Catastroika. Charles Rammelkamp

      when Maria’d separated from Boris Solovyov,

      she and her two daughters lived with him again,

      in Berlin. Her daughters’ names?

      Tatyana and Maria, after the Tsar’s children.

      But me? I may have been a landsman,

      but I never felt I could approach him.

      “Quite a nasty man,” the Okhrana reported,

      and if you can’t believe the secret police,

      who can you believe?

      The Decembrists

      It was seventy years before I was even born,

      but my uncle told me,

      when I was a boy in Kiev,

      about the aristocratic officers

      who rebelled on Senate Square

      in St. Petersburg, in December, 1825,

      advocating for a constitution,

      the end of serfdom, basic liberties.

      The Tsar, Nicholas I, shut it down so fast

      it was like dousing a candle in a pail of water.

      The leaders were either exiled to Siberia

      or executed as traitors,

      but they became martyrs

      for all future revolutionaries

      dreaming of radical change.

      As the poet, Prince Alexander Odoevsky, wrote:

      Iz iskry vozgoritsa plamya –

      “The spark will kindle a flame.”

      Lenin’s magazine, iskra – spark –

      took its name from the verse.

      “Not that it did us much good,”

      Uncle Lev added, meaning the Jews,

      “but even a little less pressure

      of the boot on our necks

      is always welcome.”

      Narodnaya Volya

      Papa and Uncle Lev never forgave

      “The People’s Will” for assassinating Alexander II.

      Hailed as Alexander the Liberator,

      the Tsar’d liberated the serfs in 1861,

      reorganized the judicial system,

      promoted university education,

      sold Alaska to America.

      Life improved even for us Jews.

      There’d been three or four attempts on his life already

      before Narodnaya Volya succeeded in Saint Petersburg,

      March, 1881, that snake, Nikolai Rysakov tossing a bomb

      when the bulletproof carriage crossed the Catherine Canal

      over the Pevchesky Bridge, the streets flanked

      by narrow pavements: the most vulnerable spot.

      The bomb killed a Cossack,

      but the emperor was unhurt, though shaken.

      Still, he left the carriage to inspect the damage.

      Another People’s Will stooge, Ignacy Hryniewiesky,

      hurled another bomb, shouting,

      “It is too early to thank God!”

      His Majesty’s legs shattered, blood pouring,

      his feeble cry for help came like a kitten’s mew.

      Scattered over the snow, bits of clothing,

      epaulets, sabers, bloody chunks of human flesh.

      Alexander’s brutal son, Alexander III, took over,

      reversing so many of his father’s reforms,

      life a greater hardship for Jews especially.

      Fourteen years after the assassination,

      at my birth in Kiev, over Mama’s mild objections,

      Papa named me for the Liberator.

      May Laws

      Talk about a tyrant.

      Alexander III really had it in for the Jews,

      blaming us for his father’s death,

      all because a single Jew, Gesya Gelfman,

      knew the “People’s Will” assassins.

      No sooner was Alexander III installed

      than his minister of internal affairs,

      Nikolai Ignatyev, enacted the May Laws,

      restrictions on the freedom of Jews.

      We were forbidden from settling

      outside the Pale of Settlement,

      denied the right to own mortgages,

      restricted from having powers of attorney

      to manage real property: crippled financially.

      Of course, we could not conduct business on Sundays.

      Quotas limited the number of Jewish children

      admitted to high school or university,

      ten percent within the Pale, five outside,

      only three percent in Moscow and St. Petersburg,

      and then in 1891 all Jews deported from Moscow anyway.

      And then there were the pogroms,

      more than two hundred

      the first two years of the bastard’s reign.

      The Kiev pogrom of 1881 went on

      for three days, my father told me,

      leaflets from the workers union stirring them up:

      “Do not beat the Jew because he is a Jew

      but because he is robbing the people,

      sucking the blood of the working man.”