Little Eva. The Flower of the South

LITTLE Eva lived in the bright sunny South, in the State of Alabama. She was the only daughter of a wealthy planter, who owned many slaves, and a large plantation. Eva was the joy and pride of her parents, she obeyed them in everything; she had a smile or a kind word for all; she is called the Flower of the South.

Here you see, is little Eva teaching the little colored boys and girls the alphabet. See how pleased they are, for they all love Eva, and would do anything to please her; and Eva takes a great deal of pleasure in teaching them and making them happy. She is teaching them the letters one by one, which she marks on the black-board.

Eva does not forget her friends, for she calls on her old nurse every day, to give her comfort and bring her all the news that is going about, for her nurse is very old and sick. Eva has just brought her some chicken broth; the nurse is always glad to see Eva, and she loves to talk of the time when Eva was a dear little baby.

It is Sabbath morning, and Eva as usual, is reading the Bible to the colored people; she has learned some of them to read, but they would rather hear Eva read than read themselves, for they say her voice is so sweet; and she always explains all the questions they ask her so pleasantly, that it is a greater pleasure to hear her.

Eva rises early like all good children. Sometimes, when the weather is clear and beautiful, she takes a walk, and gathers a pretty bunch of flowers for her dear mother, who is very fond of them. Eva is riding a pony this morning, she is not afraid of him, for he is a very kind and gentle animal, he sometimes follows her like a dog.

Eva has fallen into the water. See how the poor dog is swimming to save her, but he is too late, for Sam is taking her safely out. Poor Eva, she was reaching to catch hold of some grass which grew in the water, when she lost her balance and fell; but she is safe now. She will remember not to play again near the water.

This is Eva's birth-day. She is just nine years old; there is a double rejoicing, both because Eva was saved from drowning, and because it is her birth-day. See, she is presenting Sam with a beautiful Bible, as a token of her esteem. Eva's parents were so pleased with Sam for saving Eva, that they gave him his freedom; but he never left them, he loved them all too well.

The manner of the Indians treating their young Children is very strange, for instead of keeping them warm, at their first entry into the World, and wrapping them up, with I don't know how many Cloaths, according to our fond custom; the first thing they do, is to dip the Child over Head and Ears in cold Water, and then to bind it naked to a convenient Board, having a hole fitly plac'd for evacuation; but they always put Cotton, Wool, Furr, or other soft thing, for the Body to rest easy on, between the Child and the Board. In this posture they keep it several months, till the Bones begin to harden, the Joynts to knit, and the Limbs to grow strong; and then they let it loose from the Board, suffering it to crawl about, except when they are feeding, or playing with it.

While the Child is thus at the Board, they either lay it flat on its back, or set it leaning on one end, or else hang it up by a string fasten'd to the upper end of the Board for that purpose. The Child and Board being all this while carry'd about together. As our Women undress their Children to clean them and shift their Linnen, so they do theirs to wash and grease them.

The method the Women have of carrying their Children after they are suffer'd to crawl about, is very particular; they carry them at their backs in Summer, taking one Leg of the Child under their Arm, and the Counter Arm of the Child in their Hand over their Shoulder; the other Leg hanging down, and the Child all the while holding fast with its other Hand; but in Winter they carry them in the hollow of their Match-coat at their back, leaving nothing but the Child's Head out, as appears by the Figure.

Nazis came to Texas in the 1960s. We could hear them just around the corner. My older sister Rosi would make the sound of their footsteps—would tap her hands on the pink carpet of the walk-in closet in her room (just like the one in mine). She would look up and say, "Listen, do you hear them?" I would hold my breath. We were in the woods with the partisans. Though we didn't know the exact meaning of the word. We sat around our (invisible) campfire. We were hiding from the Nazis. They would take us away. We had saltines and olives to live on.

Sometimes I would be the one to tap tap tap slap my palms against the pink carpet: "Listen, do you hear them?" Nazis coming through the woods. They had been tipped off, perhaps by paid informers, like the ones who had turned in Anne Frank.

I had read her diary. We had seen the end of the movie on TV though my mother had said, "Don't you think they should go to bed?" My father had said, "They have to learn." What we had to learn about was life. What had happened to the Jews crouched in silence.

On TV we heard the big Nazi boot against the door of the Secret Annex where the Franks had hidden. The Nazis bashed in the door the way ours had never been bashed, or my father's or my mother's. My father had fought the Nazis in the ocean. My mother had stayed home. She'd been a schoolgirl.

Once I asked her, "Have you ever had a raw potato?" I imagined her digging them from a field, getting through the war. She'd grown up in Dallas. She said, "Maybe once" — when her brother's barbecue project in the back yard hadn't turned out. Potato half-raw, half-burned. There was no starvation, no SS in Texas. No hiding with partisans. Nothing but two daughters in the 1960s with saltines and green olives stuffed with pimientos, and sometimes a strand or two of raw spaghetti to munch on.

For years I kept a getaway bag in my closet — saltines and a notebook, a change of clothes. An alarm clock, so I would know the time. I liked the big, friendly white and gold face of that alarm clock. One summer night the air conditioning didn't work and we opened the widows and I heard Nazis, scratching to get in to take me away and steal my glasses. In the morning my father claimed the noise had been mosquitoes, other night insects. June bugs. The same June bugs I would watch at night on the porch. I would turn over the June bugs that had landed on their backs, skittering. I wanted to right all the June bugs.

We liked playing in the closet. We liked the thrill of hiding. We were victims but we were never caught. Sometimes we played secretary instead. Sometimes we played that we were lizards on a ship hiding from the Nazis. The Nazis would take us to a concentration camp. They would take my glasses and asthma drugs and let death just come up and kill me, like that. At Hebrew school the teachers talked about Nazis. They showed us a film on a small screen. They showed us the small bodies and the striped prison outfits. But we didn't think of it as prison. It was a death camp and the Nazis took people there. Jews.

They didn't take us because we were quiet in the woods, we sprinkled sand and dirt over our fire in the closet in the woods before they were close enough to smell the smoke. The Nazis were stupid. They were thick and dumb like animals and wore big heavy boots up to their hips. We were good so the Nazis would never find us. We were smarter and darker than the Nazis. But we were bad, something bad about us or the Nazis wouldn't be after us in the first place.

When we played secretary, our office was out in the hall and we would hold papers up to the air vents that would suck them so they stuck. When we played school, the air vents held up the pretend tests we gave each other. Sometimes we would just play without having a name to it and slide across the terrazzo floor in our stocking feet. We didn't wear shoes when we hid from the Nazis. They would find us; shoes would make too much noise.

Sometimes at dusk we played capture-the-flag with the neighbor kids in the Shelbys' front yard. After a rain we'd play stand-in-old-shoes-in-the-mud-in-the-side-yard. Sometimes we'd go to the houses still being built and stand on the extra lumber and play island-in-the-ocean. There were brown rabbits in the "empty" lot behind the house and once policemen came with horses back there on a search for someone — a criminal hiding in the overgrown weeds.

At some point we stopped playing Nazi. It wasn't my idea to start or stop. Maybe Rosi stopped playing with me, started playing with her own friends, and no more Nazis. We outgrew Nazis. When I was twenty-one I went to Amsterdam and went, alone, to the Secret Annex. It was on the tourist map. Each room was small and there was a guest book to sign with a fancy gold pen, unattached to anything, no string or chain. There were the books Anne Frank had read while she was in hiding and her movie star pictures pinned to the wall. The place was small, it had no power, too many people walking through.

Ten years after that, on a layover in the Amsterdam airport, a Greek man saw me borrow someone's tour book of the Anne Frank house. The Greek man said to his American wife: "Of course she's interested in Anne Frank — she's Jewish." The man who'd bought the book wasn't Jewish. I said nothing. The Greek had been able to tell that I was Jewish.

There is a statue of Anne Frank in front of a church in Amsterdam. In the walk-in closets in Houston now are full-length mirrors and the shelves that Rosi and I covered in our favorite pink contact paper, ruffles that we tacked along the edges. The closets are shrines, and storage. In Rosi's closet are my mother's mink coat and the large bride doll too big to play with and the felt board with felt numbers.

Where I live now I don't sit in closets. The closets are full. I'm on the third floor. No Nazis bang against my screens at night. Around the world people are defacing Jewish graves, threatening pogroms. In my neighborhood Jewish Community Center I watched a slide show of someone's trip to Europe — pictures of Auschwitz-Birkenau, rust-colored gas chamber. "It was cold," the traveler told us, "so very very cold. Everyone told us to bring our sweaters, even though it was a warm day." Ghosts breathing out cold air, having absorbed the force of someone's bare hatred. About 175 miles from the camp, the traveler had seen two young boys spray-paint on a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto. She said, "There is hatred for Jews where there are not even Jews any more."

Anne Frank was shipped from Auschwitz-Birkenau to Bergen-Belsen. I read about her all through my childhood. She never seemed like a child to me. At parties I eat olives and crackers. Alone at night, shadows brush against my face. At the JCC, one of the slides showed words in a foreign language carved into a wall at the concentration camp. The traveler thought it said to never forget. In my late twenties when I felt sad I would go to the public library and read Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. It was warm and familiar. It would sooth me.

Reproduced from Holocaust Girls: History, Memory, and Other Obsessions by S. L. Wisenberg by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. © 2002 by the University of Nebraska Press.

For many chapters we have followed the lives of Samoan girls, watched them change from babies to baby-tenders, learn to make the oven and weave fine mats, forsake the life of the gang to become more active members of the household, defer marriage through as many years of casual love-making as possible, finally marry and settle down to rearing children who will repeat the same cycle. As far as our material permitted, an experiment has been conducted to discover what the process of development was like in a society very different from our own. Because the length of human life and the complexity of our society did not permit us to make our experiment here, to choose a group of baby girls and bring them to maturity under conditions created for the experiment, it was necessary to go instead to another country where history had set the stage for us. There we found girl children passing through the same process of physical development through which our girls go, cutting their first teeth and losing them, cutting their second teeth, growing tall and ungainly, reaching puberty with their first menstruation, gradually reaching physical maturity, and becoming ready to produce the next generation. It was possible to say: Here are the proper conditions for an experiment; the developing girl is a constant factor in America and in Samoa; the civilisation of America and the civilisation of Samoa are different. In the course of development, the process of growth by which the girl baby becomes a grown woman, are the sudden and conspicuous bodily changes which take place at puberty accompanied by a development which is spasmodic, emotionally charged, and accompanied by an awakened religious sense, a flowering of idealism, a great desire for assertion of self against authority—or not? Is adolescence a period of mental and emotional distress for the growing girl as inevitably as teething is a period of misery for the small baby? Can we think of adolescence as a time in the life history of every girl child which carried with it symptoms of conflict and stress as surely as it implies a change in the girl’s body?

Following the Samoan girls through every aspect of their lives we have tried to answer this question, and we found throughout that we had to answer it in the negative. The adolescent girl in Samoa differed from her sister who had not reached puberty in one chief respect, that in the older girl certain bodily changes were present which were absent in the younger girl. There were no other great differences to set off the group passing through adolescence from the group which would become adolescent in two years or the group which had become adolescent two years before.

Die Geschichte vom Daumenlutscher

"Konrad," sprach die Frau Mama,
"ich geh aus und du bleibst da.
Sei hübsch ordentlich und fromm,
bis nach Haus ich wieder komm.
Und vor allem, Konrad, hör!
lutsche nicht am Daumen mehr;
denn der Schneider mit der Scher
kommt sonst ganz geschwind daher,
und die Daumen schneidet er
ab, als ob Papier es wär."

Fort geht nun die Mutter und
wupp! den Daumen in den Mund.

Bauz! da geht die Türe auf,
und herein in schnellem Lauf
springt der Schneider in die Stub
zu dem Daumen-Lutscher-Bub.
Weh! jetzt geht es klipp und klapp
mit der Scher die Daumen ab,
mit der großen, scharfen Scher!
Hei! da schreit der Konrad sehr.

Als die Mutter kommt nach Haus,
sieht der Konrad traurig aus.
Ohne Daumen steht er dort,
die sind alle beide fort.

Story of the Thumb-Sucker

"Konrad!" cried his mamma dear,
"I'll go out, but you stay here,
Try how pretty you can be
Till I come again," said she.
"Docile be, and good and mild,
Pray don't suck your thumb, my child,
For if you do, the tailor'll come
And bring his shears and snip your thumb
From off your hand as clear and clean
As if paper it had been."

Before she'd turned the south,
He'd got his thumbkin in his mouth!

Bang! here goes the door ker-slam!
Whoop! the tailor lands ker-blam!
Waves his shears, the heartless grub,
and calls for Dawmen-lutscher-bub.
Claps his weapon to the thumb,
Snips it square as head of grum,
While that lad his tongue unfurled
And fired a yell heard 'round the world.

Who can tell mother's sorrow
When she saw her boy the morrow!
There he stood all steeped in shame,
And not a thumbkin to his name.

Nick and the Sparrow Hills

'Write then how in this place [the Sparrow Hills] the story of our lives, yours and mine, began to unfold….'
A Letter, 1833

Three years before the time I am speaking of we were walking on the banks of the Moskva at Luzhniki, that is, on the other side of the Sparrow Hills. At the river's edge we met a French tutor of our acquaintance in nothing but his shirt; he was panic-stricken and was shouting, 'He is drowning, he is drowning!' But before our friend had time to take off his shirt or put on his trousers a Ural Cossack ran down from the Sparrow Hills, dashed into the water, vanished, and a minute later reappeared with a frail man, whose head and arms were flopping about like clothes hung out in the wind. He laid him on the bank, saying, 'He'll still recover if we roll him about.'

The people standing round collected fifty roubles and offered it to the Cossak. The latter, without making faces over it, said very simply: 'It's a sin to take money for such a thing, and it was no trouble; come to think of it he weighs no more than a cat. We are poor people, though.' He added. 'Ask, we don't; but there, if people give, why not take? We are humbly thankful.' Then tying up the money in a handkerchief he went to graze his horses on the hill. My father asked his name and wrote about the incident the next day to Essen. Essen promoted him to be a non-commissioned officer. A few months later the Cossak came to see us and with him a pock-marked, bald German, smelling of scent and wearing a curled, fair wig; he came to thank us on behalf of the Cossak—it was the drowned man. From that time he took to coming to see us.

Karl Ivanovich Sonnenberg, that was his name, was at that time completing the German part of the education of two young rascals; from them he went to a landowner of Simbirsk, and from him to a distant relative of my father's. The boy, the care of whose health and German accent had been entrusted to him, and whom Sonnenberg called Nick, attracted me. There was something kind gentle and pensive: I was high-spirited but afraid to rag him.

About the time when my cousin went back to Korcheva, Nick's grandmother died; his mother he had lost in early childhood. There was a great upset in the house and Sonnenberg, who really had nothing to do, fussed about too, and imagined that he was run off his legs; he brought Nick in the morning and asked that he might remain with us for the rest of the day. Nick was sad and frightened; I suppose he had been fond of his grandmother.

…After we had been sitting still a little I suggested reading Schiller. I was surprised at the similarity of our tastes; he knew far more by heart than I did and knew precisely the passages I liked best; we closed the book and, so to speak, began sounding each other's sympathies.

From Möros who went with a dagger in his sleeve 'to free the city from the tyrant,' from Wilhelm tell who waited for Vogt on the narrow path at Küsznacht, the transition to Nicholas and the Fourteenth of December was easy. These thoughts and these comparisons were not new to Nick; he, too, knew Pushkin's and Ryleyev's unpublished poems. The contrast between him and the empty-headed boys I had occasionally met was striking.

Not long before, walking near the Prenensjy Ponds, full of my Bouchot, terrorism, I had explained to a companion of my age the justice of the execution of Louis XVI.

'Quite so,' observed the youthful Prince O., 'but you know he was God's anointed!'

I looked at him with compassion, ceased to care for him and never asked to go and see him again.

There were no such barriers with Nick: his heart beat as mine did. He, too, had cast off from the grim conservative shore, and we had but to shove off together, and almost from the first day we resolved to work in the interests of the Tsarevich Constantine!

Before that day we had few long conversations. Karl Ivanovich pestered us like an autumn fly and spoilt every conversation with his presence; he interfered in everything without understanding, made remarks, straightened Nick's shirt collar, was in a hurry to get home: in fact, was detestable. After a month we could not pass two days without seeing each other or writing a letter; with all the impulsiveness of my nature I attached myself more and more to Nick, while he had a quiet deep love for me.

From the very beginning our friendship was to take a serious tone. I do not remember that mischievous pranks were our foremost interest, particularly when we were alone. Of course we did not sit still: our age came into its own, and we laughed and played the fool, teased Sonnenberg and played bows and arrows in our courtyard; but at the bottom of it all there was something very different from idle companionship. Besides our being of the same age, besides our 'chemical affinity,' we were united by the faith that bound us. Nothing in the world so purifies and ennobles early youth, nothing keeps it so safe as a passionate interest in the whole of humanity. We respected our future in ourselves, we looked at each other as 'chosen vessels,' predestined.

Nick and I often walked out into the country. We had our favourite places, the Sparrow Hills, the fields beyond the Dragomilovsky Gate. He would come with Sonnenberg to fetch me at six or seven in the morning, and if I were asleep would throw sand and little pebbles at my window. I would wake up smiling and hasten out to him.

These walks had been instituted by the indefatigable Karl Ivanovich.

In the old-fashioned patriarchal education of Ogarëv, Sonnenber plays the part of Biron. When he made his appearance the influence of the old male nurse who had looked after the boy was put aside; the disconnected oligarchy of the hall were forced against the grain to silence, knowing that there was no overcoming the damned German who fed at the master's table. Sonnenberg made violent changes in the old order of things. The old man who had been nurse positively grew tearful when he learnt that the wretched German had taken the young master himself to buy ready-made boots at a shop! Sonnenberg's revolution, like Peter I's, was distinguished by a military character even in the most peaceful matters. It does not follow from that that Karl Ivanovich' thin little shoulders had ever been adorned with epaulettes; but nature has so made the German that if he does not reach the slovenliness and sans-géne of a philologist or a theologian, he is inevitably of a military mind even though he be a civilian. By virtue of his peculiarity Karl Ivanovich liked tight fitting clothes, buttoned up and cut with a waist; by virtue of it he was a strict observer of his own rules, and, if he proposed to get up at six o' clock in the morning, he would get Nick up at one minute to six, and in no case later than one minute past, and would go out into the open air with him.

The Sparrow Hills, at the foot of which Karl Ivanovich had been so nearly drowned, soon became our 'sacred hills.'

One day after dinner my father proposed to drive out into the country. Ogarëv was with us and my father invited him and Sonnenberg to go too. These expeditions were not a joking matter. Before reaching the town gate we had to drive for an hour or more in a four-seated carriage 'built by Joachim,' which had not prevented it from becoming disgracefully shabby in its fifteen years of service, peaceful as they had been, and from being, as it always had been, heavier than a siege gun. The four horses of different sizes and colours with sweat and foam within a quarter of an hour; the coachman Avdey was forbidden to let this happen, and so had no choice but to drive at a walk. The windows were usually up, however hot it might be; and with all this we had indifferently oppressive supervision of my father and the restlessly fussy and irritation supervision of Karl Ivanovich. But we gladly put up with everything for the sake of being together.

At Luzhniki we crossed the river Moskva in a boat at the very pot where the Cossak had pulled Karl Ivanovich out of the water. My father walked, bent and morose as always; beside him Karl Ivanovich tripped along, entertaining him with gossip and scandal. We went on in front of them, and getting far ahead ran up to the Sparrow Hills at the spot where the first stone of Vitberg's temple was laid.

Flushed and breathless, we stood there mopping our faces. The sun was setting, the cupolas glittered, beneath the hill the city extended farther than the eye could reach; a fresh breeze blew on our faces, we stood leaning against each other and, suddenly embracing, vowed in sight of all Moscow to sacrifice our lives to the struggle we had chosen.

This scene may strike others as very affected and theatrical, and yet twenty-six years afterwards I am moved to tears as I recall it; there was a sacred sincerity in it, and our whole life has proved this. But apparently a like destiny defeats all vows made on that spot; Alexander was sincere, too, when he laid the first stone of that temple, which as Joseph II said (although then mistakenly) at the laying of the first stone in some town in Novorossiya, was destined to be the last.

We did not know all the strength of the foe with whom we were entering into battle, but we took up the fight. That strength broke much in us, but it was not that strength that shattered us, and we did not surrender to it in spite of all its blows. The wounds received from it were honourable. Jacob's strained thigh was the sign that he had wrestled in the night with God.

From that day the Sparrow Hills became a place of worship for us and once or twice a year we went there, and always by ourselves. There, five years later, Ogarëv asked me timidly and shyly whether I believed in his poetic talent, and wrote to me afterwards (1883) from his country house: 'I have come away and feel sad, as sad as I have never been before. And it's all the Sparrow Hills. For a long time I hid my enthusiasm in myself; shyness or something else, I don't myself know what, prevented me from uttering it; but on the Sparrow Hills that enthusiasm was not burdened with solitude: you shared it with me and those moments have been unforgettable; like memories of past happiness they have followed me on my way, while round me I saw nothing but forest; it was all so blue, dark blue and in my soul was darkness.

'Write then,' he concluded, 'how in this place' (that is, on the Sparrow Hills) 'the story of our lives, yours and mine began to unfold.'

Five more years passed. I was far from the Sparrow Hills, but near me their Prometheus, A. L. Vitberg, stood, austere and gloomy. In 1842, returning to Moscow, I again visited the Sparrow Hills, and once more we stood on the site of foundation stone and gazed at the same view, two together, but the other was not Nick.

Since 1827 we had not been parted. In every memory of that time, general and particular, he with his boyish features and his love for me was everywhere in the foreground. Early could be seen in him that sign of grace which is vouchsafed to few, whether for woe or for bliss I know not, but certainly in order not to be one of the crowd. A large portrait of Orgarëv as he was at that time (1827-8), painted in oils, remained for long afterwards in his father's house. In later days I often stood before it and gazed at him. He is shown with an open shirt collar; the painter has wonderfully caught the luxuriant chestnut hair, the undefined, youthful beauty of his irregular features and his rather swarthy colouring; there was a pensiveness in the portrait that gave promise of powerful thought; an unaccountable melancholy and extreme gentleness shone out from his big grey eyes that suggested the future stature of a mighty spirit; such indeed he grew to be. This portrait, presented to me, was taken by a woman who was a stranger; perhaps these lines will meet her eyes and she will send it to me.

I do not know why the memories of first love are given such precedence over the memories of youthful friendship. The fragrance of first love lies in the fact that it forgets the difference of the sexes, that it passionate friendship. On the other hand, friendship between the young has all the ardour of love and all its character, the same delicate fear of touching on its feelings with a word, the same mistrust of self and absolute devotion, the same agony at separation, and the same jealous desire for exclusive affection.

I had long loved Nick and loved him passionately, but had not been able to resolve to call him my friend, and when he was spending the summer at Kuntsevo I wrote to him at the end of a letter: 'Whether your friend or not, I do not yet know.' He first used the second person singular in writing to me and used to call me his Agathon after Karamzin, while I called him my Ralphael after Schiller.

You will smile, perhaps, but let it be a mild, good-natured smile, such as one smiles when one thinking of the time when on was fifteen. Or would it not be better to muse over the question, 'Was I like that when I was blossoming out?' and to bless your fate if you have had youth (merely being young is not enough for this), an to bless it doubly if you had a friend then.

The language of that period seems affected and bookish to us now; we have become unaccustomed to its vague enthusiasm, its confused fervour that passes suddenly into languid tenderness or childish laughter. It would be as absurd in a man of thirty as the celebrated Bettina will schlafen, but in its proper time this language of youth, this jargon de la puberté, this change of the psychological voice is very sincere; even the shade of bookishness is natural to the age of theoretical knowledge and practical ignorance.

Schiller remained our favourite. The characters of his dramas were living persons for us; we analysed them, loved and hated them, not as poetic creations but as living men. Moreover we saw ourselves in them. I wrote to Nick, somewhat troubled by his being too fond of Fiesco, that behind every Fiesco stands his Verrina. My ideal was Karl Moor, but soon I was false to him and went over to the Marquis of Posa. I imagined in a hundred variations how I would speak to Nicholas, and how afterwards he would send me to the mines or the scaffold. It is a strange thins that almost all our day-dreams ended in Siberia or the scaffold and hardly ever in triumph; can this be the way the Russian imagination turns, or is it the effect of Petersburg with its five gallows and its penal servitude reflected on the young generation?

And so, Ogarëv, hand in hand we moved forward into life! Fearlessly and proudly we advanced, generously we responded to every challenge and single heartedly we surrendered to every inclination. The path we chose was no easy one; we have never left it for one moment: wounded and broken we have gone forward and no one has outdistanced us. I have reached…not the goal but the spot where the road goes downhill, and involuntarily seek thy hand that we may go down together, that I may press it and say, smiling mournfully, 'So this is all!'

Meanwhile in the dull leisure to which events have condemned me, finding in myself neither strength nor freshness for new labours, I am writing down our memories. Much of that which united us so closely has settled in these pages. I present them to thee. For thee they have a double meaning, the meaning of tombstones on which we meet familiar names.

…And is it not strange to think that had Sonnenberg known how to swim, or had he been drowned then in the Moskva, had he been pulled out not by a Cossak of the Urals but by the soldier of the Apsheronsky infantry, I should not have met Nick or should have met him later, differently, not in that room in our old house, where, smoking cigars on the sly, we entered so deeply into each other's lives and drew strength from each other.

Why I Taught the Source

Autobiographical writing as a rich source for the exploration of European childhood and youth is self evident; in many cases, it is one of the most nuanced ways to understand historical actors' earliest experiences. 1 Such is the case in Russia, where there emerged a new genre of writing on childhood and youth in the middle of the 19th century. Russian authors tended to paint bucolic portraits of their own childhood years on the gentry estate, often spent away from the tyrannical clutches of parental discipline and ensconced instead in the pleasures and freedoms of roaming through domestic corridors and wild gardens. These narratives of Russian childhood and youth often provide poignant examples of how individuals came of age amidst a backdrop of radical insurgence, peasant emancipation, and decades of repression. Many of these narratives, written by members of Russia's first generations of intelligentsia, include descriptions of rebellion against their elders and an attachment to their peers. My Past and Thoughts, written by Alexander Herzen—the first self-proclaimed Russian socialist—fits precisely into this genre of 19th-century Russian writing. It is in this historical context that I use this particular text in my course on Modern Russia.

How I Introduce the Source

My undergraduate class on modern Russia provides an introduction to the history of the tsarist era from the time of Peter the Great in 1682 to the end of the Romanov dynasty in 1917. Over the course of the semester we discuss and debate the nature of autocracy, Russia's relationship to Europe, the emergence of the intelligentsia and radicalism as well as the building of the vast Russian empire. We also concentrate on the everyday lives of rulers, peasants, workers, intellectuals and student radicals, by using primary documents, whether memoirs, poems or political tracts. The course proceeds both chronologically and thematically, with special attention paid to gender, including the subject of this discussion: masculinity and youth.

Reading the Source

An excerpt of Alexander Herzen's memoir My Past and Thoughts is placed in the syllabus about mid-way, during the session where we discuss the emergence of the first generation of Russia's intelligentsia and Russia's relationship to "the West," both imagined and real. We read the text with particular attention to Herzen's own self-conscious telling of his youth and coming of age: both as an intellectual and as a young man. I remind students that this is a story written decades after Herzen's own experiences as a highly influential anti-autocratic author took place.

At the outset, I draw students' attention to the ways in which Herzen's autobiography both conforms to and challenges a larger, emergent 19th-century genre in Russian literature, that is, narratives on childhood and youth. 2 Herzen's writing, on the one hand, tends to reject the notion of a bucolic domestic experience so important in the Lev Tolstoy-inspired "myth" of Russian childhood as a golden age of freedom on the estate. On the other hand, it is through his friendship —alternately Romantic and erotic—with Nikolai Ogarev that Herzen is able to capture some of the joys of childhood and magic of first love. In Herzen's own depictions, it was the oppressiveness of his father's house that ultimately pushed him into the arms of his friend and inspired his coming of age from boyhood to youth. It was this friendship with Nikolai Ogarev—the Russian poet, historian, political activist, and fellow-exile and collaborator of Herzen—which serves as a point of departure for understanding homosociability (i.e., same-sex relationships) and masculinity among Russia's first generation of intelligentsia. While George Mosse argues in Nationalism and Sexuality that romantic friendships between men declined by the early part of the 19th century, young Russian men expressed their affections for one another well into the 19th century and beyond. 3

Another aspect of my introduction involves contextualizing the text in a variety of ways, the literary and the historical. I explain the propensity of 19th-century authors to script their own childhood and youthful experiences in Romantically-tinged language (a practice evidenced in Herzen's descriptions not of his own domestic experiences, but certainly of his friendship with Ogarev). Moreover, by the time we encounter Herzen, everyone is well versed in the social, cultural and political history of Russia up until that point and with the various intellectual struggles within Russian educated society to keep up with the "West," most often embodied in France (but sometimes England).

A close reading of the text provides insight into the ways in which gender roles and norms of sociability are historical in nature and change over time. The logistics of teaching Herzen's text includes a formal, small-group, in-class discussion exercise. About 30 students in all divide themselves into small groups of 5-6 and study the relevant passages included in their course readers. They are instructed to focus on the language and tone of Herzen's depictions of his friend and what it might reveal about the nature of male friendship in 19th-century Russia. (As most of the readings in the course are primary sources, including other autobiographical writings, my students already know how to conduct a close reading of a historical document.) I draw their attention to the role that "Sparrow Hills"—the site of Herzen and Ogarev's boyhood vow of love—has in Herzen's memory. "Flushed and breathless. . . the sun was setting, the cupolas glittered. . . a fresh breeze blew on our faces, we stood leaning against each other and, suddenly embracing, vowed in sight of all Moscow to sacrifice our lives to the struggle we had chosen [toppling the autocracy]. (62)" Through a close reading of these passages, students learn how Herzen's memories of coming of age became intertwined with his love of Ogarev, his loss of childhood innocence, and their commitment to political activism. These passages illustrate what friendship meant for Herzen: it was more powerful than love and its intensity was reflected in the beauty of the natural surroundings. During his youth, male friendship and homosocial relations signaled for Herzen the highest of callings-—more powerful than romantic love. The power of this friendship was only heightened by their frequent outings, where they basked in their connection with the natural surroundings and in their writing.

What emerges from their analyses is a picture of two young boys meeting and declaring their devotion to one another, a devotion that—according to Herzen—included a politically self-conscious desire to overthrow the autocracy together. A particular theme that we examine is the homoerotic language with which students are often unaccustomed. We examine such as passages: "Nick attracted me. . . [there was] something kind, gentle and pensive about him. . . . His heart beat as mine did. . . . With all of the impulsiveness of my nature I attached myself more and more to Nick, while he had a quiet, deep love for me (pages 58-60)." Elsewhere Herzen declares that "I had long loved Nick and I loved him passionately (64)." These descriptions provide us with the opportunity to discuss 19th-century social and gender norms. I explain that closeness between young men was part and parcel of their coming of age experiences.

Reflections

The one real difficulty that I encountered with this exercise was the challenge of getting students to think historically about interpersonal relationships, patterns of sociability, and gender expectations. For many students, the notion of male romantic, expressive friendship as a legitimate topic of historical investigation was a new idea. Interfering with their ability to think historically was a contemporary prejudice against homosexuality. Therefore, it is essential to define "homosociability" and to emphasize it political potential especially among youth who contest the social order.

"Allah's Messenger (peace be upon him) said, 'If any member of my people has two children who die before him, Allah will cause him to enter Paradise on their account.' Aisha asked, 'Does it apply to a member of your people who has one child who dies before him?' He replied, 'It does, you who have been helped by Allah to ask this.' She then asked, 'What about a member of your people who has no children who die before him?' He replied, 'I am the one who dies before my people, and they will never suffer any loss to compare with the loss of me.'" [Hadith Al-Tirmidhi, 1735]

"The daughter of the Prophet (peace be upon him) sent for the Prophet requesting him to come as her child was dying [or was gasping], but the Prophet returned the messenger and told him to convey his greeting to her and say: 'Whatever Allah takes is for Him and whatever He gives, is for Him, and everything with Him has a limited fixed term [in this world] and so she should be patient and hope for Allah's reward.' She again sent for him, swearing that he should come. The Prophet got up, and so did Sa'd bin 'Ubada, Muadh bin Jabal, Ubai bin Ka'b, Zaid bin Thabit and some other men. The child was brought to Allah's Apostle while his breath was disturbed in his chest [the sub-narrator thinks that Usama added:] as if it was a leather water-skin. On that the eyes of the Prophet (peace be upon him) started shedding tears. Sa'd said, 'O Allah's Apostle! What is this?' He replied, 'It is mercy which Allah has lodged in the hearts of His slaves, and Allah is merciful only to those of His slaves who are merciful [to others].'" [Hadith al-Bukhari 2.373]

We went with Allah's Apostle (peace be upon him) to the blacksmith Abu Saif, and he was the husband of the wet-nurse of Ibrahim [the son of the Prophet]. Allah's Apostle took Ibrahim and kissed him and smelled him and later we entered Abu Saif's house and at that time Ibrahim was in his last breaths, and the eyes of Allah's Apostle (peace be upon him) started shedding tears. 'AbdurRahman bin 'Auf said, "O Allah's Apostle, even you are weeping!" He said, "O Ibn 'Auf, this is mercy." Then he wept more and said, "The eyes are shedding tears and the heart is grieved, and we will not say except what pleases our Lord, O Ibrahim ! Indeed we are grieved by your separation." [Hadith al-Bukhari, 2.390]

"Yahya related to me from Malik from Hisham ibn Urwa that his father, Urwa ibn az-Zubayr made an aqiqa for his male and female children of a sheep each." [Al-Muwatta Hadith, 26:7]

[Legal interpretation of the hadith:] "Malik said, 'What we do about the aqiqa is that if someone makes an aqiqa for his children, he gives a sheep for both male and female. The aqiqa is not obligatory but it is desirable to do it, and people continue to come to us about it. If someone makes an aqiqa for his children, the same rules apply as with all sacrificial animals - one-eyed, emaciated, injured, or sick animals must not be used, and neither the meat or the skin is to be sold. The bones are broken and the family eat the meat and give some of it away as sadaqa. The child is not smeared with any of the blood.'"