Born in a Bookbindery
Pervomais’kyi’s parents, the Hurevyches, were common provincial and hardworking Jews that could hardly make ends meet. They lived on the outskirts of the town in a tiny hut, one half of which, sunny and spacious, they leased to a Ukrainian family, squeezing themselves into the other part, stuffed with big old furniture.
Like this old furniture, Judaism occupied a depressing and disproportionate place in Pervomais’kyi’s imagination. His parents were not as traditional as the Kulyks and the Troiankers and perhaps not that extraordinarily poor: Shloyme (Rus.: Solomon), his father, was a bookbinder, and Hane (Rus.: Anna), his mother, a seamstress. Yet when Pervomais’kyi turned six, the Hurevyches sent Leonid, then Illia (or in the diminutive, Iliusha), to a heder, a private Jewish elementary school that taught Hebrew reading skills and some basics of Judaism. In addition to the Pentateuch, with the classic eleventh-century commentary of Rashi (Rabbi Shelomoh Itshaki, 1040 -1104) taught by a local melamed, the school owner’s daughter taught the obligatory Russian language and literature, as required by the tsarist administration, which enforced and imposed a comprehensive Russification on the Jews.This unequivocal sign of an encroaching modernity—Russian language and literature—did not save Chervonohrad’s heder from physical violence against its pupils, that notorious vice of the Jewish elementary school lamented by Russian- Jewish maskilim, the ardent proponents of enlightenment and educational reform. Pervomais’kyi’s heder was still a dull, intimidating, and overcrowded institution that commonly accepted physical abuse. The young Leonid could not withstand the conduct of his female teacher of Russian, whose sharp palm not infrequently left burning pain on his and other pupils’ necks. Despite his parents’ threats and curses, he ran away after four years of study and swore never to go back.
On top of that, he wanted once and for all to erase the heder from his consciousness.12 One may only speculate whether he rejected his “Jewish” edu-cation because of the “Russian” physical violence he encountered in the elementary school, yet the consequences were clear: he did not return.
Despite his disrupted education, the ten-year-old Pervomais’kyi’s first love was letters. He found it in the bookbinding shop where the Hurevyches dispatched their stubborn son so he could learn at least a useful trade, if not Hebrew and Russian. By that time, Pervomais’kyi’s elder brother had died and the old Shloyme badly needed the help of an apprentice. In addition to a number of Ukrainians that Pervomais’kyi befriended there, the bindery shop shaped him culturally and spiritually. In the short story “Z Pisni Pisen’: rapsodiia” (From the Song of Songs: A Rhapsody, 1935) based on his life experience, Pervomais’kyi emerges as a self-taught boy who spent all his days in the bindery. He glued letters to book spines; restored and bound books by Tolstoy, Korolenko, Gorky, Defoe, Swift, and Stowe; and at night read through what had been bound during the day.13
In the mid-1920s, Pervomais’kyi argued that he had never been able to imagine himself without the binding shop of his childhood: it begat him as a reader, writer, and thinker. Even if Pervomais’kyi—like many other European literati of the twentieth century who drew heavily on childhood imagery—could claim he was “born from his childhood” (rodom iz detstva), there was perhaps only one item in the bindery shop that was of particular significance, second only to his mother’s songs: the image of the book. When conceiving his literary biography, he dated his first spiritual endeavors to this discovery. Here is the self-reflecting nineteen-year-old Pervomais’kyi:
When ten years old I was born to the world and I was born a bookbinder. From then on I have changed jobs more than once: I was a librarian, a typist, the director of a “living” newspaper, an accountant, I worked on the beet plantations, yet my first profession left its mark on me.
I love the book. With an inner trembling I turn over the pages of an old, forgotten, neglected book—I feel how life springs from each and every tiny letter, which so much resemble every other letter stamped on its yellow pages.... The hot torrent of life springs from the letters. When I was ten years old, most of all I liked books printed with the antique Peter the Great or Tsarina Elizaveta types with their long letter yat’ and their “hard sign,” obstinate, clumsy, as if its right hand were cut off. Cautiously I turned the pages of the old volumes of Russkaia starina or Otechestvennye zapiski. I did not understand anything in their intricate script, but I enjoyed their orderly rows, their columns of letters. Running heads on the upper part of the folio seemed to me like the commanders of the columns, and the more figures there were in the running head, the higher was the rank of the commander. I read books without control, at random, whatever came into my hands.14It comes as no surprise that this revealing paragraph, from the first page of the autobiographical story “V paliturni” (In the Bookbinding Shop, 1927), was erased—either by a Soviet censor or by Pervomais’kyi himself—from subsequent editions and never made it into his collected writings, unlike the story in which it first appeared.
The censor had good ideological reasons. Before anything else, Pervo- mais’kyi took the book for what it was: a physical object, with its smell of freshly cut binding cloth, its fuzzy leather spine, its reddish or gilded edge-cut, its carefully bound and sewn together notebooks, its cut or uncut pages, its deeply imprinted and almost tactile type, its elaborate title page vignettes, its size and weight, and its letters with their vertiginous yet impenetrable meaning. The book in Pervomais’kyi’s imagination was emphatically humane: it preserved human touches—the sweat of the binder, the insomnia of the typesetter, the whim of the owner commissioning the inclusion of several random writings under the same cover, or the marginal notes of long-deceased readers.
Each letter had its individual character, which could be aggressive or crooked, languid or funky, resilient or rebellious. For him, the book signified freedom; nobody had power over it. Yet for a Soviet censor, Pervomais’kyi’s perception of book lore was conspicuously conservative. Pervomais’kyi seems to have appreciated things emerging from time immemorial, as if he were some sort of an austere neoclassicist and not a gung-ho Komsomol poet, as he identified himself in the 1920s when he penned this story. Surprisingly, as if contradicting what Pervomais’kyi’s stated about his “blotted out” four years in the heder preceding his, as he put it, exile to the bookbinding shop, to some extent his attachment to the book could have been a product of his previous Jewish experience, perhaps an unconscious one and due not only to the Yiddish language, the bookbindery lingua franca.In the Jewish elementary school, Illia Hurevych was exposed to the study of the Talmud and to readings from the Torah, as was every Jewish child his age. At the time he told his parents that he would never go back to the heder, he had not yet reached his confirmation age and had not yet become Bar Mitzvah. Yet as a boy in the family of an observant Jewish artisan and a frequent synagogue-goer, he regularly saw the whitened parchment of the Torah scroll unrolled in front of the reader and the congregation. Pervomais’kyi could not but visually capture the scroll’s handwritten Hebrew letters with their three-stemmed “umbrellas,” called in Aramaic tagin, or “coronets,” sticking out from the letters. What were those coronets? For hundreds of years, Jewish children asked this question and received the same answer, taken from a famous Talmud story, quoted by each and every teacher in a Jewish elementary school. When Moses ascended to heaven to receive the Torah, he found the Almighty engaged in affixing tagin (three small upward strokes in the form of a crown) to the Hebrew letters. Moses asked, “Master of the Universe, Who is forcing Your hand [making you to add crowns to the letters]?” The Almighty replied: “There will be a man, after many generations, whose name is Akiva ben Yosef and he will expound a multitude of laws upon each stroke of these coronets.”15
Schoolchildren were supposed to believe that the tagin, the coronets, symbolized the multiple meanings of a written sign of the sacred text.
Perhaps Osip Mandelshtam alluded in his “Conversations on Dante” to the same coronets when he wrote that as far as the literary word is concerned, “it is a bundle and meanings stick out from it in various directions.” It does not seem impossible that Pervomais’kyi’s metaphor of the “hot torrent of life springing from every letter” stemmed from the same source. Apparently it was his attachment to the letter, the word, the text, and the book that later informed the self-reflective matrix of his thinking and shaped much of his poetic imagery. Hence if there was something profoundly “Jewish” in Pervomais’kyi’s late lyrics, to which we will duly return, it was this attachment to, concern for, and anxiety about the fate of the verbal signs of his Ukrainian poetry.Fascinated with letters, Pervomais’kyi worshipped paper. A close look at the physical essence of the book prompted Pervomais’kyi the binder to suggest that letters turned speechless paper in an eloquent interlocutor. This would seem a stretch, an exaggeration, or a semiotic paradox had Pervomais’kyi himself not emphasized that his writing was inspired by a desire to make his voiceless friend, a piece of paper, speak up. In 1927, he penned the following confession:
And as in childhood, now, too, I share my thoughts with my only acquaintance, with my only true friend: paper.
My silent friend! My love belongs to you, my sleepless nights belong to you, the entire suffering of my heart torn apart by my recollections, all my tears shed in the cursed bookbinding shop belong to you! Is it not too much, you would ask. But also the whole joy of my short life, the moments of unfathomable uplifting, when my heart was beating hot, nervous, when I wanted to embrace the entire world with my feeble hands, when a single flower, sprout, or stone aside a road generated a happy thought, a living confidence—and all that also belongs to you.16
Thus not the Jewish God nor the Bolshevik Party, but a sheet of white paper became Pervomais’kyi’s utmost value, his most trusted authority, and his confessor. This image implied that writing a book was hard work, tantamount to the proletarian job of the binder, rather than a white-collar occupation. It suggested a limitless potential of cultural symbolism that could place the man of letters in the center of the universe and give the artist freedom and escape. And it pointed to the ethical measure of writing: mercy to those who cannot speak on their own and who need somebody’s help, as a sheet of paper requires the help of the writer. Pervomais’kyi’s path toward the exploration of his newly discovered symbols of culture and its far-reaching ramifications, however, was long and by no means straight.