LEV AND MARIA’S STORY

Paullina Simons’s Tribute to Her Grandparents, Survivors of Russia’s Terrible Twentieth Century

My grandparents, Lev and Maria Handler, met in a factory in Leningrad when he was twenty-five and she was twenty-one. Maria was an assembly line worker and Lev was an engineer and designer of engines. They went together for two years before they married in 1934. My father, Yuri, was born in 1936, my uncle, Alex, in 1938. They lived in Leningrad on a street called Fifth Soviet, in the two rooms in a communal apartment that I use as a setting for The Bronze Horseman. There were six of them before World War II began: my grandparents, my father and his brother, and my grandfather’s parents.

My grandmother was one of the very few Soviet women at that time who did not work outside the home. My grandfather did not want an exhausted wife coming home late, and so she stayed home and took care of him, his parents, and her children. She was very happy with that arrangement, “Because it pleased your grandfather.”

In August of 1941, my grandmother with her boys, ages five and two, and her in-laws, rode one of the last trains out of Leningrad. They were evacuated to a small village 1500 miles away in Saratov County on the Volga, a hundred miles north of Stalingrad. My grandfather, a skilled and essential worker, remained in Leningrad. His factory was quickly retrofitted to manufacture airplanes, and he was assigned to design and repair their engines.

During the evacuation, my grandmother became separated from her children and her in-laws — she was aboard one boat on the Volga while they traveled on another. She had all the money (though not for long: she would be robbed during the night) and her in-laws had the documents, the luggage, and the kids. It was several days before they were all reunited at their designated evacuation post, but now they were broke and would remain penniless until my grandfather’s paycheck finally reached the village where they would live out the war.

My grandmother’s mother, Dusia, had stayed behind in Leningrad to be with her partner of thirty years, Mikhail; but only a few weeks after the evacuation he would be dead of tuberculosis. Dusia then moved in to the Fifth Soviet apartment with my grandfather. They lived there during that first terrible winter of the German blockade when half a million Soviet civilians perished from famine and pestilence. My grandfather says that he only survived because of Dusia’s daily excursions across the frozen Neva River to barter with her farmer friends, trading personal items for potatoes.

Believing, however, that he would not make it through another winter in a blockaded city, my grandfather joined the Red Army in the summer of 1942. His talent for repairing all types of engines was much in demand and he became a decorated lieutenant. Dusia remained in Leningrad for the remainder of the war, ever the survivor — until cancer of the stomach claimed her in 1977 at the age of eighty-three.

My grandfather’s father, Wolf Lazarevich, was a professor of mathematics. He died of pneumonia in September of 1943 at the age of sixty-one. During his short time in evacuation, Wolf taught mathematics to the villagers and was so beloved that when he died they gave him a funeral procession — carrying his body above their heads through the village — and a Christian burial (although he was a Jew). My grandfather’s lifelong regret is that he never again saw his father after the day he put him on the evacuation train in 1941. Wolf was already dead by the time his son was finally granted a ten-day furlough to visit his family in their village. To this day, my grandfather grieves for his father and loves him deeply.

After the war was over, my grandparents and my father and uncle lived in Moscow with relatives while Leningrad was being rebuilt. They came back to Fifth Soviet in the late 1940s and continued to live there until 1963. Both my widowed great-grandmothers lived in the rooms with them. My grandfather’s mother died in 1953 of heart failure. In 1962, my father, twenty-six, met my mother, twenty-two, and married her two months later (despite the inconvenience of a prior wedding engagement). My parents continued to live separately after their wedding because there was no room for my mother in my grandparents’ rooms.

It was when my mother became pregnant with me (I don’t know how!) that life slightly improved. My grandparents, after spending years on a waiting list, were finally given a small one-bedroom apartment of their own into which they took my great-grandmother. And so my mother, my father, and I, remained in one room on Fifth Soviet while my uncle, my aunt, and their baby lived in the other.

My parents and I left the Soviet Union for America in 1973 and my uncle and his new family soon followed. My grandparents, now retired, missed their children and grandchildren terribly. So in 1979 they accepted my father’s invitation to come and live with us in the United States. My grandfather, then seventy-two, arrived at JFK carrying his prized Soviet fishing rod — because he didn’t think they could make fishing rods like that in America.

They lived with my parents in their house for five years, and then on their own in Maine for ten. For the last six they have been back on their own in my father’s house. My parents and my uncle are in North Carolina. In July of 2001, Lev and Maria will have been married for nearly sixty-seven years — though my grandmother, coyly batting her eyelashes, likes to say that they’ve been “together for sixty-nine.” He will be ninety-four in July and she is turning ninety in August. He says, “Your grandmother may not be the most beautiful woman in the world but she is the most dear.”

My grandfather still digs his garden in the spring and plants tomatoes and cucumbers though his back is beginning to bother him; my grandmother still bakes and cooks all their dinners herself though she complains of arthritis. They argue and fight as if they were seventeen and spend every minute of every day together. After watching them go at each other for a while, my father once asked, “Has there been one day in your marriage when you two have not argued?” And my grandfather replied, “Yes, but that was a wasted day.”

They read constantly, avidly follow current events, are hockey fanatics, watch American movies though they don’t speak English, and really enjoy Mexican soap operas translated into Russian (apparently they’re even better in translation). My grandfather has two satellite dishes so he can catch Russian programming on one and movies on the other.

My grandmother says, “We can’t die; everything in life is still so fascinating.”

My grandfather says, “I won’t die until after I get your translated Bronze Horseman into my hands, Paullina. As soon as I finish reading it, then I can die.”

April 2001

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PAULLINA SIMONS was born and raised in Leningrad and immigrated to the United States with her family in the 1970s. She is the author of Tully, Red Leaves and Eleven Hours. She has lived in Rome, London, and Dallas. She now lives in New York City and can be reached at

[email protected]

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CREDITS

Jacket design by Richard Aquan

Jacket painting: view of the Monument to Peter the Great by Vasili Ivanovich Surikov. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia/Bridgeman Art Library New York

Also by Paullina Simons

Tully

Red Leaves

Eleven Hours