was withered with dark circles under her eyes. When she spoke, two sorrowful lines stood out on both sides of her mouth.

Essentially, he had come here only to learn whether she had seen his parents there. The question haunted him: how could this have been? How could his ill, frail father survive the arrest and deportation? And she responded that he did not survive the deportation but died on the journey, in a village that she could not remember the name of. This happened back in the old Soviet territory. He was not the only one to die along the road. There were many deaths even before they were moved to the intended region. “They drove us along on foot,” she said. “In some villages the sick were given carts, it got worse in Ukraine, sometimes they didn't let us into houses. The Ukrainians said that the Jews were guilty of everything.” “Of what?” Vilkovsky wanted to say, to shout. “Of collectivization? Of the war? Where is this cruelty coming from? What caused it – famine, poverty?” But he couldn't say the words. His mouth seemed to be frozen. He could only look into the young woman's dark face with its motionless eyes, shielded by the sad remnants of weariness and detachment, and listen to her tragic words. And when he decided after all to ask how it had all happened, her dead eyes suddenly sparked with such frantic pain and horror that Vilkovsky regretted his question and tried to end the conversation as quickly as he could. Nevertheless, he heard that the mass executions began on the 20^th of December, 1941, and they continued for several days in a row. The enraged, drunken police moved people onto the field, made the men dig and chisel into the frozen ground – it was a harsh winter – but the shots did not stop even during a blizzard. “You can imagine what it was like,” the woman said, trembling. Vilkovsky sat paralyzed on the stool as if in a stupor, but fragments of visions and images spun before his eyes, and suddenly he clearly saw his mother in an old green coat that had been resewn many times, her eyes, and snow powder whirling around her head. He thought that he had lost consciousness, but somehow he could still hear everything they were saying around him.

“Go see Tanya Zavadskaya,” the woman said quietly. “She knew your mother well… And your father… he died earlier, on the road.”

Going out onto the street again and glancing at it with bleary eyes, Vilkovsky did not see anything. He went along the same Bolshaya Dunayskaya, but it was no longer a street, it was no longer anything. Something in him had broken, and he could not think about anything, did not want to think, and did not want to remember anything anymore. And in this condition of soul-deep numbness, moving as though through empty space, not seeing the trees, the houses on the outskirts of town, their green hedges or flower beds in the gardens, he came to the soccer field, where, surrounded by a crowd of boys, the pilot waited for him. The man was explaining the secrets of aviation to them and batting at the hands of the most enthusiastic listeners, who were trying to touch and pat the airplane on the ground.

The day stretched on, beginning at a provincial municipal airport, and below, under the wings of the airplane, again the green fields, fruit orchards, and houses of the homeland swam by, a land which had given Vilkovsky so much joy, inspiration, and hope since childhood, but now seemed to him to be foreign and irrelevant. He already knew that he would never come back here. An incomparable grief that had started when he stood in the deathly twilight of his gutted boyhood home and had become even stronger in the room with the ficus, where he listened to the stories of the woman who carried such horror in her soul that Vilkovsky couldn't even imagine, did not leave him even after his return to Moscow. In essence, this grief never wore off and, after moving into the secret depths of the subconscious, then continued on there hopelessly for his entire life, sometimes breaking through into his dreams, in which the sorrowful images of that horrible day were mixed together with memories of a peaceful and happy childhood: his boyhood home boarded up and the laying of the foundation for Uncle Abraham's home, Mother in her green coat leading him by the hand on a sunny winter day, and in that same coat with eyes frozen in horror, on the edge of a grave ditch.

Notes:

1. Ilya Konstantinovsky calls himself David Vilkovsky in this true story. Return
2. Einek Benerav did not specify. From the Tsalis family, only one of the daughters died. All the rest escaped and lived in Kishinev after the war. Return
3. Tonya Zavadskaya – Tonya Bershadskaya Return
4. Kuperman, Doctor Volovich – ??? Return
5. Doctor Rabinovich rode around on his motorcycle in approximately 1920-1926. Return
6. I. Konstantinovsky's testimony gives evidence that the Romanian Fascists and Nazis exterminated most of the Jews in Kiliya, and after 1945, the Soviet authorities destroyed all four of the city's synagogues and confiscated the Jewish Community building, the Tarbut Jewish school, the Jewish library, and more than 500 homes of the victims of Fascism. Also see the Yizkor Book, pp. 131-147. Return

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