From the Shtetl to the Circus
Raisa L’vivna Troianker was born on October 30, 1908, in Uman, into a poor and traditional Jewish family of eight.3 Her father Leyb (Leiba, Lev), a beadle in the local synagogue in charge of books, candles, and keys, like Yudl Kulyk, the Uman-based father of Ivan Kulyk, was no well-to-do Jew.
Yet as family legend has it, Uman Jews held him in high esteem for his profound expertise on the torah she be-al-peh, the “oral Torah,” that is, such rabbinic sources as the Talmud, homiletic literature, and legal codices. Indeed, Leyb’s religiosity of the God-fearing Jew informed his communal concerns, his rigid behavior, and his black-and-white ethical worldview, a source of imminent family conflict. In her Ukrainian poetry Leyb’s daughter Raia Troianker repeatedly etched her father as a learned Talmudic Jew. In “V hostiakh u tata” (Visiting Dad), the atheist Troianker depicted her father’s religious attributes, the peculiar color symbolism of which (yellow blue) will be discussed in due course.Troianker’s use of Jewish terms leave little doubt that she conversed with her tradition-minded parents in Yiddish, something that is well recognizable in her authentic Ashkenazic spelling such as tales and shames, Yiddish for the prayer shawl and synagogue beadle:
Swifter than a fast mouse
A rumor will run through the lanes:
“Our shames’s daughter has come from Kharkiv.”
Tiers and grief will fill the eyes of the shames.
An unexpected surprise for the old one.
Here he is, with his old glasses, fixed with threads,
Barefoot, in a yellow tales and blueyarmulke,
Anxious. Spasms heard in his voice.
Dad is old and weak, as an exhausted autumn.4
Like her father, Raia’s mother was pious and kindhearted. She managed a low- profile and barely profitable home-catering service, and her concerns never extended beyond her kosher cuisine and her children’s daily bread.
Sometime in the early 1910s, she tried to manage a kerosene store, but it brought no profit. Troianker portrayed her mother as a yidishe mame, the Jewish mother—caring, exhausted, and extraordinarily poor:My beloved old mom,
Whose hands are covered with fish scales,
For she has to cook
And earn her morsel of bread.5
Mind Troianker’s focus on bodily details: her mother’s dirty hands reeking with fish scales, her barefoot father with his spasmodic voice and his broken glasses. The poetess observes with regret and sorrow how her father turns into “a tired autumn,” an abstract metaphor, loosing his somatic features. This empathy to a decrepit body tells worlds about the relationship between Troianker and her parents.
If these excerpts from two different poems reflect with some accuracy Troianker’s attitude toward her parents, one cannot fail to notice Troianker’s tender voice, her affection, and her diminutive Ukrainian colloquialisms. She uses tato for “dad” and matusia for “beloved mom,” instead of the neutral bat’ko for “father” and maty for “mother,” which is particularly surprising given Raia’s conflict with her family legacy, Judaism. This conflict notwithstanding, she remained deeply attached to her parents, both poetically and personally, even though her father had excommunicated her and her mother had rejected Raia’s new non-Jewish family. Whenever Troianker turned to a poetic reinvention of the Jewish past, it was necessarily inhabited by, and even limited to, two indispensable personages: her father and mother. At the same time, Raisa morphed her routine visits to her father’s Uman house into a poetic return to her Jewish past—anxious, agonizing, decrepit, and ghostlike.6 Her parents’ Judaism, detached in Troianker’s memories from its characteristic somatic manifestations, failed to infuse her with religious inspiration, awe, or joy.
Traditional piety, however, to a great extent informed Troianker’s upbringing.
Apparently Troianker’s home training entailed a good deal of liturgy, primarily the prayer book and the Psalms, as well as Jewish dietary laws and regulations on woman’s purity. As a child, Raia had mastered Jewish prayers so nicely that fifteen years later she murmured them while observing one of her Ukrainian friends playing billiards in a Kharkiv literary club: she wanted him to win and hoped to reinforce him spiritually! Although we know next to nothing about Raia’s formal education except that she apparently finished the seven-grade secondary school in Uman, one may surmise that she familiarized herself with Ukrainian in the streets of Uman and taught herself Russian literature from books.7 Whereas Kulyk found inspiration in adventure books and Ukrainian folklore, it was verse—above all Russian Silver Age poetry—that became Troianker’s passion. In Russian poetry Raia sought sensuousness. In her early teens she fell in love with Anna Akhmatova, Nikolai Gumilev, Alexander Blok, Sergei Esenin, and Rudyard Kipling.8 Her reading preferences include no Ukrainian names—or perhaps her daughter from whose memoirs we most draw did not know about the Ukrainian affections of her mother. In addition, the works she read indicate that the strict laws of Judaism, which foreordained a young girl to marriage, childbirth, and housekeeping, did not check Raia’s sensuality. “She was like fire, her nature was more powerful than any restrictions,” recalled her daughter Elena Turgan.9Uman was too narrow for a lover of Blok and her family’s traditional Judaism too prohibitive for an admirer of Akhmatova. Years later Raia portrayed her escape from a sedentary life in a fetid shtetl as an act of liberation and freedom:
On a joyous evening I will drive to the railway station.
April flowers in love fly straight in my face.
Some fresh wind into the mould
Of the stagnated shtetls.10
Raia’s imagination went far beyond the confines of stagnating shtetls like Uman.
Her native shtetl gave her no scope to express herself. She sought sensuousness flying straight in her face, like flowers. Raia looked for adventure, love, and freedom. Her female ego was desperately knocking against the moldy walls of her parents’ house—and one day she broke through them.The itinerary that brought Troianker to the epicenter of a bourgeoning literary life in the Ukrainian capital began as a romantic adventure. Just as the circus in Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude redeemed a godforsaken Colombian pueblo, a vagabond circus freed Raisa from the provincialism of her shtetl. At fourteen or fifteen, Raisa had a romantic interlude with Leonid Jor- dani, a professional animal tamer traveling with his motley circus through Uman. After several meetings in the Sofia Park, Raia ran away with Leonid. The circus, if one believes the recent semiotic approach to this genre of early twentieth-century mass culture, demonstrates how a human being overcomes nature and the elements, above all, somatic sluggishness, natural laws, and gravity. It is an embodied utopia that celebrates a lamb and a lion lying together. To underscore the inexhaustible possibilities of human physicality, it places the human body in the center of its anthropocentric model of the universe.
Jordani’s vagabond circus made Raia’s head go round. “Rai—ia,” literally, “I am paradise,” is how Raia Troianker spelled her name to her partner, and Jordani promptly agreed to this fascinating onomastic mythmaking. Although the next year and a half was one of the happiest times in her life, Troianker had to pay a price for her freedom. In addition to the sudden joy of unrestricted sexual relations with Jordani, exuberantly romantic for both of them, Raia had to master the dangerous art of animal taming in order to become a member of the circus team. Jordani featured Raia in his key show: at the end of the daily performance after the clowns, trapeze artists, and wild beasts, a young, short, charming, ginger-haired girl shoved her head into a tiger’s wide-open mouth.
The show was such a success that Jordani commissioned a circus painter to make a poster featuring Raisa Troianker in a Turkish turban leaning her head on the bosom of the tamer.11Two years later Troianker referred to her circus career in the autobiographical poem “Zhadka” (Recollection), which for unknown reasons she did not include in her collections of poetry. She dedicated it to her circus colleagues, among them Jordani, and addressed one of her four-legged companions that she unexpectedly recognized while visiting the zoo:
Remember, the small town,
In a distant godforsaken province,
There is no tram ringing
And love’s pouring over the edges.
Remember, a little circus
And me, the tamer of wild animals.
One can never forget these moments
Ineffably painful and generous.
Remember—the stalls have calmed down
(second bell after the first one)
And you rubbed against my legs
The stripes of your skin.12
The last two lines convey Troianker’s propensity to the somatic and the sensuous. The image of a domesticated and nonaggressive beast stems from the immediacy of body contact: the tiger, nothing but a big cat, empathically rubs his striped skin against Troianker’s legs. In fact, according to the memoirs of Troianker’s daughter, the tiger was decrepit and senile, yet he once lost control and swiped her thigh. A deep scar from the tiger’s claws remained on Raia’s thigh for years. She epitomized her scar poetically as a sign of empathy and somatic proximity, not as that of aggression.
Your paw on my thigh
(even now, near my belly
there is a bluish secret cross).
But for the enraged tamer it was no joke: he punished both the tiger and Raia. This intercalation put an abrupt end to Raia’s first, but not last, love adventure. A person for whom the universe was somatic-centered could not endure the violence against that which she took very seriously: her own body, young, beautiful, and sovereign.
Raia left the circus and ran away for good.In vain she tried to suppress her deep feelings for the sharp-clawed tiger— her “striped lover” (mii smuhastyi Iiubovnyku)—and her significant other, Leonid. A year later, she revisited her love affair, turning the tamer Leonid into the Russian sea wolf Lionia (diminutive of Leonid) and herself into a Hong Kong prostitute. In her Kapytan i kytaianka (The Captain and the Chinese Girl), Troianker imitated Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” which she knew through Ivan Kulyk’s translation, later published in his Ukrainian anthology of American poetry.13 Here is Troianker’s exotic version of her romance:
Captain, my beloved captain!
My memories are like loosen beads.
Our nights are as drunk as whiskey,
Our nights are as fragrant as passion.
Five years after that meeting
You lived in my sleepless nights
And now, preparing the cocktails,
I murmur that unfathomable “Lioniu!”14
Years later, around 1942, when she was a popular war journalist in the northern Russian city of Murmansk, whose publications appeared regularly in Poliarnaia pravda (The Polar Truth daily), Troianker received a letter from the front. She received many letters from frontline soldiers—thanking her for her Russian verse calling for vengeance and for igniting their bellicose spirit—but this particular letter left her speechless. It was from Jordani. He informed her that he had long ago abandoned his profession as a tamer, had shot his beloved tiger (to save him from the Nazis), and had volunteered for the Red Army. A skilled marksman, he impressed his commanders, who offered him all sorts of privileges, including service in a noncombatant military artistic cast. He rejected the offer and became instead a first-rank sniper on the Leningrad front. Fifteen years after they parted, he still cherished his best memories of Raia and was thrilled to discover her publications in Poliarnaia pravda.
Jordani wrote her immediately, penning his letter with a chemical pencil in his minuscule indecipherable script and dispatching to the newspaper editorial board. The rest of Troianker’s wartime correspondence was lost during the Nazi bombardment of Murmansk, but Jordani’s first letter, perhaps unlike his later letters to Raia, did partially survive (only the first page, the second is illegible). The letter is too sexually explicit to be quoted in full yet too revealing to disregard. Given the scarcity of documented evidence, this letter presents an unusual insight, one that casts light on Raia Troianker’s early years. Jordani penned it in Russian, most likely the language he and Raia spoke to each other. The italics correspond to the emphasis in the original:
Listen to the sun singing in my soul. I think about you often and long. Sometimes I see your eyes in my optic sight. I have met other women after you. But their vulgar lust could not erase my bright memories of you. I would like to walk with you in the Sofia Park. There were black swans there. To that wood of our rendezvous [I would like to go]. I will sit at your feet. I have no future and I do not think about it, but I am concerned about you: there are too few girls like you in the world and you should take care of yourself. You are a diamond. You were then a diamond in a rough, but I understood you and imagine you now—a diamond in a setting, and I am envious that your brightness warms someone else. Perhaps you have become as arrogant as our Aida. Where is she, the best of the horses of the world? Also I would like to tell you that my life is almost gone, I don’t even know what awaits me this morning, but I would like you to remember that there is no educated and well-trained scholar able to carry you as I am carrying you in my straggling soul. I want to listen to how the tiger is roaring: not the mechanical German one but a genuine Ussurian tiger. I want your dearest lips and gloomy eyes and your face getting red with passion. I have a poster with your face on my bosom. When you get this letter do not share yourself with anyone and spend some time with your Leonid. He spends too much time with you. I believe you have not forgotten him, as it is impossible to forget the summer and the fall in Ukraine.15
The letter betrays Jordani as a person of unbridled character and arduous passion, and as a man with a broken heart. His uncombed Russian language was imbued with a mixture of pathetic rhetoric and point-blank sincerity and filled with bold yet artless metaphors. Since he had not seen Raia for some fifteen years, one can hardly doubt that the sixteen-year-old Raia’s charms and maturity had enchanted him. These many years later, Jordani retained his emotional zeal.
Troianker, wooed by many, considered Jordani’s letter one of her most precious artifacts. During the Nazi bombing, when she made her way to the Poliar- naia pravda office, in addition to her own journalistic notes she took three items in her small field-case: a volume of Anna Akhmatova’s Chetki, a collection of Nikolai Gumilev’s poetry, and the letter from Leonid Jordani.