Disconnected by a Revolution

The black wind that blew through Europe in the first part of the 20th century came early to Belogorodka.

Ikhel Vodonos was born to it. His life began in 1916, a year before the Russian Revolution, in the midst of world war and restless times.

He was, like many of the town’s inhabitants, a Jew, the youngest of 13 children born to Yankel and Reizl Vodonos.

At first, the revolution didn’t mean much more than some new slogans in Belogorodka. Even the pogroms didn’t change.

“Bandits are coming!” shouted a neighbor one time when Ikhel was 3 and the family had just sat down to eat.

Yankel and Reizl pulled the children out of the house and hid them in the bushes near the river, where there was no road for the men who hunted Jews to take their horses.

Another time they hid in a Russian neighbor’s house, in a storage cellar surrounded by his provisions. After that pogrom, the bandits caught Ikhel’s father and cut off his beard, mutilating the pious man’s symbol of his devotion to God.

When Ikhel was 5, his parents had a surprise for him. You have a brother, they said. In America. His name is Joseph. Joseph, they said, had sent money for another brother, Shuki, to come to the United States.

But in the nine years since 1913, when Joseph had sneaked over the Russian border to his new life, attitudes toward foreigners had changed in the place Jewish immigrants called “Columbus’ golden land.”

Americans, even some Jews, no longer wanted all these newcomers, these people willing to work for next to nothing, with their noisy ways. So Shuki went instead to Argentina, where he worked as a Hebrew teacher, living with an Orthodox family.

Shuki waited for several years, but the United States did not ease its borders. Finally, he booked passage for Palestine. He became a farmer, growing oranges and lemons. He changed his last name to the Hebrew Vardi, for a flower growing all around his orchards.

He wrote to Joseph, saying once and for all that he was not coming to America. He wrote to his parents, asking about Ikhel and the others.

Ikhel missed Shuki, and dreamed of Joseph. He could not imagine what his mysterious brother might be like. He corresponded with Joseph’s first son, Louis, who was about Ikhel’s age.

The family struggled. Ikhel was 8 years old before he saw a loaf of white bread. He asked his mother what it was.

He had been studying at the town’s heder, or religious school, under the tutelage of his pious older brother, Leib, but now, under orders from the Marxist government, he was sent to public school. Against Yankel’s wishes, he would learn the secular arts of mathematics and history, and become skilled in reading and writing Russian.

Ikhel also would be taught that religion was foolish superstition, a comfort to the very old, people like his father, who attended synagogue every day. Religion was of no use to the new Soviet youth.

For many years, he would believe that.

In 1929, the Soviets began to collectivize farms and businesses, and Yankel Vodonos lost his general store. Hard times became worse. All of the children except for Ikhel, the youngest, made their way to Moscow, seeking work.

Not too far from Belogorodka, in a famous old Hasidic town called Berdichevin, a 7-year-old girl named Riva Kooperschmidt helped her mother move the family’s belongings into a single room in the large house that had been their home.

It was illegal now to occupy more than a certain amount of space. Four other families moved into Riva’s house, among them a set of cousins whose home the government had confiscated for official use.

Sometimes, the other children in school teased Riva and called her a capitalist. She dressed a little better than they did, even after collectivization. And she had gone to a private kindergarten.

But after her father lost his shop, an appliance store in Moscow, under collectivization, she was no better off than the rest of the children. Her father became a shoe repairman, and his earnings were meager.

Even before collectivization, food had become scarce. Agricultural policies had led to a shortage of grain in 1927, and by 1929, the government implemented rationing of meat, poultry and fat.

In Belogorodka, Ikhel continued to attend school. But he could not write to Louis and another new nephew, Sam, and tell of the shortages, because the regime had severely curtailed communication with the outside.

The family struggled through. Ikhel and his parents shivered in winter as condensation made icicles on the inside walls of their wood house, and read in the evenings by the light of a single kerosene lamp.

In 1930, a package made it past the censors and the thieves. It was from Shuki in Israel.

The box gave forth a smell sweet and tart, like a magic candy that makes the eater tingle behind the ears. Inside lay the fruits of Shuki’s orchards: yellow lemons. And with them were deep brown chocolates.

Ikhel, at 14, had never before seen such riches. He smelled them and tasted them.

He marveled at their colors and flavors.

It would be 20 years before he served lemons to his own young son, in a cramped Moscow apartment with a low ceiling and crumbling paint.

He would remember the lemons, and the chocolate too, as an old man, retelling the story of his brothers.

In memory, they became more sweet, more pungent, as scarcity over the next few years gave way to famine, and the stirrings of war in Europe grew ever louder.