When I was little, I had Jewish relatives. They were the daughters of my great-grandmother’s sister, who helped my grandmother get a job at the Transsignal factory in Kyiv. My grandmother worked at that factory from the age of 14 until her retirement. This saved her life for the second time, and she didn’t die of hunger during the war. The first time her life was saved was by the sentimentality of a policeman who helped her, her brother, and her mother escape from execution. My great-grandmother won at Nazi bingo and was not only Jewish but also the wife of a commissar. And the world was not without “good” people, especially since my great-grandmother had cows on the farm.
My grandmother greatly valued her cousins from Kyiv. They were, in fact, the only adults she could trust. Therefore, no family gathering was complete without them; our summer house was always open to them, where they spent their vacations and also participated in my upbringing. There were four sisters: Aunt Rakhil, Aunt Manya, Aunt Udy (Adolina), and Aunt Fira (Zemfira) Brisovna. They were called aunts because my mother referred to them as (cousin) aunts. Unfortunately, I only know that Aunt Rakhil had mental health issues and ended her life in a psychiatric hospital. Aunt Manya and Aunt Fira were childless. Aunt Manya and Uncle Abrasha (her husband) left my grandmother an apartment in Darnytsia, which upset Aunt Fira greatly, and after arguing with everyone, she moved to Israel to live out her days. Aunt Udy married a non-Jew and they had children. Her husband, Vladimir Nikitich, outlived her and, being somewhat unsociable, did not maintain connections, and their children were far away, so I hardly ever saw them. I remember that while relaxing at the summer house with Aunt Udy and me, he showed me how to make and eat soup from just one sausage and a boiled potato. Of course, Aunt Udy wasn’t at the summer house that day.
For me, they were elderly women speaking with that very Jewish accent and Yiddish-inflected Russian that Russians love to mock in chauvinistic jokes about Jews. Aunt Fira was the most carefree and energetic among them. She was unmarried, and her life was full of adventures, including a trip to the Jewish Autonomous Oblast for a Komsomol railway construction project and a mistake in calculating the curve of the track (five straight and one curved or five curved and one straight), for which she almost got shot. They would have shot her if the coin she tossed had landed on tails.
My aunt Fira used to call me Romelè. It sounded like [Ghómelee]. Aunt Fira is sitting on a deck chair at the dacha, sunbathing with a newspaper stuck to her nose. “Romelè, come here, my boy. Do you see that bucket over there? Don’t forget about the accent and the inability to pronounce the letter ‘r.’ Go and run to the bucket of water. Good boy. Now take that rag and soak it in the bucket. What a good boy! Now take that rag and bring it up the stairs. My clever boy! Now wipe the top step with that rag. Excellent. Now go down and rinse the rag in the bucket. You are such a capable boy, Romelè! Now go up and wipe the second step as well…”
— Nastya (my grandmother) Come here quickly! Look, Nastya, we cleaned the stairs with Gomele!
Aunt Fira loved watching my grandfather work in the garden. For her, it was magic. Grandfather grafted trees, and then the grafts took root, resulting in one tree bearing several varieties of fruit. One day, she watched him for a long time. Then she walked with me through the forest to the river. By a tree that had been vandalized with an axe by some hooligans, she stopped and said to me in a teaching tone: ““Look, Romel, the forester got vaccinated.”
It was all the more charming because there couldn’t possibly be a forest strip 300-500 meters wide between the dam and the ranger’s creek. But it turned out that you could get lost there if you were Aunt Fira. I was five years old, doing what I was told and going where I was led. The only thing I said to Aunt Fira at the time was that we had already seen this particular stump about five times, and I wondered if she really wanted to reach the creek with me or if this was just a game. An hour later, we arrived at the creek, but not at the usual spot. Now I understand that we had walked along the forest strip for an hour instead of across it. Then Aunt Fira convinced a motorboat operator to take us to a familiar place, specifically to the dock for river trams. From there, coming from a completely different direction than anyone would expect, we returned to the dacha. Our relatives were already worried about our long absence and greeted us on the dam just as they were about to start searching. Aunt Fira felt like Magellan and Vasco da Gama at the same time. And from how this story was recounted later, I realized that yes, Aunt Fira was a unique person.
— Romela, how is your neighbor at the dacha doing?
— What the heck, Aunt Fira?
— Well, that mute plumber!
“We don’t have any one-armed plumbers!”
— Well, I forgot what his name is, the plot of land along the dam…
— Maybe a one-eyed firefighter?
— Oh, Romela, what a mess!!!
“What’s the difference?” — this was clearly an echo of some processes in the neural system of her brain. She constantly mixed everything up, like children confuse Spain and Italy or Iran and Iraq. One day, she needed to go to the tailor’s shop located downstairs from her apartment, but she had just washed her hair and didn’t want to go out with wet hair, not knowing the shop’s hours. In the USSR, there were no decent hair dryers at that time. So Aunt Fira decided to call information. The phone connection was poor, and Aunt Fira had such a thick accent that no one, except for her close ones, could distinguish her “r” from the fricative “g.” Everything was done to ensure that Aunt Fira could get the information she needed.
— Good day!
— Excuse me, do you happen to know the phone number for the “Goose” tailor shop?
— There’s no such tailor! Short beeps. Aunt Fira doesn’t give up and calls again. And again, short beeps. On the third try, she changed her strategy:
— Young lady, please don’t hang up! I’ve already called you several times and you keep hanging up on me. — Aunt Fira didn’t realize that there was more than one operator.
— Yes, what do you want!
— I called the Gus atelier, and you said there’s no such atelier, but you see, I live in this building. I just washed my hair and want to know when they open.
— What’s the address?
— Air Fleet Prospect so-and-so
— Maybe Lybed?
— Oh, girl, what a beauty!!!