THE ENDLESS STEPPE: Growing Up in Siberia; by Esther Hautzig; Thomas E. Crowell; 243 pages; paperback; $3.50.
Does it sometimes give you pause to think that your children are growing up in a society where children go to bed hungry while pudgy pooches eat a special "low-fat" dog food? Does it anger you to think that ketchup was labeled a `vegetable' to make a skimpy school lunch program look good at the same time a veterinarian was developing a low-cholesterol, low-fat, premium doggie "ice cream"? Has something gone awry when a teen's athletic shoes cost $200?For every parent who longs for simpler times there is a book that is a must read (preferably out loud) for children. "The Endless Steppe" cuts through the gloss and hype of materialism and exposes the soft golden glow of the things that endure: the love of family, the pleasure of making something yourself and faith in God when all else fails.
What joy could possibly be found in this true tale of a Jewish family from Vilna, Poland, who spent five long years on the Asian steppes of Siberia? Esther Rudomin Hautzig reaches deep into her memory and brings to life the maxim that it isn't what happens to you so much as how you handle it that determines your life.
For what a blessing in disguise is the six-week ride to Rubtsovsk, Siberia, in a filthy cattle car, the five years of slave labor in a gypsum mine. The mud hut, the freezing wind, the daily humiliations and deprivations. For only Esther's immediate family - mother, father and grandmother - would survive the Holocaust as Hitler's army swept through Poland months later obliterating Poland's Jewish society and the Rudomin line in the process.
Walk in your house; look at the plaster, the windows tight and snug. Feel the soft carpet and the shiny linoleum. Then imagine repairing a mud hut with "bricks" made of manure and clay. Whitewash is found, precious glass goes in to make a window, clean clay is spread for the floor. See an 8-year-old girl take some smuggled surplus hospital gauze and soak it in carefully saved onion peels. The gauze is dyed yellow and when dry is fashioned into curtains. Because the life-saving potatoes will freeze in a root cellar outside, watch how Father digs a pit in the center of the hut and covers it with rounded logs with bark still on them. A "bed" is just a sleeping platform fashioned from planks of wood called a nari. Whatever you think of living in conditions like this, Esther assures you they have made it home.
Esther found adventures on the barren desolate steppe. There was the 3-hour walk to the village to trade at the baracholka with the native Siberians. Esther and Grandmother find they are born traders with Mother's lace-trimmed French slip. "Rough hands that had scrounged in the earth for potatoes, and had been frostbitten more than once, fingered the silk, sometimes as if it were a rosary, sometimes as if it were sinful for anything to be that silky. . . . If an egg was worth around 15 rubles, how much should a silk slip with hand-drawn lace be?" Hautzig writes.
Father is taken away by the NKVD to see if he will consent to be a spy. After 24 hours of questioning and badgering, he cries when he says to them they'll have to kill him before he reports on the "activities" of his fellow Poles. He tells his family: "I put my head down on the table and begged them to stop. No, I told them, I would not spy on my friends. I told them they could shoot me. . . ."
Esther goes out one night with a group of children and learns how to steal small pieces of coal that have fallen on the railroad track. As an alternative to her family's dwindling wood pile (augmented with dried manure), the coal is just too much of a temptation. Esther writes, "With every sound I heard in the darkness, I felt the brutal arm of the law thrashing my fragile back. Stealing in Siberia? If Siberia was the place thieves were exiled to, was there an even worse place for Siberian thieves?"
"The Endless Steppe" is a tale that begs to be read. But in the reading, between the lines and woven throughout the story, are glimmers of how values and traditions can make a family rise above even a manure-mud hut.