with the Sabbath candles. It was a small pogrom. Only two Jews died that night. As they walked the twelve miles to Pidvocholesk, Ludwik’s father told him not to worry. Things were much worse in Lemberg and Kiev.
Ludwik and his friends, inspired by Adam, were determined to escape from Pidvocholesk. They had all done well at school. Their families had managed to raise enough money to send them to the university in Vienna. The year was 1911.
Freddy, Levy and Larin studied medicine. Ludwik, despite the strong objection of his parents, who wanted him to become a lawyer, was studying German literature, raving about Heine and writing poetry. Schmelka Livitsky was a mathematician, but spent most of his time playing the violin.
At first they met every evening to exchange experiences, talk about home, complain about how expensive everything was and feel sorry for themselves. Apart from Livitsky, none of them could afford tailored clothes, and they attracted attention when they were huddled round a cafe table noisily drinking their coffee and speaking Yiddish. They were all quick to detect imagined slights. They wanted to outgrow their provincialism overnight.
After the first few weeks their meetings became less frequent. They were working hard and beginning to find new friends. Soon their contact with each other became limited to waving at each other across tables in their favourite coffee houses.
Ludwik was bewitched by Vienna. He was caught up in the amazing whirl of history. Everything appeared to have its opposite. The anti-Semitic Social Christians were being confronted by the Socialists. Schoenberg had unleashed his ultra-modernist fusillades against the Viennese waltz and a musical establishment happily buried in the past. Freud was challenging medical orthodoxy.
Ludwik was excited. He could not then see that what he was witnessing was nothing less than the disintegration of the old order. Unlike their English and French counterparts, the Austrian bourgeois elite had been unable either to fuse with or destroy their aristocracy. Instead it fell on its knees and sought to mimic its betters. The Emperor’s authority was unchallenged, except from below: protofascists on the one side and socialists on the other.
Unable fully to comprehend the dynamics of this world, Ludwik sought refuge in the cultural section of the Viennese press. He was attracted to the feuilleton style and its leading practitioners. These were guys who specialized in cultivating their personal feelings and making the readers feel they were getting insights into the true nature of reality. Ludwik was impressed. The literary tone appealed to him greatly, as did the narcissism.
Ludwik often thought of home. He missed his mother and her meat dumplings. He missed the little pastries his Aunt Galina used to bake for special days, and he even missed his father’s bantering tone. Late at night, all alone in his tiny room, he would sit and write what he thought were clever letters to impress his parents, mimicking the style of the feuilletonists.
The flippancy and false tone depressed his parents. Ludwik’s father was a private tutor who earned a little money teaching music to the children of the Polish gentry. His mother made bread and cheesecakes for the Pidvocholesk bakery. Both had worked hard to send their favourite son to Vienna. Ludwik’s brother, in sharp contrast, had been apprenticed to a watchmaker uncle in Warsaw and was doing well.
How long this would have gone on and where the five Ls would have ended I do not know. Two things happened to end their obsessive self-contemplation and push them in the direction of reality. The first was Krystina. The second was the outbreak of the First World War.
Krystina entered their lives in the summer of 1913. The month was June, the days were long, the sky was blue and the nights were balmy. Freddy had sighted her one evening on the pavement where they were sipping iced lemon drinks. His attempts to engage her in conversation had failed miserably. Ludwik had noticed she was reading a pamphlet by Kautsky. He had walked up to her and asked if he could borrow it for the evening. This approach had been more successful. She agreed to join their table, but insisted on paying for her own tea.
She was a few years older than them and possessed a fierce and combative intelligence. She was also very beautiful, but in a distant sort of a way, and she disliked flattery. She had grown up in Warsaw, but had studied philosophy in Berlin and attended the study classes organized by the German Social Democratic Party. When she returned home she had become a Socialist and joined the underground Polish party. Her authority had been conferred by the four months she had spent in prison. All this she told them, but every attempt to question her about her personal life failed. She never talked to them about her parents or her lovers. They were not even sure if Krystina was her real name.
They all fell in love with her. Yes, even Ludwik, though later, when his wife Lisa questioned him about Krystina, he used to protest a bit too vigorously and say: ‘Of course I love her. How could one not? But I’m not in love with her. A very big difference.’
One evening after they had been attending her study classes for a few months, Krystina recruited them all to the cause of international socialism. It’s amazing how quickly she changed their perception of Vienna and the world. She had taught them not to accept life as it was, but to fight against every outrage with their fists. In her book, there was no such thing as accomplished facts. Everything could and should be changed.
The five boys from Pidvocholesk were now a clandestine cell of the Polish Socialist Party in exile. Krystina’s tiny room had become their true university. Not that she encouraged them in any way to give up their academic careers. The working-class movement needed doctors to treat poor patients free of charge. This meant that three of the Ls were fine.
Krystina realized that Ludwik was a gifted linguist. She persuaded him to abandon German literature and study the details of the German, English, Russian, French, Spanish and Italian languages. She wanted him to appreciate the nuance of each language, and for this he insisted that he must read the literature produced by the different cultures. For several months he could be sighted at his favourite cafes absorbed in European novels.
They had never met a woman like her. She was fighting for a better world and had subordinated everything else in her life to achieve that goal. She taught them the meaning of commitment to a set of ideals. She had brought a sense of drama into their lives, made them feel that they were not simply individuals, but actors with a part to play on the stage of history. How grandiloquent this all sounds now as we look at the world today, but it was not always thus and this is something your generation wants to forget. Krystina had altered the way they saw the world, forced them to reflect on the need to change the human condition. She transformed their vision forever.
It was she who gave them their new identities. ‘My five Ls’, she used to call them, and they willingly became five fingers of her hand. It was undoubtedly her strong personality that pushed the five Ls towards the revolution. The social disintegration caused by the First World War did the rest.
Think of it, Karl. Each one married to his time. Working patiently for the world revolution. In Galicia the choice had always been limited. Emperor or Tsar? Krystina pointed them towards a new horizon. In her room in Vienna they used to wonder whether it was all talk, whether Krystina’s utopian vision could ever be fulfilled. Ludwik had witnessed pogroms. He doubted whether the oppressed could ever be united under one banner. Those poor Polish and Russian peasants had been so easily incited to kill Jews and burn their homes. Could they really emancipate themselves? It would require a miracle to wrench them away from the deferential stupor in which they lay engulfed.
Krystina would listen patiently and smile. Ludwik was expressing the very same doubts that had plagued her a few years ago. Even as they argued, they heard excited shouts in the streets. News had arrived from Sarajevo. The heir to the Austrian throne had been assassinated by a Serbian nationalist. Who could have thought then, my dearest Karl, that our century of wars and revolutions would begin and end with Sarajevo?
