“Each of my grandmothers was burdened with a conscience, which meant that both of them at crucial points in their lives tried to find a way to make an honest peace with the system,” writes Masha Gessen in her book “Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler’s War and Stalin’s Peace.”
The book is a memoir of two Jewish women who suffered not only the waves of war, oppression and bitter poverty that swept Eastern Europe in the mid-20th century, but the scourge of anti-Semitism as well.
Each was brought up by adoring parents in a relatively healthy environment. Each had a special gift for language. Ester Gessen was born in 1923 in Bialystok, Poland, the center of Jewish life in Europe between world wars. When it was invaded by the Nazis, she was yanked into an officer’s car — not to be raped or killed, but to act as translator for the conquerors. In 1940, she immigrated to the Soviet Union to study at the Moscow Institute of History, Philosophy and Literature.
A separate section is devoted to her father, Jakub Goldberg — a larger-than-life figure, physically and otherwise, who served on the Jewish Council of the Bialystok ghetto during the Nazi occupation. “One survivor remembers my great-grandfather as an organizer of the resistance effort; another as a deluded coward,” writes the author. “He was neither deluded nor a coward.”
Her other grandmother, Rozalia (Ruzya) Solodnik, was born in the Soviet Union in 1920 and grew up at “a time of unrelenting romanticism,” against the dark backdrop of anti-Semitism and other abuses under the old regime. Another era of darkness would soon follow.
The persona of Josef Stalin broods like an evil deity over the book. The author expounds on the horrors of his regime, which targeted Jews as “rootless cosmopolitans.” He pursued an “anti-cosmopolitan campaign” to expel them all, which was halted only by his death.
Ruzya worked as a government censor, a job that haunted her with guilt. Her lifelong friend Ester, however, defied the efforts of a Major Gurov of Stalin’s secret police force to recruit her as an informer. Both infuriated and smitten by her, he pulled out his gun at one point and yelled, “I ought to shoot you now!” She escaped his clutches by marrying a war hero and eventually found a job as Polish translator for an international magazine, which she would keep for 40 years.
The child of Ester’s son and Ruzya’s daughter, Masha Gessen has always been close to her grandmothers. She and her parents immigrated to the United States when she was 14; she returned to Russia 10 years later. She presently lives in Moscow with her partner and their two children as a correspondent for U.S. News and World Report.
Gessen shares her grandmothers’ linguistic ability, writing in English as though it were her native tongue. Her book reads like a journal, each section headed by a precise date, with an air of breathless immediacy that relieves its melancholy chronicle of suffering. It provides drama with the stories of the young men Ester and Ruzya first loved, men who were killed in the war while still fired up with idealism; of lovers’ trysts and family life in overcrowded living quarters. Her book is a valuable story, not just about Jews attacked by anti-Semites, but about highly intelligent and principled individuals in a world filled with unreason.
“Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler’s War and Stalin’s Peace,” by Masha Gessen (384 pages, Dial Press, $24.00).