Don’t be fooled by the official French record of my war service, which states I was born in Markovits, Poland, on November 25th 1847, the son of Israel Brodzky and Emilie Gerviskoski. Markorvits does not exist. I made it up. The term is a Russian patronymic. It means the son of Mark. My father Israel, the son of Mark, was therefore Israel Markorvits. I chose Markorvits as the fictitious place of my birth because, no matter what my circumstances, father’s patronymic would be easy to remember.
The claim of my descent from Meyer Schor or Mark Brodzky is an extremely interesting one. He was the patriarch of the famous Brodzky family of Kiev, which by the late nineteenth century had become perhaps the richest family in Russia. Mark Brodzky had five sons; Abraham, Isaac, Israel and Joseph named sequentially after the Jewish patriarchs in the Bible, and Solomon named after the wisest of Jewish kings. All were successful merchants who got their good start in the lucrative trade of alcoholic beverages but Israel (1823-1888) and his sons Lazar (1848-1904) and Lev (1852-1923) became business magnates. Israel expanded from liquor into sugar and during the 1870s and 1880s developed a network of sugar refineries that stretched from his new home in Kiev to as far as Odessa, enabling him to rapidly establish control over a quarter of Imperial Russia’s sugar production. Lazar proved an even more aggressive businessman than his father. He expanded the sugar empire which he inherited, becoming known as the “Sugar King of the South” in the process, and also branched out into milling and boat building. He owned three houses in Kiev, his home base. Not one to limit his business commitments he developed an interest in that city’s major urban technological developments, becoming a main shareholder in the tramways, the gasworks and the sewerage facility. This tycoon, with the Midas touch, made a huge fortune inside a decade of his father’s death and then devoted himself to philanthropy. Indeed, it is for this philanthropy that he and his brother Lev are best remembered today.
The Brodzkys of Kiev were generous contributors to Russian and Jewish cultural and welfare institutions. Their particular leaning was towards medical and educational facilities. They funded the Bacteriological Institute, the Kiev Society for the Struggle against Contagious Diseases, the Tuberculosis Sanatorium, the Obstetric Clinic, the Kiev Red Cross and the Jewish Hospital. They donated the Kiev Polytechnic Institute, the Trade School for Jewish Boys, and the new Kiev Synagogue of 1898. They gave freely to the Literacy Society, the People’s Club and numerous other charities. And when Lazar the “Sugar King” ironically died of sugar diabetes, he left the city 500,000 Roubles to build a new covered market specifically designed to prolong the preservation of foodstuffs, and provided from its profits, a perpetual income for some of his favourite Jewish charities.
Such was the fame of Israel, Lazar, and Lev Brodzky in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century that they became an integral part of its Jewish Folklore. Numerous anecdotes and jests were told about them. Such a tale follows.
THE MILLIONAIRE BRODZKY, in the course of his business travels, was required to spend the night in a small Ukrainian township. He was greeted with enthusiasm by one and all and directed to the most comfortable inn. When he arose in the morning he descended to the dining area where he ordered two eggs for breakfast. On completing his meal the innkeeper presented him with a bill for twenty roubles. Brodzky was quite taken by surprise. “Are eggs rare in these parts?” he questioned. “No, but Brodzkys are!” the innkeeper replied.
It is true that I claim to be a son of Israel Brodzky. But there is, to my best of my knowledge, no surviving written evidence in which I claim to be a half brother of Lazar and Lev. The reason that I say half brother is that their mother was Chaya Charal and not Bella Czerwynkowsky. I am the right age to have been a son of Israel Brodzky. My birthday is halfway between Lazar’s and Lev’s. My biographer believes that Israel Brodzky had a mistress who he set up in one of the cities he visited on business. This is not beyond the realms of possibility. The Brodzkys had extensive business interests throughout Europe and were always travelling abroad. Stanley Robboy, a latter day descendent known to my biographer, named Vienna, Paris, Brussels and Basel as the cities they most frequently visited.
Let’s talk about mistresses in connection with a Jew like Israel Brodzky. The Seventh Commandment, “Thou shall not commit adultery,” is the biblical law in relation to forbidden sex. If a man, either single or married, sleeps with a woman married to somebody else, then both parties are guilty of adultery. It is solely the marital state of the woman that determines whether or not adultery has taken place. If a man sleeps with an unmarried woman then no adultery or forbidden sex has taken place. The man is theoretically permitted to take the woman as a first or subsequent wife, should he so desire, as biblical law has always permitted polygamy. In the year 1000 Rabbi Gershom ben Judah of Mainz issued a decree establishing monogamy as the sole practice for Jews in Christian countries. This was introduced to combat accusations that Jews have a lower code of morality than their Christian neighbours. But despite this edict a Jew who preferred to relate to biblical law rather than to the law of the land, could, in conscience, morally justify himself, while married, to having a single woman as his mistress.
Israel’s immediately older brother Isaac had a wife named Bella whose surname is no longer remembered and a son named Manue of whom, likewise, little is known. My biographer asked. “Could this Manue be Maurice in light of the fact that he had two older sisters called Anna and Sophie?” I had alluded to two older sisters in my memoir Ben Israel. But surely a man of my sophistication would know if his father’s name was Isaac or Israel and why should I substitute as my father, one son of Meyer Schor for another?
One thing is certain. A Jewish lad educated in six languages and studying medicine at the Sorbonne in 1868 is unlikely to be a poor and ignorant man’s son.
From the age of thirty months I was entrusted to the full-time care of a Hebrew tutor. After that my parents visited me rarely and then only briefly. My master was very strict, short tempered and beat me frequently. For four and a half years he alone conducted my education. The only language that we spoke was Hebrew and by seven years of age I had become quite fluent in that ancient language. My schooling was then suddenly liberalised. I was sent to a German speaking secular school during the day, but despite this, my rigorous Jewish education continued outside of school hours. Talmud was added to Hebrew and Torah and these studies now occupied three hours in the morning before school, two hours in the afternoon after school, and from eight till ten at night. The only respite I had was six hours of sleep.
My secular and religious tutors were as day and night. The teacher at the secular school was gentle and encouraging and when I performed well he showered me with praise. In contrast I began to see my Hebrew tutor as a tyrant and a brute. I began to hate him, his Hebrew, and his Jewish religion. I could not dissociate Judaism from the Hebrew language as the two had always been taught me, one in connection with the other.
Things changed dramatically once I was ten years old. My mother informed me that my father, a wealthy Hamburg banker, whom I had seldom seen, had died following a long illness. He had left her property valued at one hundred thousand pounds sterling on the verbal understanding that she not remarry and that she keep our family and the estate intact. She removed me from the house of my tutor and I went to live with her in Vienna.
My biographer does not accept that my father died. He believes that mother’s large inheritance represented a more than generous settlement at the termination of a long-term de facto relationship. For him the co-existence of two immensely wealthy Israel Brodzkys at the same time seems improbable.
Eighteen months later mother married and we moved to Berlin. I took an instant dislike to her new husband. To call him father was out of the question and time did little to change my mind. Mother did her best to convince me that he was a fine, learned, cultured gentleman but to no avail. I desperately wanted to get away from him and, being used to not living at home, begged to go to boarding school.
I was sent to Highgate Grammar School in London for four years. Mother thought