Midday. HG sipped BSK’s savory sorrel soup and thought of schav the sour and tangy ice cold soup HG’s Mom served on steamy New York summer days. Mom’s soup was a variation of schi, a favorite Russian soup that is made with sorrel and spinach in the summer and cabbage (or sauerkraut) in the winter. Mom also made beet borscht in the summer (always served with a dollop of sour cream) and either a boiled potato or cottage cheese mixed with chopped onions and radish. Winter was time for kapusta, a very filling cabbage and beef soup. Chicken soup was enriched with a ladle of the Russian staple, kasha (buckwheat groats). Smetana (sour cream) is eaten with virtually everything in Russia and Mom followed that custom. All of her cooking was a blend of Russian and Jewish flavors but since she learned to cook from her mother in Belorussia, she favored Russia. HG’s father drank tea Russian-style: a sugar cube clenched in his teeth (sometimes cherry jam was added to the tea). HG’s father home brewed Russian cherry brandy, vishniak. Cherries, soaked and aged in sugared vishniak, were a special treat. (Seven-year-old HG once raided a bowl and had HG’s first, but not last, tipsy experience). Vodka was never seen in HG’s home. Presumably, the family associated it with Russian peasants, Cossacks and violence. The spirit of choice, besides vishniak, was Park & Tilford rye whiskey. HG’s father always had a robust shot before dinner and poured a tiny snifter for little HG (thus beginning a very pleasurable lifetime custom). Yiddish and English were spoken in HG’s home but Mom and Dad switched to Russian when they discussed subjects forbidden to children (sex?). HG’s father was profoundly anti-Communist. A Socialist and a youthful member of the Jewish Labor Bund, he hated Stalin and always called him the Momser (the bastard). “Der Fuhrer Hitler” and “the Momser Stalin”, in his eyes, were equally evil mass murderers. During HG’s youth, HG was more sympathetic to Stalin and Russia. HG cited Russia’s support of the Spanish Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War, the American Communist Party’s battles against racism and the fact that Russia, alone in Europe, was a bulwark against anti-Semitism. HG’s father shook his head and said HG had a good heart but was deceived by Stalin’s propagandists. Just wait, young HG was advised, you will learn the truth about Stalin (“that monster momser.”) Of course, HG’s father who had no formal education but much labor union experience, was correct. Stalin was a monster, responsible for the death of 10,000,000 Ukrainians by famine during his agricultural collectivization program and the death of untold millions of Russians in purges and gulag imprisonment. His destructively wrong headed strategy toward Germany during the early days of World War Two cost millions of Russian lives and could have led to a to a total German conquest of Russia. HG has been immersed in thoughts about Russia since a recent reading of “A Writer At War: A Soviet Journalist With The Red Army, 1941-1945” by Vasily Grossman. A superb war correspondent and great novelist (“Life and Fate” about the siege of Stalingrad), Grossman is particularly moving in depicting the courage of Russian soldiers, often poorly lead (they died by the millions but they defeated the better organized, technically superior Germans). Grossman personalizes combat through the intimate depiction of the participants. A critic described Grossman as “a perceptive observer with an eye for detail.” No writer, in HG’s opinion, has ever had a better grasp of what Grossman called “the brutal truth of war.” His journalistic masterpiece is probably his description of Treblinka, the Nazi death camp (874,000 Jews were murdered there and 2,000 Gypsies). Grossman’s precise detailing of the camp’s operations is a chilling, horrible piece of Holocaust history. After describing one almost inconceivable horror, Grossman writes:”It is infinitely hard even to read this. It is as hard to write it. Someone might ask:’Why write about this, why remember all that?’ It is the writer’s duty to tell this terrible truth, and it is the duty of the reader to learn it. Everyone who would turn away, who would shut his eyes and walk past would insult the memory of the dead.” Given his humanism and his passion for the truth, Grossman became a political outcast in the Soviet Union. It was ruled his novel “Life and Fate” could not be published for over 200 years. In 1961, KGB officers broke into his apartment and seized every copy of the manuscript plus carbon paper and typewriters. However, Grossman had left a copy with a friend and it was eventually smuggled into Switzerland. Published worldwide, it was acclaimed as one of the greatest Russian novels of the twentieth century. It was published in Russia only as communism itself collapsed. Grossman died of stomach cancer in 1964. He was 59, living in poverty. His earlier works were removed from circulation and he believed his great work had been suppressed forever. If you have not read Grossman, do so. He is a treasure.
