Читать книгу Catastroika - Charles Rammelkamp - Страница 12

Call Me Sasha

After the “People’s Will,” a revolutionary band,

assassinated Alexander II in 1881 –

a bomb tossed in Saint Petersburg –

Jews lost most of the privileges

we’d been granted in Russia.

Alexander, the “tsar liberator,” had freed the serfs

twenty years earlier, and we’d benefited as well.

Rasputin originally praised the Black Hundreds,

the 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.”