nationalist group that promoted Sergei Nilus,
the mystic who later published
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
as a part of his work on the Antichrist.
But by 1912 he’d mellowed,
defending Jews from our detractors,
calling us “equal before God,”
which made the Black Hundreds turn on him,
mocking him for destroying Orthodox Russia
“for the Yids.”
But still, I knew better
than to pursue a friendship
with his daughter Maria,
a lovely fifteen-year-old when I first met her,
fresh to the big city from “The Sleeping Land” –
what “Siberia” means in Tatar, after all;
“The Edge” or “The End” in Ostyak.
“Alexander Federmesser,” I introduced myself,
noting my parents had named me for the tsar,
“but you can call me Sasha.”
Jewels
Papa knew Rasputin’s secretary,
Aaron Simanovich, in Kiev,
where he ran a small jewelry shop –
all Jews knew every other Jew –
but I only became aware of him
when I lived in Saint Petersburg.
Simanovich had brought his son to Rasputin,
suffering from Saint Vitus’s Dance,
Ioann, a teenager when the spasms began,
jerking like a puppet,
Pinocchio pulled by strings.
The Petersburg doctors were helpless,
so Simanovich, desperate,
brought Ioann to Rasputin,
who cured him in ten minutes,
laying his healing hands on Ioann’s head;
he never suffered from St. Vitus’ Dance again.
Simanovich had made a fortune
selling diamonds to the Tsarina’s friends,
became Rasputin’s secretary, replacing
Ivan Dobrovolsky, who, with his wife,
had been embezzling money
the petitioners brought to Rasputin.
Maria called him by her pet name,
Simochka, fond of the Jew
who’d saved her father when Khvostov,
the Interior Minister, tried to assassinate him.
Later, after the Revolution,
after Felix Yusupov finally did kill Rasputin,
the family moved in with Simanovich,
too dangerous to stay at their father’s apartment,
and much later than that,
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
