I’ll admit, the first thing I ever thought was my name was “Stop that Mikhail!” Honestly, no bull. I thought my name was “Stop That Mikhail Geriiovich Moisse”. I guess because I got into everything -- that I DO remember. Spilling Mama’s paints on the kitchen floor (I still say it was just a sign of artistic genius to come), breaking vases from running too fast around the house, digging up the Morning Glories and proudly presenting my floral prize to my parents, roots hanging out, complete with tiny stubs of dirt clinging to them that always managed to fall and stain the floors.

All right, so maybe I wasn’t the calmest child you’d ever seen.

“You little chutzpah nudnik!” Mama would scold, fighting a smile. Translated loosely, she was calling me an ‘imprudent pest’.

I took it as a compliment.

I loved Yiddish. It was my first language. Later, when I traveled away from my childhood home of Moscow, the girls would ask me to sing songs for them in Yiddish. Some said it sounded like I was coughing up a hairball. I never took this too personally -- the French sound the same, only the hairball is coming out of their nose instead of their throat.

Yiddish was the best. Barely anyone understood what you were saying when you were on the main streets, and you could talk about anything -- or anyone -- you wanted.

“You saw the tchotchke?”

“Yes.”

“Nu?”

“She was a shiksa.”

With conversations like that, how can you go wrong?

Before I was eight I lived what felt like half my life in The Shul -- the synagogue. Mama dragged Nataniel, my older brother, and I there every week. We were dressed in our best each time, my feet pinched from the shoes and my pants too tight. Papa went with us until I was five. He stopped then, leaving Mama to be the soul overseer of our religious well being. She was a firm believer of the ‘sins of the fathers‘ rule, and since our father had plenty of sins to go around we were in the crosshairs for eternal damnation.

She once said we’d be happy in God’s eyes, damn it, or die trying.

I normally passed my time in the Shul by listening to the Hebrew floating around me, peppered with sporadic Yiddish and Russian.

Oh, do I remember that Russian. It was Shalmai’s wife who was born a Russian Orthodox but converted when she married him. The Shul was shamed. A Goy -- a Yiddish racist term we used, you might say -- stepped foot inside a Holy Synagogue? Suddenly it wasn’t just Nataniel and I as the target for sin. The whole Shul was!

Shalmai had to translate the whole service for “The Goy”. I must admit, I never learned her name...we only knew her as “The Goy” thanks to the busy bodies we went to Synagogue with.

Pretty soon, however, everyone saw her as a Godsend after all. Don’t get me wrong -- she was still called “The Goy”. But at least she kept the Russians from burning The Shul with us in it to the ground. They hated us, true, but they didn’t want to kill one of their own.

At least they didn’t at that point.

Don’t feel too bad. We didn’t like them much either.

“Goys! Goys! Shmatte!” We’d yell that as the Russian schoolchildren would go by.

“Kikes, Kikes, Go Back to Palestine!” They’d yell that back at us.

“Shmucks!” That was a dirty word we’d scream at them.

“Ublyudoks!” That was a dirty word they screamed back.

“MIKHAIL!!!!!!!” That was my mother grabbing my ear and dragging me inside for yelling dirty words at the Russians.

“I was just telling them too --”

“I know what you were telling them, and you’re not to tell them that anymore!”

I pouted. “They kicked Tzalmon,” I moodily whispered -- I was very moody as a child, and never really grew out of it.

“That’s because Tzalmon kicked them.”

My mama always saw both sides of the story.

It was the most frustrating thing you’ve ever seen, trust me.

Nataniel and I had playmates over all the time, at least before five o’ clock, which was when Papa got home. My favorites were the Yarden brothers. They were older than both of us, but only by a year or two, and they were even more mischievous than I was. It made me look like an angel for once.

“Why do you have such silly names?” they asked me once.

“Our names aren’t silly,” I sniffed haughtily, running a hand through my dark brown hair.

“Mikhail Geriiovich? Nataniel Geriiovich?”

They didn’t have patronymics like we did. They had what most Ashkenazic Jews had, a Jewish name, then a Russian, and then a last name. In fact, our family was much more Russian on every level, they pointed out -- from our names to our father’s occupation as a Banker.

“That’s because we’re special,” Nataniel said. “We get to have Russian names because we’re the best.”

Even our last name was better than most. In 1845, the Russians had given all Jews last names. That’s why some got stuck with awful names, like Lakhudra (a prostitute). People who could pay for a good name -- I assume my grandparents could -- got names like “Moisse”, which meant Moses, the leader of the Hebrews out of bondage.

“My mama said you used to have names like us, but your papa changed them.”

I never understood what this meant until later. I figured it meant they planned to name me Abraham or something else equally Jewish, and at the last minute they went with Mikhail.

“Want to go yell at the Russians?”

“Sounds fun.”

And off we’d be again, yelling at the Russians and letting them yell back at us. It was almost a friendship we had with them, bonded through slurs.

I didn’t have that many years to yell at the Russians, though, at least with a group and not under my breath. We moved to the different part of Moscow when I was eight, a part far away from The Shul and my Jewish playmates.

Two days after we had, a pogrom -- an anti-Semitic riot -- broke out in our old neighborhood. Two children were killed and five adults.

But that’s neither here nor there.

Grandfather Matityah still visited. He was from a little shtele further north, a tiny village called Belz, and he‘d come to see us every other month for a weekend. He and Mama loved to sing a song he made up about it...something about Meyn Shtele and Home of my Childhood.

I don’t remember Papa and Grandfather Matityah ever getting along, although Nataniel claims he does. Grandfather was too much like Mama -- playful, caring, a tease at heart -- to ever be friends with Papa.

Moscow was a fun place to be when I was growing up. We had always been poor in the Jewish section of town, but things changed after we moved. Suddenly, we had meat on the table. Kosher meat, of course, but real, actual meat.

Then we had desserts. I had never tried ice cream before, especially with thick, creamy chocolate syrup dripping down the sides of it and oozing into a little puddle at the bottom of the bowl.

Suddenly we had a twice-weekly maid, who then became a live-in. Mama started wearing bright, vibrant new dresses. Shoes didn’t pinch my feet anymore. Nataniel and I were given toys -- so many toys, you couldn’t count them all!

But it all didn’t come without a price.

I was babbling about something or another to Mama one day, speaking Yiddish like I always had and getting perfectly good Yiddish responses back, when Papa came into the room.

“Mikhail! Stop that!”

He was speaking in Russian.

“Stop what?” I answered back in Yiddish. I knew some Russian, sure, but little more than slurs and how to ask for the bathroom.

“THAT!”

“That what?”

“That!” He slapped me sharply across the face.

This, of course, just made me angry. I‘m not someone who you’d want to mess around with when I‘m angry. “That what?!” I screamed back through tears, confused and upset at that then rare expression of anger from my father.

“Don’t smart off to me! No dinner for you! Upstairs!”

“Gerii!” Mama pulled me against her, letting me bury my face in her skirts. “You hit the child and didn’t even tell him what for!”

Her words, even though they were in my defense, were lost on me. I was concentrating too hard on the language she used them in.

She was speaking perfect, fluent Russian.

After that day no one spoke Yiddish in the house anymore, unless Grandfather Matityah came to see us. Even then Papa refused to be around, and he made sure that Grandpa came in the back entrance -- where none of his business associates could see.

I realized later this was just the beginning of my family’s ‘Russification’ as I like to call it -- only the start of my father’s crazed hope to leave behind his ancestors.

~*~

I loved art from an early age. I’d sit and watch my Mama paint or draw every morning until finally when I was about three she set me up with my own pad and pencil.

“Now,” she said carefully, setting a bowl of apples in front of me, “draw exactly what you see.”

My first drawing looked, to be frank, like a man vomiting. Mama tried to keep a straight face as she judged it.

“Well...it certainly is...interesting, Mikky,” she kindly encouraged, addressing me by the Jewish nickname for Mikhail instead of the Russian.

“Can we play with your cards now?”

“Shh,” she’d whisper, glancing at the stairwell. “Not until your Papa leaves.”

Her cards were magic. Most everyone did them back then -- Russians or Jews -- but Mama was the best. She never let Papa see her practice them, though, because he was a firm skeptic in all things religious. He’d call them ‘tarot’. She’d call them ‘wisdom cards’.

She’d do readings for the neighbors in the shteles, and even for the poor Russians sometimes. Russia is a highly superstitious country...they’ll believe in most anything you place before them. Even the Romanovs who ruled the country had secret tarot meetings.

Mama was good though, no doubt, and I to this day trust her readings more than I trust anyone I’ve met since who claims to be an expert at ‘wisdom cards’.

Mama and I had a bond deeper than that I’ve had with anyone else. She once said that when I was born it was like looking at a tiny portion of her soul that had always been lost -- she always had a way with mystical words like that.

I went to a Jewish school until I was 14, which was the age most Jews stopped their learning. You had to be in the top 10% in every subject of the city’s Jewish population to get into High School. I wasn’t good at math at all -- far too right-brained and creative -- but was excellent at Art, Grammar when I tried, and Athletics. Nataniel had a way with numbers and letters. He won every Spelling Bee for as a many years as he attended.

Natty -- we called him Natty back then -- and I were like night and day. Physically we looked very alike: average height, big boned, broad, muscular build, dark complexions, and chocolate brown hair with dark, intense eyes.

Personality wise, however, we differed. He was colder, a deep calculation behind his eyes that made you realize he thought he was smarter than anyone else alive. I’m more open, more likely to experiment. He refuses to do anything without a plan -- I refuse to do anything with one. He was ice to my fire, chill to my passion.

I remember the Russians storming into our school every so often and checking our bags ‘for state protection‘. Nataniel and I were the richest children there by the time I was 12 -- thus our bags were always the first to be checked, shoved away for a while, then returned a significant amount lighter. We learned to stop bringing anything personal when Natty’s Star of David icon was stolen, only for us to see it days later in a merchant’s stand.

I was popular, especially with the girls, but the teachers despised me. I was too ‘outspoken’ they’d write on my reports home, ‘full of too much energy and talk’. I remember one teacher telling my mother that I would ‘have to have that fierce pride drummed out’ of me.

It was drummed out far sooner than she could have ever guessed.

It’s true, I WAS proud -- of myself, of my family, of my religion. So proud I was almost blind with it. Later Lara would explain that it was because my father had been so UN-proud. His stifling of the Yiddish culture made me defend it even more vehemently, and even the cold Nataniel later fought for it in his own way.

I was only allowed to go to school on the weekdays, and I had to follow the same path back and forth as I did. If I didn’t I was libel to be told so by various Russians. That was something even I did NOT want.

Mama and I would go for walks on the weekends, especially past the Art Gallery. We weren’t allowed in -- rather, we might have been able to get in past a few certain guards, but eventually would get stopped, hear the word ‘jail’ thrown around a few times, and be forced to turn around and leave.

“We don’t want to go in there anyway,” Mama would say, grasping my hand tighter and pulling me past the building. “It’s just a bunch of dead painters.”

Dead painters sounded interesting though, especially when I was only five and I thought it meant the actual bodies were there instead of the art.

As I got older we’d spend more time outdoors before the rest of the household woke up, drawing, painting, or even sculpting. I loved colors; nothing seemed more perfect than a deep red background with a splash of blue, a touch of green, a tiny dab of yellow, that when combined turned into a picture of a spring day.

I doodled in school constantly, paying more attention to the leg of the dog I was currently drawing versus math theorems and Shakespearean monologues (especially some of the anti-Jewish ones). I was good at languages, though -- I spoke fluent Russian that hid my Yiddish accent, enough Latin to get by with most romance languages, and was able to pick up words quickly. This helped me later.

Several of my classmates were openly against the Russians because their parents were. We called them as many dirty Yiddish words as we could, and once Yiddish was outlawed in the school we started in with Russian slurs. Back then, though, no one knew anything about political activists -- in fact, none of us knew much about anything except the professions open to us.

Natty wanted to be a banker, like Papa, or a mathematician. I wanted to be...well, I didn’t know WHAT I wanted to be.

Nataniel of course got into Jewish High School, but only because I turned in some art projects with his name on them to help him into the 10%. I, instead, was rather content to stop my formal education. I didn’t like books much -- they seemed like a waste of time when there was so much living to do.

It especially seemed futile to spend my precious minutes reading after the day that changed my view on the world in 1891.

The whole day had been perfect -- Channa, a classmate, had kissed me behind the coat closet and invited me to her house for dinner. I didn’t have the heart to tell her I was sure my father wouldn’t allow it. My teacher Mr. Tzel had entered one of my drawings into an art contest as the best from my class. Mama had promised to make my favorite supper, and even Natty was being a little more loving than normal -- he told me he loved my newest set of Matrushka Dolls.

We were walking through the old Jewish section of town we used to live in. The school was confidently located in the heart of it. I was babbling on to Nataniel about something or another when he grabbed my arm in his large hand.

We both stopped and stared at the scene before us.

Two dozen Russian soldiers were lined up in front of a large cluster of apartment buildings, barking out orders, small revolvers in hand. There were a few people leaving the building, suitcases in hand, tight babushka scarves pulled over their hair and faces. Most were children being dragged along by adults down the stony sidewalk, their faces a chilling frozen peach next to the dreary gray sky.

Some were being pulled away, especially women who seemed hesitant to leave their homes. One mother grabbed at five children all at once, unable to choose which of her small ones needed the most help moving along.

“What’s going on?“ I whispered. Natty’s mouth tightened, his thin red lips turning a cold white.

“You haven’t heard?” he finally muttered, turning me around. “The warning was in the papers a month ago.”

He started dragging me away from the scene. I was all ready tall and broad for a thirteen year old, but Natty was twice as large.

“Since when do I read papers?” I asked, glancing back over my shoulder.

“We have to tell Mama.”

A little girl behind me screamed. It was followed by a sickening thud, then a louder shriek and a cry from her. She had been hit.

I pulled my arm away from Nataniel, my heart suddenly flashing, my mind running with a thousand thoughts. “What the hell is going on?!”

The little girl was sitting on the ground, stomach to the floor, arms outstretched, grabbing for anything she could. A massive load of tears fell from her crystal eyes, blubbering down her cheeks and over her thick pink mouth. Her mother was going insane, trying to reach her but being held back by three guards -- three, all on just one simple mother.

How like the Russians to choose a time to force evacuation when the Fathers were at work.

An officer caught the girl by the hair, trying to pull her up, but she still refused to move. She reached out for a tree, then a crack in the sidewalk, then me -- she was actually reaching out to me of all people, screaming in Yiddish a thousand helps.

I dropped my schoolbooks and started running back into the scene.

Natty’s hand grabbed my shoulder and yanked me around, pushing his large face close to mine.

“They’re being evacuated, you idiot! All the Jews are being forced into shteles in the Pale away from Moscow!”

My stomach lurched.

“What about us?”

“Papa’s arranged something, I’m sure.” He forced his arm around my shoulders, trying to guide me back to my fallen schoolbooks.

The little girl kept screaming, her shrieks louder and louder until both Natty and I had stopped walking. We didn’t turn however -- no we kept our backs to them, unable to face the fallen people.

OUR fallen people.

“You! You boys!”

Two men were ahead of us, brawny Russian men with imposing tangled beards. “Are you boys evacuating?”

Natty nodded, trying to steer me around them. By now the books had long been forgotten.

I noticed these weren’t members of the armed forces. These were everyday peasants -- in fact, there were quite a few of them around, peeking through alleys and watching the riot. They must have had some sick fascination with it.

Human nature is cruel.

One grabbed me, yanking me from Nataniel. Another took a hold of Natty, pushing him against a brick wall. I felt the air swish out of me just watching.

“Then where are your bags?” one man taunted. “Everyone knows the Kikes live like kings underneath their rags! They steal our gold, the Russian people’s rightful treasure, and keep it for themselves! Don‘t you need bags to keep your riches?”

I squirmed, trying to knee one of my attackers in the groin. A thirteen year old boy, however, is no match for several middle aged drunken men.

I was slapped, my cheek knocking into the bricks. I closed my eyes tightly, screaming, trying to grab any part of the men I could to use as a weapon. I was met with another punch, this time to my stomach, knocking the wind out of me.

“Damn little Jew,” one muttered, grabbing me by my shirt and tossing me into the alley.

“NATANIEL!” I cried, trying to fight off tears. I couldn’t see him anymore. I felt blood trickle on my forehead down between my eyes and nose, dripping on my shirt.

“Stop it!” I said in perfect Russian, trying to drop as much of the Yiddish accent as I could, trying to seem like one of their countrymen, one of their friends. “Stop it, my father will pay you well!”

“You think we want some dirty Kike’s money? Your stolen money?!” One of them took the palm of his hand and pressed my head back into the wall, sending a quick flash of black through my eyes. “Who do you think we are to accept something from the enemy?!“

I realized I had offended them all in trying to save my brother and I. I had played to their love of money over country -- they saw me as the enemy, as a force to be destroyed in pursuit of their beloved Mother Russia’s perfection. They would never accept money over what they saw as patriotic in their warped, distorted minds.

I was pulled down then, my temple getting banged against the wall again. My hearing got fuzzy. I remember hearing something about being spoiled, about stealing food and silver, about causing Russian deaths.

Then I felt searing pain shoot through me. I screamed. And screamed. And screamed.

The scream lasted forever, even in the twilight dream of foggy pain I drifted into.

I woke up to Natty’s face over mine. He was bruised and his cheek was cut, but he seemed fully alert, unlike me. I felt like I’d had too many shots of vodka and run into a troika.

“Mikky!” he whispered, glancing around him anxiously. “Mikky, get up. You have to go to the doctor.”

We were both breathing heavily. I could see tiny dabs of blood on my nose.

“My...my chest...” I whispered, feebly trying to make a motion to the center of my pain. It was a dry pain now, not like before. It throbbed, not shocked.

I saw for the first and last time in my life the aloof Natty’s eyes water.

“My God,” he whispered.

I placed my right hand over my torn shirt, trying to feel what he saw.

A crust of blood made a small imprint via what had to have been a small pocket knife with a dull blade. Later that day at the hospital I would be told the dull blade had saved my life, and that I wasn‘t the first, nor the last Russian Jew to be purposely branded this way.

I tracked the two triangles with the tips of my fingers slowly, grimacing, my skin chilled, the right portion of my chest cut.

The rest of my life I would wear the scar of a Star of David.