Everywhere it was a time of collapse: powers were falling, one after another, two ancient oaks (saplings when Caesar was crossing the Rubicon, said the Ottawa newscaster) came heaving down, struck from crown to root by a frenzy of lightning. For days the bitter smell of charred bark and ashen leaves drifted past nearby towns, arusing the nostrils of nervous dogs. In New York a pair of famous editors, intimidating and weighty as emperors, in a flash of the guillotine were suddenly displaced; overnight their names tumbled into blackest obscurity. The young ruled, ruled absolutely; the outmoded old were forgotten, they were diminished and dismissed, and whoever spoke of their erstwhile renown spoke of vapor.
And on the earth's far-off other cheek, beyond the Pripet Marshes, beyond the Dnieper and the Volga, in the very eye of Moscow, where the cold cellar walls of Lubyanka Prison were wont to break out in pustules of bloody mold, like executioner's mushrooms, Communism was cracking, falling. The Soviet Union was on its way out, impaired, impaled, stumbling, exhausted, moribund--though who, in the ninth decade of the twentieth century, dared to suspect the death of the Kremlin?
Yet there were signs: fascism was pressing through the fissures. In Red Square, a mocking phalanx of blackshirts openly paraded. Thugs invaded Writers' Union, yelling insults to Jews. Fossil Cossacks, old Czarist pogromchiks, renewed, restored!
Ruth Puttermesser, white-haired, in her sixties--retired, unmarried, cranky in the way of a woman alone--had no premonition about the demise of the Soviet Union; yet she believed in collapse. The skin on the inside of her elbows drooped into pleats; her jowl was loose and bunched, as if governed by a drawstring; the pockets under her eyes hung, and the ophthalmologist, attempting to dilate her pupils, had to lift the lids with deliberate fingers. All things fallen, elasticity gone. Age had turned Puttermesser on its terrible hinge.
She was as old now as her long-dead father: her father who, fleeing the brutish Russia of the Czars, had left behind parents, sisters, brothers--Puttermesser's rumored Moscow relations, aunts, cousins, a schoolboy uncle, all swallowed up in the Bolshevik silence, dwindled now into their archaic names and brittle cardboard-framed photographs. Puttermesser's Moscow grandmother, a blotched brown blur in a drawer: wrinkled Tatarish forehead, sunken toothless mouth; a broken crone, dim as legend. "Do not write anymore," Puttermesser's Moscow grandmother, a blotched brown blur in a drawer: wrinkled Tatarish forehead, sunken toothless mouth; a broken crone, dim as legend. "Do not write anymore," Puttermesser's grandmother pleaded as the thirties wore on: "My eyes are gone. I am old and blind. I cannot read." This was the last letter from Moscow; it lay under the old Russian photos in an envelope blanketed by coarsely printed stamps. Each stamp displayed the identical profile of a man with a considerable mustache. Stalin. Puttermesser knew that the poet Osip Mandelstam had likened that mustache to a cockroach: whereupon Stalin ordered him murdered. Isaac Babl was murdered after months of torture and a phony trial. Mikhoels the Yiddish actor was murdered. All the Russian Yiddish poets were murdered on a single August night in 1952. Shot in the cellars of Lubyanka.
And between Moscow and New York, a steady mute fright. The hidden warning in Puttermesser's grandmother's plaint was clear. Stop! We are afraid of a letter from America! They will take us for spies, you endanger us! Keep away! The old woman was famous among her children for eyesight so sharp and precise that she could see the altertly raised ears of a squirrel on a high branch in a faraway clump of trees. Puttermesser's father too had owned such a pair of eyes. Blue, pale as watery ink. Her poor orphaned papa, cut off forever from the ties of his youth: from his little brother Velvl, ten years old, his head in the photo shaved in the old Russian style, his school uniform high-collared and belted, with a row of metal buttons marching down his short chest. A family sundered for seventy years--the Great War, the Revolution, Stalin's furies, the Second World War, the Cold War: all had intervened. Puttermesser's papa, dying old of stroke, longed for his mother, for Velvl, for his sisters Fanya, Sonya, Reyzl, for his brothers Aaron and Mordecai. Alone in America with no kin. Never again to hear his father's fevered voice. Continents and seas lay between Moscow and New York, and a silence so dense and veiling that in the three decades since her papa's death Puttermesser had almost forgotten she had Russian relations. They were remote in every sense. She never thought of them.
Cynthia Ozick - The Puttermesser Papers
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