Free The Knife Sharpener's Bell by Rhea Tregebov

work, all that belief, and then they had to watch that hard-earned life eaten up by hard times. Hard times. It wasn’t hard times; it wasn’t an act of nature! It was a government that didn’t care about ordinary people, didn’t give a damn about the workers. Finally my father told the man this, told him about William Spratt, about a fine man, a life thrown away because the government didn’t give a damn . . .
    He talked until there was no more to say, until the man behind the desk stopped offering other possibilities.
Very well then, Comrade
, the man said.
I’ll see what I can do.
    So my father went back to Odessa, to wait again. Two weeks he waited, dreaming every night of family, Anne, Ben and me, Joseph; dreaming his mother’s ghost, brown braids like a crown. In daylight, the Odessa faces crowded round him too, alive, wishing: Manya, the sister who stole my mother’s boyfriend, Lev; my mother’s two older sisters, Basya and Reva, and their families. Evenings they waited, the whole family around the table, all his favourite food, the lace tablecloth pressed, the samovar steaming hot, polished. Lev, a middle-aged man now, though handsome still, tall, took photographs of all of them. If we weren’t allowed back, at least my mother would have photographs.
    Sixteen days after his meeting in Moscow, a thick envelope arrived at the house in Odessa. My father opened it, his hands steady. Yes or no, he was ready. Yes. He closed his eyes, held his hands clasped in front of his face as though in prayer. Yes. Our repatriation papers were all in order: permission had been granted. He opened his eyes, ran into the front room to tell the Odessa family, my mother’s family, the good news. We were going home. He could tell them he was at last bringing my mother home.
    Home. In the Liberty Temple, everyone sighed. And my father told us what home was like: how everybody in the Soviet Union talked about the Five Year Plan, how every person felt that they had something to contribute to make the country better, how ordinary citizens in the Soviet Union knew that they could make a difference. Here’s how it was: if the people living in an apartment building wanted to make a daycare centre in the building, or a reading room, what they did was call a meeting and talk it over. They worked together to make things happen – they didn’t have to go begging to a landlord. And he told us about the beautiful apartment that Lev and Manya had in Odessa, and Lev had a very important job for the government. Things were good for them. Lev would be able to help us out.
    But the thing that everybody was most interested in was when Poppa told us about how good a place the Soviet Union was for the Jews. It wasn’t just that they had laws against the anti-Semites, he said, it was that the laws were being enforced. One of Reva’s friends – Avram said the woman was from a very well-heeled Jewish family – told him a funny story: she and her husband had to go down to the police station to fetch their nanny, an old woman who had worked for them since before the Revolution. Why was the old woman arrested? For saying it was the Jews’ fault that the lines at the grocery stores were so long!
The Jews’ fault.
Three words and this harmless old woman had to sit for four hours in jail. That’s how serious they were about the law, about justice for all the peoples of the Soviet Union.
    And that wasn’t all, my father said. They were very serious also about building a Jewish proletarian culture. They meant business. Lev had told him that in the Soviet Unionin 1932 they’d sold more than two million books in Yiddish. And there was a Jewish State Theatre that did plays in Yiddish, and there were public schools for children where they taught in Yiddish, and magazines that published in Yiddish. And then my father told us about how much progress was being made in Birobidzhan,