Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler's War and Stalin's Peace (Hardcover)

To be sure, the official historical record of the war has been partially corrected since the Soviet Union's collapse. But the public narrative -- of a victory purchased with the blood of more than 25 million Soviet citizens, most of them civilians -- still precludes open discussion of Stalin's reckless squandering of his own people's lives, or atrocities carried out by Soviet soldiers or widespread acknowledgement of the help given by the United States and other allies.

"It is inappropriate and blasphemous toward the memory of those killed to engage in public debates on this issue," the Russian government declared in a statement last year. Ostensibly, the statement was responding to Polish historians who sought to blame Stalin for not aiding the 1944 Warsaw uprising against the Nazis. But it perfectly summed up the national attitude about revisiting any aspect of the war. Concern for the horrific domestic costs of Stalinism is similarly out of sync with the times, a subject many Russians are eager to consign to the unexamined past.

At such a moment, then, journalist Masha Gessen's family memoir Ester and Ruzya comes as a welcome corrective. This is not the official version shown in hagiographic documentaries on Russian state television, but the real one narrated around countless Russian kitchen tables, where the chaos and senseless brutality on both sides of the front coexisted with genuine heroism and the mundane business of living.

Gessen's book tells war stories from the hellish zone where Eastern Europe's Jews were trapped between two tyrannies -- a dilemma she powerfully sums up in the story of her great-grandfather. Jakub Goldberg narrowly escaped being sent to Siberia when the Soviets occupied his home town of Bialystok, Poland, only to perish in a Nazi concentration camp. In trying to reconstruct what happened to him and the rest of her family, Gessen offers the reader an extended case study in the moral ambiguity of life in a dictatorship; no one, not even two grandmothers "burdened with a conscience," as hers were, could live untainted.

In her great-grandfather's case, Gessen discovers that he remained behind in Bialystok as a member of the Judenrat, the Jewish council appointed by the Nazis to oversee the city's ghetto. The rest of his story turns out to be hopelessly tangled up in the deadly compromises forced on the Jews there. According to the varying accounts Gessen collects, he was either helping the resistance or sabotaging it, either a Zionist sympathizer or a Nazi collaborator. In the end, he perished in the camp of Majdanek, along with the remains of Bialystok's once-thriving Jewish community.

Her grandmothers survived the war, with their own improbable stories of exile and loss. Gessen skillfully evokes the panic of wartime Moscow and the privations of Soviet refugees forced to live off bread and "suckers" -- hard candy given out as rations -- in far-off Turkmenistan. But the survival of both Ester and Ruzya comes with the price of collaboration, an unavoidable fact of life under Stalinism. Gessen had imagined she would find heroic resistance when she began to unravel her grandmothers' tales -- and both did indeed resist -- but she learns in the end that survival was impossible without some form of accommodation.

Consider Ruzya's choice to work as a government censor and Communist Party member, tasked with protecting the secrets of the Soviet police state and redacting the dispatches of American foreign correspondents -- the profession her granddaughter would one day adopt. Engaging in the sort of moral hair-splitting that Stalinism forced on Soviet citizens, Ruzya decided it was better to be a censor than to do the teaching work for which she had studied, since "teaching history in a Soviet school is, always and inevitably, lying." As a censor, she rationalized, she wouldn't have to confront her own compromise with the system quite so directly as she would have to in school. "I couldn't teach history and look those children in the eye," she tells her appalled father.

On the surface, Ester appeared to resist more steadfastly. During the war, a relentless Soviet major had pressured her to become an informer. Despite the very real risk of being sent to the gulag, Ester refused repeatedly. Gessen attributes this to her Polish childhood, away from the omnipresent fear of the Soviet Union.

But Gessen discovers that even this grandmother, whom she always imagined as "a hero who would not bend to the secret police," had made a deal with the regime. As the war ended, Ester had been summoned to the headquarters of the Soviet secret police and offered a job as a translator at a time when the NKVD, the forerunner to the KGB, was overseeing the imprisonment and death of millions of fellow Soviets. She said yes. Only a bureaucratic error on her application, and a well-timed job offer from a literary journal, saved her from a lifetime of working for Stalin's state.

After such agonized choices, the rest of Gessen's story is inevitably a letdown. She lovingly chronicles the postwar friendship between her grandmothers, the unlikely marriage of their children (Gessen's parents), and those children's eventual decision to emigrate when Soviet authorities made it possible for Jews to leave in the 1970s. But ultimately, what makes Ester and Ruzya worth reading is their encounter with the world war and its aftermath -- a journey through morally ambiguous terrain that modern Russia seems all too determined to forget.

In the end, Gessen tries to make sense of these confused lessons in a dialogue with her grandmother Ruzya. "So where is the moral high ground here?" Gessen demands. It is a question that her book hurls at the reader time and time again. And it is a question that inevitably circles back to the impossible choices of life under totalitarianism, leaving this "grandmother alone with her compromise, again."

Reviewed by Susan B. Glasser
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