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And little Dora? We never spoke about her again. Even Xenia Dim-itrovna never pronounced her name, as though she forgave her for taking her lover but not for disappearing to Warsaw. Instead Xenia raised two dear little birds in a cage on the porch and they thrived until the winter, and in the winter they froze to death. Both of them.

24

MENAHEM GELEHRTER, who wrote the book about the Tarbuth gymnasium (secondary school) in Rovno, was a teacher there himself. He taught Bible, literature, and Jewish history. Among other things in his book I found something of what my mother and her sisters and friends studied as part of their Hebrew curriculum in the 1920s. It included stories from the rabbis, selected poems from the Jewish Golden Age in Spain, medieval Jewish philosophy, collected works of Bialik and Tchernikhowsky and selections from other modern Hebrew writers, and also translations from world literature, including such authors as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Turgenev, Chekhov, Mickiewicz, Schiller, Goethe, Heine, Shakespeare, Byron, Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Jack London, Tagore, Hamsun, the Epic of Gilgamesh in Tchernikhowsky's translation, and so on. The books on Jewish history included Joseph Klausner's History of the Second Temple.

Every day (Aunt Sonia continues), before the day begins, at six or even earlier, I go slowly down the stairs to empty the liner in the garbage can outside. Before I climb up again, I have to rest there for a moment, I have to sit on the low wall by the garbage cans because the stairs leave me breathless. Sometimes I bump into a new immigrant from Russia, Varia, who sweeps the pavement in Wessely Street each morning. Over there, in Russia, she was a big boss. Here—she sweeps the pavements. She has hardly learned any Hebrew. Sometimes the two of us stay for a few minutes by the garbage cans and talk a little in Russian.

Why is she a street sweeper? To keep two talented daughters at the university, one in chemistry, one in dentistry. Husband—she has none. Family in Israel—she has none either. Food—they save on that too. Clothes—they save on. Accommodation—they share a single room. All so that for tuition and textbooks they won't be short. It was always like that with Jewish families: they believed that education was an investment in the future, the only thing that no one can ever take away from your children, even if, heaven forbid, there's another war, another revolution, another migration, more discriminatory laws—your diploma you can always fold up quickly, hide it in the seams of your clothes, and run away to wherever Jews are allowed to live.

The Gentiles used to say about us: the diploma—that's the Jews' religion. Not money, not gold. The diploma. But behind this faith in the diploma there was something else, something more complicated, more secret, and that is that girls in those days, even modern girls, like us, girls who went to school and then to university, were always taught that women are entitled to an education and a place outside the home—but only until the children are born. Your life is your own only for a short time: from when you leave your parents' home to your first pregnancy. From that moment, from the first pregnancy, we had to begin to live our lives only around the children. Just like our mothers. Even to sweep pavements for our children, because your child is the chick and you are—what? When it comes down to it, you are just the yolk of the egg, you are what the chick eats so as to grow big and strong. And when your child grows up—even then you can't go back to being yourself, you simply change from being a mother to being a grandmother, whose task is simply to help her children bring up their children.

True, even then there were quite a few women who made careers for themselves and went out into the world. But everybody talked about them behind their backs: look at that selfish woman, she sits in meetings while her poor children grow up in the street and pay the price.