SOVIET HISTORY LESSONS

Soviet History Lessons is excited to publish the memoirs of Bertha Klenova, a linguist, traveler and diarist born in the Russian Empire into a wealthy lumber trading family, and who was just beginning her career at the American Embassy in Petrograd when the Bolshevik Revolution broke out. Klenova's account details her travels to Berlin and London during WWI and recounts in sharp detail pre-revolutionary Russia's mores and values, the plight of the Jewish communities, and America's views on tsarist Russia, as well as the reaction to the revolution of the U.S. diplomatic corps. We are grateful to Harriet Levi Fierman for making this remarkable text available to our readers.

A LONG WAY FROM KLENOVKA

by

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BERTHA KLENOVA

(née Berta Petrovna Katz-Sandler of Klenovka)

Written in 1977

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PREFACE

The title I originally gave to my manuscript was Roots in Russia. Although the Introduction was written in 1934, I have decided to let it stand, for that was the way I felt when I was writing the book. I could not have written it at all these many years later. However, I am omitting the epigraph, which was my own translation of the last verse from a poem by Alexander Pushkin:

And although for the unfeeling body

It is immaterial where it decompose,

Close to the dear native spot

Just the same I should like to repose.

I do not feel that way any longer. The new Russia is an interesting foreign land.

I wish to express my deep gratitude to my deceased friends, Charles D. Todebush of St. Louis, Missouri, and Martin Walker Smith, Professor of History at Heidelberg College, Tiffin, Ohio, for their assistance in checking the events reported in Part II. Mr. Todebush, my superior and Mr. Smith, a co-worker at the American Embassy at Petrograd, turned over to me the voluminous letters they had written from Petrograd to wife and mother, respectively. They also read over with me the penultimate copy of the manuscript.

To my friend, Charles Moritz of New York, New York, a busy editor in other fields, my eternal gratitude for his voluntary, meticulous and time-consuming revision of the manuscript many years ago.

To my more recent friend, Joyce Woodworth of Florence, Alabama, who made the final copy and acted as my literary agent for a while, my great appreciation of her additional corrections, especially punctuation.

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INTRODUCTION

On April 13, 1918, the steamer Simbirsk on its regular trip from Vladivostok, Siberia, to Tsuruga, Japan, carried me away from the shores of my native land. The boat was crowded with excited passengers who were so manifestly happy to have secured accommodation and so anxious about their baggage, which lay strewn in great disorder over the deck, that only a very few of them took the trouble to cast a parting glance toward the receding town. I was among those two or three passengers who had come astern for a last farewell. Tears kept welling up in my eyes, and as I lowered my lids to let them roll down, the rippling grayness of the water sent up the changing image of an old crab apple tree, a symbol of home to me since childhood days. When I again raised my eyes to the naked hills forming the background of Vladivostok, my blurred vision mirrored the very same tree stretching across the widening gulf between ship and shore. Gradually I lost all sense of reality, and in that dolorous stupor an idea began to take shape that I myself was the tree which the boat was pulling with such terrifying force. The boat seemed to have the branches firmly in its grip, while the roots clung just as firmly to the soil. Each forward movement pulled out and broke off another root. The symbolical wrenching of the roots became so real and the pain so intense that I thought I actually saw drops of blood where the roots broke in two.

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Many years have passed since that day and many are the countries, east and west of the meridian, north and south of the equator, where I have tried to take root. I finally settled in the United States of America, to whose hospitable shores so many before me have fled to replant broken roots in its fertile soil. Still, a strain of a Russian melody painfully disentangled from its jazz form, a word in my native tongue intercepted in the street, a newspaper heading concerning New Russia never fail to remind me, with a piercing clarity, that the roots which have sprouted in foreign soil are those nearest to the surface, while those deepest embedded still are and forever will remain in the country of my birth. This is in spite of the widespread mis­ery and oppression which I witnessed and the suffering and humiliation to which I was personally subjected.

Bertha P. Katz-Klenova

New York City

September 1932–October 1934

A LONG WAY FROM KLENOVKA

BOOK I

STRUGGLES FOR AN EDUCATION

CHAPTER I

Whenever my thoughts fly back to my childhood days, their first impact invariably encounters the outline of an old crab apple tree. An exquisite thing of beauty in the spring, all covered with lovely roseate buds, a cool green shelter in the summer, a living body with countless red apples in the autumn, a bizarre apparition under its blanket of snow in the winter - I loved it in all seasons with passionate attachment. That old crab apple tree stood behind a cow shed on a small estate in the Province of Vilna, formerly in Russia, then in Poland, where I was born in the last decade of the nineteenth century. To be exact, the fields of Klenovka are now located in Lithuania, while the neighboring small town of Troki was in Poland. There I first encountered civilization in the form of shops, churches, a prison and a post office and there, until 1939, father’s grave was tended by the offspring of those who personally knew and revered the memory of Peretz Katz.

The land belonged to a Count Tyshkevich, its 650 acres representing just a small fraction of the many square miles he owned in that part of Russia alone. Although we paid a certain rental, and several times a year the Count’s Chief Overseer came to pay us a call and between lunch and tea inspected the crops or the granaries, depending upon the season, it never penetrated my childish consciousness that Klenovka did not belong to us.

Long before I was born, my father, then a dealer in lumber, was supplying the old Count Tyshkevich with money for his various expensive chateaux and extravagant splurges on the Riviera and in Paris by cutting down thousands of acres of virgin forests which were young when Gedimin, Duke of Lithuania, founded Troki in the year 1321. The last tract father bought and subsequently settled on and where I first saw the light of day was about ten miles from Troki.

In after years, when the place of my birth had begun to take on the form of unreality, I often wondered how father obtained permission to settle on the land, for Jews were prohibited from doing so. It was in a library in a foreign country, when I looked up the heading “Jews” in a Russian Encyclopedia, that I discovered the reason: it had simply been a matter of chance. The law prohibiting the settling of Jews on land was passed in 1882, and father happened to buy the forest in 1877. It took six months to open the first clearing and build some sort of living quarters, so that he actually moved his family into the wilderness in the beginning of 1878.

The first contract between father and Count Tyshkevich called for a complete clearing of the allotted forest within twelve years. During this period, father must have grown attached to the soil, for when nothing but stumps remained, he decided to turn farmer.

I imagine that the lovely rolling country, with small lakes interspersed among undulating hills, had a great deal to do with his decision. From the knoll, where the maple stumps were thickest, he must have found himself gazing into a semicircle of thick woods at a uniform distance of about a mile. Slowly turning around, his eyes would have followed the receding trees to the right and left, until the hills in the background obscured further view. Also, while cutting down the trees and cultivating part of the land, an awakened impulse to create and make things grow no doubt prompted him to remain in the isolated spot.

He leased the land - stumps, lakes, swamps and all - named the property Klenovka (klen is Russian for maple) and proceeded to build additional buildings for the farm hands, sheds and granaries and to till the soil. It must have been a hard struggle for a Jew, born and bred in a small town, to master the intricacies of farming, especially since, apart from choosing a beautiful spot, he did not use very good judgment in selecting the land. There was not a single acre of level ground, the soil was full of small pebbles and sand, and the stumps must have been terrifically thick in the beginning, because twenty years later, when I began to notice such things, stump burning was still a regular seasonal occupation of the farm hands, between the time the last potatoes were carted in and the winter threshing began. I often wondered whether my crab apple tree had not bewitched father in the same unaccountable manner in which it held me in spell until I parted from it forever, for surely, I thought, it must have been there from time immemorial.

When I came into the world, the youngest of eight children, the family was solidly identified with the soil. By the time I was five, the old log buildings, which under the original contract father had built at his own expense, had begun to crumble and he was busy designing and erecting, this time at the Count’s expense, new stables, sheds, granaries and finally the house for ourselves and the twelve families of farm hands who lived on the estate. From the modern point of view, the house could have been greatly improved upon, but it certainly was very imposing in its setting. Long and squat, it was made of huge blocks of rock from our land with corners and sub-divisions in red brick and walls almost three feet thick. It was rather cold and damp in the winter and not as cozy as the old log house, because the smallest room, an auxiliary nursery used for the influx of my nieces and nephews during the summer months, was twenty feet square.

Yes, the house was very large and imposing with its high red tile roof, the first in a radius of ten to fifteen miles. It filled me with a pleasant elation to walk through the spacious high-ceilinged rooms, even though they occasionally presented a great drawback to me at night. At that time I had chosen a porcupine for a pet; his tiny paws echoed like horses’ hooves when he would set forth on his favorite nocturnal strolls in search of freedom or adventure. Nobody could do any harm to him, since he only drew in his quills when safely in my lap. Still, it was not pleasant to hear my older brothers and sisters ridicule my strange taste in pets and threaten to put the porcupine in the barn.

There was not another house in the neighborhood like it. The others were all of mere wood, while ours was of stone, actually blown out of rocks with dynamite by men smartly dressed in boots and vests, who came from town for this special purpose. Their attire differed greatly from that I was used to seeing on our peasants who, the spring, summer and early fall, went around barefoot and, when the weather was cool, wore a coat of home-made felt over raw linen shirt and trousers. In the winter they added a pair of homemade check­ered linen or woolen pants, a sheep-skin coat and a pair of lapti (a special kind of footwear similar to a sandal, made of bast) over rags wound around the feet.

In one way only was the house a great disappointment to the youngest member of the family, aged five, for it was built with mere­ly one step separating it from the level ground, and I had so hoped that it would have at least three steps. I knew we could not have any more because father had a lame leg and the house was designed especially for his comfort; even the one step was there to help him mount, for he spent most of his days on horseback. I did not then know that houses could be built with two stories one over another, but in my imagination I saw an ideal structure of countless steps going up to the skies and a house perched on top of the stairs. While the stone house was going up I would climb to the highest permissible point on the scaffolding and strain my eyes to penetrate beyond the thus enlarged horizon. Sometimes I would be rewarded by catching the sight of fast moving puffs of smoke. I was told that it came from a monster called a railroad train, but it was hard for me to imagine what it looked like.

There was only one person in my small world to whom I could boast about the house, the daughter of the count’s supervisor, my equal in years and upbringing. As luck would have it, her house most nearly approached the model of my dreams; it was actually raised ten steps. Otherwise, our house was the best in the immediate neighborhood, excepting the palaces of Count Tyshkevich’s various sons, and it somehow tended to nurture my childish belief in the superior position of my family.

Of course, my range of acquaintance was very limited. It comprised twelve families of our farm hands, the inhabitants of several villages within a radius of five to eight miles who worked in our fields during harvest time, five or six small farmers — owners very much down at the heel but preserving some kind of gentility - the abovementioned family of the supervisor, Mr. Boksztanin, later a lessee like ourselves, and our friends in the small town of Troki, the Klausners. As a matter of fact, to my childish mind, no one counted but the latter two, the Boksztanins and the Klausners.

The Boksztanins were moderately well-to-do Poles who liked to make a showing and who had a considerable amount of taste. They, of the house with many steps, had a grand piano in their salon, a profusion of flowers all over the place, many knickknacks in glass cases, and a chambermaid who wore a starched white apron with frills. The frills impressed me so much that they even cast a dwarfing shadow on the importance of the stone house.

Our families had become friends, probably through the common problem of the education of the children, but also perhaps because my father was a lovable character. Neither the Bokzstanins nor my family had much ready cash, and the education of the children was a great care since Vilna, the closest place with gymnasias (Russian middle schools which prepared for university entrance), was 35 miles away, with only the last 17 miles by train.

Shortly after I was born, the two families pooled their resources and engaged a tutor. My sister Sofya and brother Shlyoma (short for Solomon) were about the same age as Jan and Anton Boksztanin. The tutor lived for six months at our house and the other half year at the Boksztanins’, and the children alternated in driving three times a week in a horse and buggy five miles each way over infernal country roads to obtain their learning. I remember that in the winter it used to take ten to fifteen minutes to unbundle the Boksztanin boys from their many wrappings and to thaw them out sufficiently so that they could begin their studies. At the age of five I had a terrific crush on eleven-year-old Antek and probably annoyed him no end when I tried to be helpful in taking off his heavy wrappings and to be near him every moment I was permitted to do so. I, who never learned to cook properly, used to describe dreamily to my chum Stasya my favorite Jewish dishes that I would prepare for him when I grew up.

The Boksztanins were devout Catholics, and Father was a very pious Orthodox Jew, and an observer of all the rituals prescribed by the Jewish religion. There must have been a bond of understanding between them which was not affected by the difference in faith, for they remained friends until father’s death. As a matter of fact, father was such a strict observer of the kosher food laws that he would never eat in a Christian home, except to drink tea served in a glass, because glass is rendered pure by scouring with boiling water. The Boksztanins, whom he visited not oftener than four or five times a year, had a few utensils set aside for Papa’s special use, so that he could have boiled eggs in addition to the tea. This attention to Papa also tended to strengthen my belief that Papa, and consequently our entire family, was something to be proud of.

Our Jewish friends, the Klausners, had a sort of general store in Troki, and were a large family and very little money, the latter no doubt due to their boundless generosity to all who were in need. My mother came from a good and wealthy small town family but, having been left an orphan at the age of seven, was married off by her relatives when she was sixteen to Father, a widower twice her age. Transplanted to strange surroundings, she remained proud and aloof and did not approve of contact with any of the inhabitants of Troki other than the Klausners and, since we children were not permitted to go to town more than once a month, we did not have much opportunity to become friendly with others.

It happened therefore that until I reached the age of seven the Klausners were the only Jewish family I knew intimately, and they were exceedingly nice and liked and respected by Jew and Gentile alike. There were a few other Jewish families living in neighboring villages: a tailor, a blacksmith, a cobbler, all almost as dejectedly poor as the peasants around them and I somehow placed them in a class by themselves, above the peasants but not on a par with our family.

The rest of the people I knew during the early years of my life were peasants, farmhands on the estate and peasants in the neighboring villages, who came only in the summer to help with the harvest. With a very few exceptions they were all poor, illiterate and ignorant. Very few had been farther than Troki and fully half of them had never seen a train, even though it was only about fifteen miles to the nearest railroad station. Of course, the roads were terrible and it was necessary to reckon with wasting two or three hours one way or exhausting the horse in order to get to the railroad. Besides, they had very little business outside of their village and certainly no reason to take a train. They went to Troki, combining the Sunday pilgrimage to church with the sale of what little produce they could spare without literally starving, but Troki had no railroad connection because railroads in Russia were invariably planned and built without much regard for the economic needs of the district, and most of the railroad stations were miles away from a fairly inhabited place.

Of the hundreds of peasants in the villages around Klenovka, whom father knew by name and I remembered from summer to summer, hardly one could read or write. A government census taken the year I began my formal education showed that the Province of Vilna had an illiteracy rate of 72 per cent, but the fortunate 28 per cent, with the exception of landowners and lessees like ourselves, belonged to the town population. Occasionally a child could read the Catholic catechism by the slow and painful method of spelling each successive letter of a word and then adding them together, but this was forgotten as soon as the child began to do the work of an adult, which was around the age of eight or nine. This meager knowledge was acquired clandestinely, without the sanction of the authorities, because teaching the catechism also involved the teaching of the prohibited Polish language. The teachers were always old men whose own knowledge of spelling rarely went much further than that taught to their charges, and who in this manner earned their keep in successive households of the village during the winter time, when they could not find any other occupation for their dwindling strength. The keep was usually very meager and sleeping accommodation provided on top of the stove was often begrudged to the herald of the printed word.

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The nearest village with a school, where the rudiments of book knowledge were taught, was at a distance of eight miles from Klenovka and anywhere from five to ten miles from the villages. How could the poor peasants send their children to that school, to trundle hours over the abominable roads, muddy in the fall, deeply covered with snow in the winter and almost impassable in the spring when the snow would begin to thaw? Boots and warm clothing were necessary, also food in bulk to take along. None of these necessities were available. During spring, summer and fall the children ran around barefoot, and in the winter they contrived to have rags wrapped around their feet and the inevitable lapti, but even so there was not always a suffi­cient amount of warm clothing for all the children, always numerous, who were forced to go outside to play, build snowmen or toboggan in rotation.

With some exceptions, the peasants all over Russia, but particu­larly in its northwestern part, were appallingly poor. Considering the fact that they had been serfs until 1861, dependent body and soul upon the will but more often on the tyranny of the landlords who owned them, and the conditions under which they were set free, their plight was only natural.

The census of 1851 shows that there were over twenty-five million male serfs, so that together with their families they formed a mighty part of the population of the Russian Empire. They had no civil or any other rights, had no recourse to any court and the few things that they were supposed to own, such as cattle, were also at the service of the landlord any time he wished. For several centuries their owners had sold them at will, separating husbands and wives, moth­ers and children. Occasionally, the downtrodden worms would turn and in their wrath and fury kill their oppressors, burn the estates and ruin everything that came their way. In the nineteenth century such riots became more frequent and the government found it advisable to attempt to curb the absolute power of the landowners. It was found to be much easier to enact the law at St. Petersburg than to see that it was obeyed by the nobility, who considered that lording over the peasants was their God-given right. Thus the situation of the peasants, while depending to a certain extent on the economic conditions of the district, was in reality governed by the kinds of obligations imposed upon them by their owners at the latter’s will, a will which was only slightly curbed by custom and very little by law.

Alexander II, who went down in history as the Liberator, intended to put into effect when he became Tsar of Russia the liberal ideas he acquired in his youth, but under the influence of his reactionary advisers and also due to his vacillating nature, only a few of them saw the light of day.

After much procrastination, in a manifesto dated February 19, 1861, Tsar Alexander II gave the peasants their freedom. Prior to that date, the reformers had over a period of years been arguing as to how best to accomplish it. Some of them had more liberal ideas than others but none of them possessed the necessary experience and sound economic knowledge required for such a tremendous task. They agreed that the peasants had to have land when they were freed but could not decide whether to make it obligatory for them to purchase it from their former owners. The government was afraid of offending the landlords by enacting a law which would make it mandatory for them to sell land to their former serfs but in the final count did much more harm when it left it to the landowners to straighten out with the peasants, already nominally free, the matter of their “buying” themselves out of serfdom.

By the time the manifesto was proclaimed, it was highly confusing to the reformers, the landlords and the peasants. The landlords were to receive so-and-so much for the land allotted to the peasant but the land was evaluated at two to three times its normal value because both the land and the working power of the freed peasant were assessed. Under such exorbitant demands many a peasant refused to sign the purchase contract assessing him with taxation for 49 years which the plot he would be paying for could never earn. They even preferred to remain in serfdom which, under the circumstances, was sound economic judgment on their part. The result was that twenty years later there were still one and a half million peasants in Russia who were yremennoobyasannye, meaning under temporary obligation.

Under the law the landlord was to receive 80 per cent from the government and 20 per cent from the peasants, provided the latter agreed to the bargain; otherwise the landlord had to be satisfied with 80 per cent of the evaluation. The peasants, however, paid the government in full for the exorbitant price placed by it on their liberty. Their descendants were still paying for their freedom in 1906 although, according to statistics, the government came out with a profit at the end of 1905. In 1907 the debt was finally cancelled.

The number of serfs the landed gentry could own was unlimited. In those parts of Russia where the soil was rich it was naturally advantageous to acquire as much land as possible. There, as elsewhere, the serf had to work for the lord three days a week using his own horse and implements, and his wife and children were also obligated to certain duties to the landlord, including gathering of berries, spinning and weaving. The serf was given sufficient acreage to till for his family’s own sustenance and that of his animals. It was of ad­vantage to the owner that his serfs should be healthy and that their cattle be strong.

On the other hand, in those parts of the country where the soil was poor, there was not much advantage in owning too much land. In such parts the gentry owned more serfs in proportion to the acreage than in the first described. The reason was very simple; as soon as the harvest was taken in, the male serfs were sent to towns to earn their living and the proceeds went to the landlord. Naturally, the acreage allotted to the peasant was very small and, since the landlord did not depend much on the land, he did not care how the peasant fared in his village as long as he earned money for him in town.

One of the conditions under which the peasants were freed was that, depending upon the quality of the soil, they were to be given against taxes for 49 years three to seven desyatinas (one desyatina = 2.70 acres) per adult male, but with the proviso that not more than half of the land belonging to the landlord could be divided among them. It therefore developed that while in those parts of Russia where the soil was rich the peasants could receive their full quota of land with the landlord still retaining a great deal more than one half, the peasants in those parts where the owners did not concentrate on owning land obtained next to nothing after the land owner received his full half share. By the end of the 19th century, some of the peasants in the villages around Klenovka were entitled to not more than a garden patch even after some of the males had forfeited their shares and hired themselves out as farmhands or laborers in town.

The antiquated method of tilling the soil had not changed for centuries. Artificial fertilizers were not even heard of in the villages and the manure from the only cow and horse and a couple of pigs was very scant, because even straw was a luxury and the animals often stood knee-deep in slimy mud. It was no wonder then that the crops were invariably poor and that it was only on the average of every seven years or so that the peasants had enough bread to last them till the new harvest. Even then, beginning in April, potatoes were added to the rye flour, making the loaves heavy and the bread indigestible. Every pinch of flour was so precious that, in order to save it, oak leaves were used for protecting the dough from sticking to the bricks of the oven.

Bread, potatoes, and a thin watery soup in which a few cabbage leaves and beets floated around - a poor imitation of the borshch served in well-to-do families - or hot water mixed with a handful of partially refined rye flour gruel and whitened with a few drops of milk were the staple foods of the peasants, at least in our part of Russia. Sundays, and then only during the winter months, a piece of ham and potato pancakes served with sour cream and farmer’s cheese dried hard in the sun would find their place on the meager menu.

If a son were to be sent to school (nobody would dream of sending a girl), he would either have to live in town or take food along for the entire day. He could not take soup, and the amount of bread that he would eat in place of soup was a very important factor in deciding whether the family could afford schooling.

Aside from the economic considerations, education had no rational appeal, for of what use was it to the peasant? The mere fact that his son would know how to read and write would not improve his crops nor permit him to buy an additional horse or cow. None of the people who knew how to read and write tilled the soil, so obviously learning was not meant for peasants. It was in order for the large and small estate owners or even lessees, such as Pan Peretz of Klenovka or Pan Boksztanin, to educate their children, for neither personally went behind the plough nor helped in the mowing. Thus reading and hard peasant work apparently did not go together.

When our new house was completed, it contained at one end living quarters for nine fami1ies of our workmen, the other three being housed in a log house. The new quarters were talked about far and wide, and on a Sunday, especially in the summer, many neighborhood peasants would come to admire them. Those rooms - which were actually palatial compared to the houses in the villages - what were they like? Nine rooms of uniform size, five on each side of a long hall, the latter frightfully cold in the winter because it had no ceiling, only the red tile roof. Each room had a modernized Russian stove of medium size, so that it occupied only about one-eighth of the space instead of the usual quarter; each room housed only one family, had high ceilings and real windows. The windows had six panes, each over a foot square, and also a “fortochka”, one framed pane which could be opened to let in air in the summer - no one would dream of opening it in the winter. The stove had the usual katuch (a vaulted hole under it for chickens) but no other animals were permitted in the living quarters by strict orders from Father. The result was that, although one family occupying such a room sometimes consisted of eight people and, crowded or not, the home had its full quota of various kinds of vermin, still it had plenty of light and no smoke so that none of the children born and brought up by our farmhands developed blindness and other diseases so frequent in the villages, and the mortality rate was also somewhat lower.

The average peasant house in our part of Russia was little better than a hovel. It usually comprised two parts, one housing the livestock, the other the family, connected by a cold ceilingless hall. Both were on about the same sanitary level; the earthen floor in the animal kingdom was covered with manure, in the living quarters with chicken dung. On a cold day, a couple of lambs, a calf or half a doz­en suckling pigs would also be found with the family. In a good many houses the stove had no chimney outlet, only a vent in the ceiling, so that at cooking time, especially in the winter, the air was so full of smoke and stench that even the light from the luchina (a dry piece of tinder lighted at one end and stuck in a crack in the wall) could hardly be seen. If the family could afford kerosene at three kopecks a pint, a tiny tin lamp with a smoking wick was used, while a lamp with a glass chimney was a decided sign of affluence. Each house usually had a window, sometimes two; the larger one of four panes, each about nine inches square, but it is hard for me to remember seeing all four panes intact. Usually a bundle of dirty rags protruded from one or two openings in the window.

The clothing worn by the occupants of these houses and the scant bedding used by them was also far from clean. Soap was one of those necessities that could only be bought in town and was therefore a luxury to be used sparingly. Accordingly, although soap was applied to the family wash, it was customary to give it a vigorous thrashing with special wooden beaters instead, to loosen the dirt. The more fastidious also used soap for washing the hands and face, but most of the peasants saved it for the weekly bath. On Saturday nights the entire village scrubbed itself clean and changed its underwear - the men their linen shirts and trousers, worn both day and night, and the women their long-sleeved shifts, which served the combined purpose of shirt, shirtwaist and nightgown. Each village owned a public bath, which had the capricious habit of burning down in the middle of winter when it was most needed and when it was impossible to build a new one. I have never been inside a village bathhouse but, as our own was built on the accepted pattern and, crude though it was, was considered far superior to those in the neighboring villages, it can serve as a fair example.

Our bathhouse, which stood at the far end of the pond, was built of logs and consisted of two rooms, an anteroom and the bathroom proper. In the anteroom the logs were not even hewed down, it was not heated and its only furniture consisted of benches running around the wall. A few wooden pegs took care of the clothing. The other room had a huge oven which occupied the entire length of one wall except for the door; it was built of stones, ingeniously put together without cementing, rising from a brick floor. Two tiers of benches ran along the other walls and the only other fixtures were several barrels filled with water, a few wooden buckets and a pile of birch twigs in a corner. Early on a Saturday afternoon a farm hand versed in the intricacies of heating the bathhouse was delegated to this task. First he piled the oven with about a hundred round stones specially selected for the purpose and then for several hours burned dry logs piled on the stones. As the bathhouse had no chimney, the man had to lie on the floor, so as not to become blinded by the smoke which he let out very gingerly, to conserve the heat, by leaving the door only slightly ajar. When the temperature of the stones underneath the logs and above the cupola-shaped oven satisfied the bath tender, he began to lower the red-hot stones into the barrels, soon bringing the water to near the boiling point. As soon as the last logs burned out and the smoke subsided, the man signaled to the household that all was ready and the family would start on its weekly pilgrimage. In the winter we were bundled into rugs and furs for the two-minute sleigh ride around the pond and, in company with the maids and a few chosen women from among the farmhands’ families, we usually had a gay if suffocating time. Upon our return, father and the boys were driven over, also sharing the bath with a few privileged farmhands. After them it was the turn of the rest of the women and children and then the men still unwashed closed the cycle. In the bath we were vigorously scrubbed by the maids and then just as vigorously spanked with bunches of birch twigs, while we lay stretched out on the benches with our heads in a bucket freshly rinsed with cold water, to prevent suffocation. By that time the room was usually dark from the dense steam which was produced by throwing cold water on the hot oven. Although we were heated to a point where our bodies could barely stand it, we, until late into the fall, used to jump into the pond straight from the steaming bath.

No precautions of any kind were taken by my family to safeguard the cleanliness of the bathhouse, except an ordinary soap and water scrubbing of the benches and the floor, yet in all the years that we used it, we never caught even an itch. Even so, I was not permitted to go near the bathhouse from one Saturday night to the next, because as soon as the heat cooled off and the water dried up, the small house at the other end of the pond became an undisputed flea domain. This prohibition was sometimes lifted late in the fall, when the bath­house was used for rotting flax, a process of soaking it in order to separate its fibers. The temperature inside was hot enough - and in the anteroom cold enough - to anesthetize the jumping pests. Pieces of the woody bark from the flax clung to the floor of the anteroom and it was not always a pleasant sensation to step on them with bare feet, but the use of the bathhouse for rotting flax was just as important as for keeping clean. The bathhouses in the villages also served this double purpose but they were neither as roomy nor as clean as ours, because their floors were made of clay and a scrubbing of the benches was not considered imperative.