“In the beginning was the Word” says John in the New Testament. But in this story, the beginning was a photo instead.

It took me a long time to have any clue what I was looking at. But now I know I am looking at my great-grandmother Chaya Kievitksy. I suspect I am looking at my great-great-grandmother Zlata as well. There is no way to be sure which of my Great-Uncles stands so seriously behind them. But given that the photo probably dates from the early to mid-twenties; and that as of 1930 Leibe had only two sons whereas Peiser had four children of unspecified gender, I have to assume this is Peiser, his wife Merka and a daughter. The girl who reminded me of me is my first cousin, once removed.

And with all this new knowledge, I have slowly come to realize something that should have been obvious from the outset:  this knowledge is not going to return my grandmother to me. It is probably not even going to teach me anything important about her. She had a difficult life, but not so difficult as Peiser and Leibe, her brothers devoured by the Holocaust. Or her baby brother Isaak who was murdered at 25. Or her baby sister Sofia who died at 24, probably in childbirth. Only Beryl/Boris – who died in Moscow in 1983 – lived a longer life than she did. And up until a few days ago, I would have assumed that his lot as a Jew in Russia could not have been a happy one. All I knew was that in 1930,  he was an engineer with a wife and two children, “doing well” in Leningrad.  I had to wonder if they had all endured the siege. And then, while trying to determine the date when he might have moved his family to Moscow, I found him in Циклопедия (quite literally Tsykclopediya, the Russian version of Wikipedia). Translated, it yielded this:

Astonishingly, Boris had been a Deputy Minister of the Russian Chemical Industry under Stalin! He became Minister of the Chemical Industry when Stalin died.

Online, one can find copies of the textbook he wrote in 1968 with his daughter Evgenii. With presumably deadpan Russian understatement, it is entitled a “Brief engineering handbook on the technology of inorganic substances: Graphs and monograms”. Its pages number a modest four hundred and thirty-two

So Beryl did very well indeed and I have to assume his failure to reach out to his only surviving sibling means he either bought into his mother’s (repeated) operatic convictions her first-born daughter had perished; or that the exigencies of Stalinist and post-Stalinist politics meant that acknowledging relations in the USA was not wise. Or he was just mad at her. He was only 6 when his 17-year old sister and presumable mother-surrogate vanished. Sister Sofia, just 3 years older than he, wasn’t going to fill that gap. And by the end of the Cold War he and Lena were both long gone. There would never be glasnost between them. The only photo Lena would ever have of Beryl was the much-handled one of an 18-year old boy.