The Tallis (excerpt) |
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| Without a word, Sergei turned his horse around and galloped away from the town, his troop following after a moment. The black bag with its despised contents, so inappropriate for a Red Army officer to possess, stayed with him through the rest of the civil war. It was in his suitcase when he married the firebrand Sarah Isaakovna in Leningrad three years later. It was on a back closet shelf in his apartment when they took him away twelve years after that, before the eyes of his little Volodya, named after Vladimir Ilyich himself. It was there a few years later still when an Einsatzkommando lined the shtetl wraiths up along a convenient ditch just outside town - there was no need for the victims even to dig their own graves. |
| Sarah Isaakovna and Volodya knew nothing of that. They were too busy scrounging in garbage heaps along with the rest of Leningrad as the Nazi siege dragged on. A day came when Sarah was too weak to leave the apartment. She handed the black bag to her twelve-year-old son, who weighed no more than an eight year old, and as if revealing a shameful family secret, told him he was a Jew. Volodya listened with incomprehension, holding the soft thing loosely in his hands. It could not be eaten, that was all he knew. Nevertheless, he kept it with him until the end of the war, kept it hidden among his clothes in the Komsomol Home for War Orphans, and later in the People's Institute for Oil and Gas... |
| Copyright © 1998, Martin J. Gidron. This story appeared in Jewish Currents, May-June 2002. |
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Copyright © 2002, Martin J. Gidron