It is hard enough for any grandchild to edit and publish a brutally frank memoir by a cherished forebear.
But it must have been especially difficult for Hebrew University historian Dr Michael Beizer, who believes the writings of his grandmother Doba-Mera (Miriam) Medvedeva are unusual, not only for their valuable historic content but as an accurate record “of a Lithuanian-Belorussian Jewish shtetl at the turn of the twentieth century – “written by a poor, uneducated woman”.
Equally impressive, he says. “is the power of her writing. Seen through the eyes of this unfortunate girl, shtetl (small town) life loses the romantic aura ascribed to it by people who had good lives there, as well as by postwar scholars carried away by nostalgia. It is striking how a simple woman with no conception of feminism understood herself as a strong personality with things to say, whose experience could prove useful to her descendants. Her native intelligence and awareness are impressive”.
Beizer and his co-editor and translator, Alice Nakhimovsky have published Daughter of the Shtetl, The Memoirs of Doba-Mera Medvedeva, in a series, Jews of Russia & Eastern Europe and Their Legacy produced by The Academic Studies Press and sponsored by Boston College, USA.
In his introductory essay, Beizer explains that Doba-Mera’s father, Izrail´-Vel´ka, was an Enlightenment-influenced melamed (traditional children’s religious teacher), descended from famed 16th-17th century Talmudist Rabbi Yoel Sirkis.
But what could and should have been a relatively happy, fulfilling girlhood in a tiny town with a majority Jewish populace ‘on the edge of the earth’ turned sour when first her mother, Rokhl´-Leia Ben´iaminovna (née Medvedeva) died when she was aged only 11 and then her father, when she was aged 16.
Her father had meanwhile remarried and she was made to feel an ‘outcast’, forced into a Cinderella existence where she encountered “extreme need, illness, greed and wretchedness; very rarely, human kindness and sympathy”.
‘“I had no childhood, only years during which I was a child,”’ Doba-Mera later recalled.
Beizer makes us question how much his grandmother was a victim of circumstance and to what extent she was imprisoned by her own personality.
While like all natural writers, an innate compulsion may have sparked Doba-Mera’s scribblings, it was surely unalloyed fear that caused her to destroy the first draft.
“In 1939, at the age of forty-seven, Grandmother decided that she had seen enough of life to begin a memoir. When she finished, she destroyed her account of the interwar Soviet period, which is a great pity but hardly surprising, if one considers the terrifying nature of those years for all of Leningrad …
“In addition, why remind the children that Papa had been a lishenets (deprived of the right to vote in the Soviet Union) and had been ‘purged’ from the Party?
“‘That’s what all honorable people did then,” explained his son, “because if the writer was arrested, then everybody mentioned in the memoir would end up in the cross-hairs of the security police”’.
After the war, as a sign of gratitude for the safe home-coming of her sons and sons-in-law, Doba-Mera returned to traditional Judaism, observing Sabbath, Passover and the dietary laws.
In 1958 during the Khrushchev Thaw, she also resumed her diary, describing her golden wedding anniversary and her complicated relationships with her children and husband. Despite countless travails and disputes, the couple’s marriage survived an extraordinary 62 years!
Perhaps understandably, Beizer leaves for another book what lay beyond an ‘impenetrable green fence’ in the woods near his grandparents’ retirement home at Levashovo, outside Leningrad (St Petersburg): It surrounded a former execution and burial site for twenty-eight thousand ‘enemies of the people’.
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* Dr Michael Beizer, born in St Petersburg in 1950, served from 1982 - 1987 as coordinator of the city’s ‘home refuseniks’' seminar on Jewish history and culture. He emigrated to Israel in 1987.
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**Daughter of the Shtetl: The Memoirs of Doba-Mera Medvedeva is available from The Academic Studies Press in paperback and hardback formats from $ 21.95.
© Natalie Wood (27July 2019)
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