Natalya Sharandak

A Jewish Grandfather

[German]

Every family has its secrets. In our family, it’s my mother’s extraction on the paternal side. So who exactly was my grandfather? An evildoer-murderer or a thief? He was simply a Jew. „Because you have misfortune/ Because you have a star“ – as Ehrenburg wrote. Thus, half a misfortune fell to my mother and just a quarter to me.

I shall try to reconstruct the history of my mother’s father’s family. And at the same time to find answers to the question of what has happened to turn a state that declared the equality of all nations, into one where a person has to hide his background.

Mama’s father – Oskar (Oyser) Berlyand (born in 1887) – had his origins in a Jewish village, which he left to go to the „Pale of Settlement“. His grandfather, my great-great-grandfather Shimon, was a member of the Haskalah movement – the Jewish Enlightenment. He was among those who advocated Jews having a European education. His son (my great-grandfather Semyon) maintained the same stance. All of his sons had a solid education, despite the quotas limiting the number of Jews who were accepted at institutes of higher education.

The usual regulated structure of the Berlyand family, like that of many other Jewish families, was overshadowed by the unbridled outburst of anti-Semitism that were among of the main indications of the demoralization of the Nikolai regime. The peak of the anti-Jewish campaign was the pogroms that flared up at the height of the revolution of 1905.

My grandfather Oskar and his brother Aleksandr, or Sasha (Isril, born in 1890, a father to my mother and a grandfather to me after the early death of his brother) – the youngest children in the family, were inseparable. For a time, though, their paths led them in different directions. Oskar studied in Moscow and Sasha entered the chemical-pharmaceutical faculty of the Kiev University and completed his course in 1917, that fateful year for Russia. My grandfather and his brother were not very interested in politics. Like most of their compatriots, they just tried to survive those years of civil war and turmoil. For Jews, this was particularly difficult. A terrible wave of pogroms rolled over the whole of Ukraine.

At first, the Soviet state gave Jews ample opportunities, allowing them access to many spheres of activity that had previously been closed to them. With no obstacles in his way, Oskar was able to pursue his desire to move to another city. Work took him to Petrograd, where he happened to meet my grandmother, Lillian, an ethnic Estonian and at that time a young librarian.

Sasha completed his course at the Institute of Medicine, defended two dissertations, one after another, and became a professor of medicine. But soon it became clear that anti-Semitism had far from disappeared. The battle against the threat of „Jewish domination“ became more or less the general line taken by the party and the Soviet leadership, although it occurred silently, with the help of secret directives and instructions. The „fifth point“ on passports and on forms indicating citizens‘ ethnicity came into effect in 1932 and promoted this selection procedure.

In the lottery of life, my grandfather Sasha pulled a lucky ticket. He not only survived but even managed to pursue his calling without having to sacrifice his conscience and his principles. Though he occupied prominent positions, he remained a non-party man until the end of his days, something not easily done, and a fact that cast suspicion on him.

The war began in autumn 1941. Kiev was under threat of occupation. The Institute of Medicine where Mama’s uncle worked as head of the therapeutic department offered to evacuate him. If he hadn’t taken his brother’s children with him, who knows whether they wouldn’t have ended up on the edge of Baba Yar.

In 1948, I came into the world. I had a happy childhood. It was only many years later that I realized that the happiest days of my life were the „black years“ for Soviet Jews. The final stage of the persecution of the Jews unleashed by Stalin was the „doctors affair“. When the hunt for the ringleaders began, Aleksandr Semyonovich Berlyand went to his superiors proposing that he voluntarily hand in his notice. But they told him that he could continue with his work. Some of his patients preferred to do without services rendered by a „suspicious“ Jewish doctor. The epitomy of this outburst of anti-Semitism was to have been exiling the Jews beyond the borders of the European part of the USSR (although today a number of academics reject this version). The Jews were saved by a miracle in the form of the death of the tyrant.

Two years later my grandfather died. One night, hooligans defiled Jewish graves at the cemetery where he was buried. They knocked off the nose of my grandfather’s marble likeness. I think that for Mama this was a signal that she had to defend herself. This is where the story of Mama’s „psychosis“ regarding her Jewish background began, one which gradually took hold of me, too. It was made worse by the atmosphere of hostile anti-Semitism in the Brezhnev era. In an attempt to „save“ their children, the parents of „half-breeds“ registered them as having a „positive“ ethnicity.

I was lucky with my teachers. They managed to create an ordinary humane atmosphere for us, their students. But as soon as they took their first steps into the world outside without them, my Jewish school-fellows increasingly realized the sad truth that in the country that they had considered their home since they were children, they were merely outcasts. That they would fail the entrance exams to universities and a number of other prestigious institutes of higher education was decided before they even took them by the guardians of sacred Soviet science against Jewish invasion.

What was nearly impossible for my Jewish contemporaries became a reality for me. I entered the Academy of Artists in Leningrad. The fact that I was concealing my grandfather’s Jewishness was the sole reason. In the museum where I worked for many years, there were fairly latent anti-Semites, but there were also overt ones. One fine day I realized that I didn’t want to be „one of us“ for the anti-Semites. I have no reason to be ashamed of my grandfather. This is what gave me the idea to write a book about the history of my family, a book I’m still working on today.

Natalya Sharandak, born in Kiev, is a writer and film maker. She lives in Berlin.