Masha was born in Moscow on November 7, 1926, the ninth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Friends said to her parents, “You must name her Octyabrina in honor of the October Revolution.” People were still euphoric about the Revolution, about the future; they gave their children names like Tractor and Industriya. Her father said she should really be named after her grandmother Miriam, but there were reasons not to choose a name like that. In tsarist times the Russians had been contemptuous of the Jews; now they feared and hated them, blamed the Revolution on them, saw them as conspiring to destroy the entire Christian world. And it was true that a few thousand Jews, sickened to blinding rage by tsarist oppression, had thrown away the very last marks of their Jewishness, joined the Bolshevik Party, and helped to make the Revolution. For them and all the other new leaders of Russia, the name Miriam was too Jewish. So Sanya and Bertha Rashkovsky named the child Maria, and at home called her Musya or Manya. It was Volodya who began to call her Masha.
Masha was the firstborn; then, five years later, came a boy, named Zinovy and called Zalya; and, afterward, a second daughter, named Henrietta and called Gera.
Sanya Rashkovsky left the care of the children and the house in the hands of his wife, whose cooking was a source of enormous pleasure to him. A supper of lamb stew and chicken soup with noodles: He would wrinkle his nose at the smells, rub his hands together with delight. He loved sweets, often told Masha tales of a mountain outside Odessa, a fantasy mountain of halvah, describing it so vividly she could taste its rich, honeyed sweetness. Cut flowers dismayed him. “Flowers die the instant you cut them,” he said to Masha. “How can one gain pleasure from something that is dead?”
In the early 1930s he became ill with tuberculosis and spent the last months of his life in a sanitarium located in an evergreen forest outside Moscow. One month before he died, Masha and her mother visited him. Ten-year-old Masha could not recognize the wasted figure they said was her father. He was dying of starvation, slowly melting into death, unable to eat because of the searing pain in his intestines.
He died on January 17, 1937, and was buried three days later. Many attended the funeral. Masha watched the coffin being lowered into the ground and suddenly threw herself forward to halt its terrifying descent, screaming, “Daddy! Daddy!” Her uncle pulled her back. The chronicles record her comment: “My childhood was over.”
Masha’s mother was born in a small town on the Dnieper River in the Ukraine into a family of devout Jews. Her father, barely eking out a living as a maker of leather goods-belts, saddles, bridles-was at the same time a judge in the local Jewish religious court, a man so highly respected that the Ukrainians would often appear before him, requesting that he settle their differences. During the pogroms of 1903-1905 and the Civil War, Ukrainians tried to protect the family from Cossacks. Masha’s grandmother bore across her face a long scar left by a mounted Cossack wielding a metal-tipped whip.
In the early 1930s Masha’s parents took the children on visits to the grandparents, and Masha remembers Jewish folk prints on the walls and the warm smells of special foods for Sabbaths and festivals. Her grandmother lit candles on Friday evenings; her grandfather conducted the Passover Seder. The family gathered around the big dinner table for the Sabbath. At the head sat her grandfather; next to him his mother, Baba Malka; on the other side, his wife; then his children and grandchildren. Each knew exactly his or her place at the table. Then the blessing over the wine, the washing of the hands, the blessing over the bread, the scents, the food, the Sabbath songs, the Grace After Meals. She still remembers all those visits to the grandparents. And standing in the road alone one day in front of her grandparents’ house, spinning her arms, and her grandfather calling out in Yiddish-he also spoke Ukrainian but could barely read Russian-“Hey, windmill, stop spinning your arms, you haven’t gained a gram of fat, what am I going to tell your mother?”
Her mother had left her parents’ home in the early 1920s, gone off to Moscow, lived under horrific conditions in a place called Hotel Chicago. She attended the School for Higher Education for Women, where she received a teacher’s diploma, the equivalent of a university degree, with a specialty in preschool education. The winter of 1924 was especially severe in Moscow. On the day of Lenins funeral she stood patiently in line with the tens of thousands who had come to view Lenin in his open coffin, to pay their respects to the leader of the Revolution. One of the guards near the coffin came over to her and said quietly that one side of her face looked severely frostbitten, she should tend to it immediately.
After her marriage to Sanya in January 1926, she ran one of the most successful kindergartens in Moscow, and Mashas very first memory is of sitting in her mother’s classroom at the age of three, and watching her show flash cards about Lenin and Stalin and the Revolution. She remembers one evening her father sitting in his chair reading Pravda and suddenly saying in disgust, “What sort of newspaper is this, four pages of nothing, do you know what an English newspaper has?” and her mother looking around nervously and whispering, “Sanya, be still, the walls have ears.” Masha was five. They lived in one room of a two-room apartment on Pokrovka Street near the Kremlin, directly under the slanting roof of a two-story pre-Revolution house. In the other, smaller room were two elderly men, factory workers. She remembers the fear on her mother’s face when she said that: “The walls have ears.”
The school authorities asked her mother to join the party, and she talked about it with her husband, who said that if she joined she would need to attend meetings and would have less time with the children, so she declined the invitation. Years later she told Masha that by not joining, she had probably saved herself, because had she joined she would have risen in the ranks, and all the high party members among her colleagues were arrested and shot.
The links to her family in the Ukraine wore thin through the thirties. Her father’s leather shop was taken over by Communists, and in 1939 he died of a heart attack. The rest of the family disappeared into the storm of war.
In the early months of the war, with the German Army advancing upon Moscow, the city was at first chaotic, mobs of drunken and hysterical people roaming the streets looking for German spies, and then the streets were suddenly still, no traffic, no pedestrians, and nobody knowing what to do or where to run, and long lines at the bread stores. Masha waiting in a line one morning heard people say, “What are Jews doing here?” She was certain that if there were no bread or flour in the city the next day, all the Jews in Moscow would be killed. She waited in the cold for three hours, and someone pushed her out of the line and said, “Go to Palestine for bread.” She ran home, weeping.
That October the family was evacuated from Moscow. A terrifying journey in a crowded freight car, one of more than ninety attached to two engines operated by men who seemed not to know their destination and took them at first south to the Caucasus and then east to the Urals, through vast fields and forests, the war sometimes nearby, the thump and crunch of artillery and German aircraft overhead.
After six weeks of travel the train deposited them in the exotic world of Tashkent, the capital city of Uzbekistan in Central Asia, where they lived for a while in a shack. It was winter, the rainy season, and very cold. In a bazaar one morning they watched as soldiers loaded onto a truck the corpses of starved children recently arrived from the Ukraine, and some minutes later a hungry boy was beaten to death before their eyes by a raging crowd for stealing an apple from a stall. Masha’s mother decided they would not remain in Tashkent, and they traveled south and lived in a village not far from the border of Afghanistan. There they survived the winter through the grit and wits of Masha’s mother, who seemed to understand how to deal with the local people, bartered clothes for food, worked at odd jobs with Masha, who was fifteen years old, on a collective farm for a daily payment of a loaf of bread each, and nursed Masha’s sister through the measles that took the lives of all the other refugee children stricken with it.