The House of Cards

When I was growing up, few things worried me more than the state of my father’s back. He suffered from regular bouts of backache—what the Russians call radikulit—that made him walk like a penguin and that no doctor could remedy. His backache would especially act up on the eve of inclement weather, which, in our parts, lasted a good two-thirds of the year. In addition to walking, the condition made other kinds of movement, especially that of bowels, quite painful for him. The strain involved exacerbated his backache, which further aggravated his constipation, which, in turn, made his backache even worse. The hours he spent on the communal toilet trying to relieve himself—preceded by imbibing generous amounts of castor oil—left him drained and dispirited, and led to skirmishes with sosedi, the apartment roommates who claimed the throne for themselves. At such times I knew better than to get in his path, for this normally cheery, soft-spoken man, now reduced to a state of sullen gloom, was prone to lose his temper and give me a drubbing at the slightest of pretexts.

For a long time I had remained ignorant of the true origins of my father’s ailment. He himself had vaguely alluded to it as frontovoy, a war injury. The story went that once, while on a reconnaissance mission near the river Dnieper in the Ukraine, he had stumbled upon an SS patrol, and had to dive into the ice-cold waters of the river, where he spent an hour or so hiding in the reeds. The ordeal had cost him his sciatica. And at that the matter rested until one day when, as a young man of twenty-one, I was about to leave Russia and my parental home for good, and my father and I had a real heart-to-heart. It was during that conversation that he disclosed to me a series of episodes from his and my mother’s past that helped explain not only his own predicament, but some of the tribulations that I, their son, had endured as a Jew in Soviet Russia.

 

His story went like this. When my parents first got married, they had no place of their own. This was in Leningrad, USSR, at the end of the 1940s. The city had just begun to recover from the devastation left by the siege, and what with the thousands of veterans and evacuees that had poured back into it after the war, housing was all but impossible to come by. Prior to the marriage, my father, then a meat procurement manager for the local Catering Administration, had been staying in an annex adjacent to his sister’s basement room on the Fontanka river embankment. My mother, thirteen years his junior, had recently finished high school and was still living with her own mother, Leyah, in a small, canyon-shaped room in a communal apartment on Trade Unions Boulevard, in the city’s historic center.

The newlyweds got on a waiting list for a single room. In the...