Chapter 1: My Childhood
Early Life: In Europe
"In a way, I suppose that the little I recall of my early childhood in Russia, my first eight years, sums up my beginnings, what now are called the formative years. If so, it is sad that I have very few happy or even pleasant memories of this time. The isolated episodes that have stayed with me throughout the past seventy years have to do mostly with the terrible hardships my family suffered, with poverty, cold, hunger and fear, and I suppose my recollection of being frightened is the dearest of all my memories. I must have been very young, maybe only three and a half or four. We lived then on the first floor of a small house in Kiev, and I can still recall quite distinctly hearing about a pogrom that was to descend upon us. I didn’t know then, of course, what a pogrom was, but I knew it had something to do with being Jewish and with the rabble that used to surge through town, brandishing knives and huge sticks, screaming ‘Christ-killers’ as they looked for the Jews and who were now going to do terrible things to me and to my family.
I can remember how I stood on the stairs that led to the second floor, where another Jewish family lived, holding hands with their little daughter and watching our fathers trying to barricade the entrance with wooden boards. That pogrom never materialized, but to this day I remember how scared I was and how angry that all my father could do to protect me was to nail a few planks together while he waited for the hooligans to come. And, above all, I remember being aware that this was happening to me because I was Jewish, which made me different from most of the other children in the yard. It was a feeling that I was to know again many times during my life —the fear, the frustration, the consciousness of being different and the profound instinctive belief that if one wanted to survive, one had to take effective action about it personally."
"As for the Jews being a chosen people, I never quite accepted that. It seemed —and still seems to me —more reasonable to believe not that God chose the Jews but that the Jews were the first people that chose God, the first people in history to have done something truly revolutionary, and it was this choice that made them unique"
"Most of the young Jewish revolutionaries in Pinsk...were divided at that point into two main groups. There were the members of the Bund (Union) who believed that the solution to the plight of the Jews in Russia and elsewhere could be found when Socialism prevailed. Once the economic and social structure of the Jews was changed...anti-Semitism would totally disappear. In that better, brighter, socialist world, the Jews could still, if they so desired, retain their cultural identity, go on speaking Yiddish, maintain whatever customs and traditions they chose, eat whatever food they wanted to eat. But there would be no reason at all for clinging to the obsolete idea of Jewish nationhood...ironically enough, the bitterest enemies of Zionism were the Bundists."