isaac-deutscher-the-prophet-armed-trotsky-1879-1921

HOME AND SCHOOL 7
illiterate, indifferent to religion, and even a little contemptuous
of the Synagogue. Although a ploughman in the second generation
only, he had in himself so much of the peasant and of the
child of nature as to appear almost completely un-Jewish. At
his home not Yiddish, that amalgam of old German, Hebrew,
and Slavonic, was spoken but a mixture of Russian and
Ukrainian. Unlike most muzhiks, however, the Bronsteins had
no memories of serfdom; here in the open steppe serfdom had
never been firmly established. David Bronstein was a free and
ambitious, tough, and hard-working farmer, of the frontiersman
type. He was determined to develop his farm into a flourishing
estate, and he drove himself and his labourers hard. His
opportunities still lay ahead: when he moved to Yanovka he
was only about thirty.
His wife Anna came from different stock. She had been
brought up either in Odessa or in some other southern town,
not in the country. She was educated enough to subscribe to a
lending library and occasionally to read a Russian novel-few
Russian Jewish women of the time could do that. In her
parental home she had imbibed something of the orthodox
Jewish tradition; she was more careful than her husband to
observe the rites, and she would not travel or sew on the Sabbath.
Her middle-class origin showed itself in an instinctive conventionality,
tinged with a little religious hypocrisy. In case of
need, she would sew on the Sabbath, but take good care that
no stranger should see her doing so. How she had come to
marry the farmer Bronstein is not clear; her son says that she
fell in love with him when he was young and handsome. Her
family was distressed and looked down upon the bumpkin.
This was, nevertheless, not an unhappy marriage. At first the
young Mrs. Bronstein fretted at rustic life, but then she did her
best to shed her urban habits and to become a peasant woman.
Before they came to Yanovka, she had borne four children. A
few months after the family had settled at Yanovka, on 26
October 1879, a fifth was born, a boy. The child was named
after his grandfather, Lev or Leon, the man who had left the
Jewish town near Poltava to settle in the steppe.'
By a freak of fate, the day on which the boy was born, 26
October (or 7 November ~ccording to the new calendar) was
1
L. Trotsky, Moya :(;hiQI, vol. i, chapter ii.