Foreword


Dear Reader,

You hold in your hands a remarkable book. I would describe it as a family saga spanning four generations of a large Jewish family. The narrative embraces the fates of people born at the end of the 19th century, as well as those of members of the family who are alive today – Alla Esipovich-Roginskaya and her son Stanislav. The book is dedicated to Stanislav as the continuator of this distinguished line. Yet the lives it recounts, the intricate interweaving of historical events, characters, and situations make it, believe me, engrossing reading for the widest circle of thoughtful readers.

Today it is rightly acknowledged that the history of a family – a family saga – can, in condensed form, reflect the history of a country in one or another dramatic epoch. The grand history of a nation or of a family is invariably composed of small, individual human destinies. This has become particularly evident in our own time, as so-called everyday or family history has become the focus of close scrutiny by sociologists and historians, evolving into an independent scholarly field known as the history of everyday life (German: Alltagsgeschichte).

The much-tried history of Russia and the complex history of the Jewish people are refracted in an entirely unusual way within this family. The geography of the relatively familiar story of how people moved from the small towns of the Jewish Pale of Settlement to the major cities of the vast Soviet Union now expands. The narrative leads us to the Middle East, to Mandatory Palestine, to contemporary Israel, and back to contemporary Russia.

It is a whole kaleidoscope of human characters and fates: tough-minded merchants, petty crooks, sincere romantics, ideological fanatics, irrepressible optimists, those killed or broken in spirit for life by the Soviet regime, those who fell on the fronts of World War II, and those quietly surviving under totalitarianism… The work of Maria Makogonova and Alla Esipovich-Roginskaya helps this anonymity to find a voice.

I would venture to add that, among other things, this book serves as an exemplary guide to working with archival sources and to their deep and comprehensive interpretation. It reconstructs the biographies of Sofya Roginskaya and her husband Alexander Shami – committed communists and members of the Palestine Communist Party who were executed by the state. The book contains a heart-rending letter written by Sofya’s mother, Feyge, from a home for the elderly in Petah Tikva to the Prosecutor of the USSR, as well as letters from Roginskaya and Shami’s children to the Prosecutor’s Office requesting their parents' rehabilitation.

I was particularly moved by the fate of Alla Esipovich-Roginskaya's father, Shlomo-Alexander. Following his return from Palestine to the USSR and the subsequent arrest of his mother and her husband, he spent seventeen years in exile (1938−1955). The experience caused him to withdraw into himself for the rest of his life – so profoundly, in fact, that he completely forgot Hebrew and the entire milieu in which his childhood and adolescence had unfolded. Even after moving to Israel at an advanced age, he was unable to remember anything: neither the language, nor the people, nor the places where he had grown up. It was a kind of protective amnesia, which is also a mute testimony to the era…

There is no point in recounting the contents of this book. It is neither a detective story nor a historical novel. It is a document of its time, and its publication undoubtedly constitutes an important contribution to the development of the history of everyday life.

By a twist of circumstance, or perhaps as a consequence of ongoing historical upheavals, I now live in Jaffa, literally a hundred metres from the building of the prison where Sofya Roginskaya was held until her deportation to the USSR, and where her eight-year-old son Shlomo and his grandmother came to visit her. Much later, in 1960–1961, this prison housed "Prisoner No. 1" of the State of Israel, Adolf Eichmann. Today the building houses the luxurious Setai Hotel. For me, this change in the building’s function symbolizes a certain stage of civilisational progress in which I very much want to believe.

In Israel, the following words are sometimes inscribed on memorial steles – words with which I shall conclude this brief foreword:

ZIKHRAM YINON LA-AD
May their memory be eternal!

S. M. Ya.
Doctor of Historical Sciences