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

12 THE PROPHET ARMED
At first he ran away in embarrassment, but soon he grew
accustomed to receiving admiration and looked for it.
A year or sq after he had left the Jewish school there came to
Yanovka a visitor who was to have a decisive influence on him
as boy and as adolescent. The visitor was Moissei Filipovich
Spentzer, Mrs. Bronstein's nephew, one of the remote, towndwelling,
middle-class branch of the family. 'A bit of a journalist
and a bit of a statistician', he lived in Odessa, had been
touched by the liberal ferment of ideas, and had been debarred
from the University for a minor political offence. During his
stay at Yanovka, which lasted a whole summer-he had come
there for his health-he gave much of his time to the bright but
untutored darling of the family. Then he volunteered to take
him to Odessa and to look after his education. The Bronsteins
agreed; and so, in the autumn of 1888, equipped with a brand
new school uniform, loaded with parcels containing all the
delicacies that the Yanovka farm-kitchen could produce, and
amid tears of sadness and joy, Lyova left.
The Black Sea harbour of Odessa was Russia's Marseilles,
only much younger than Marseilles, sunny and gay, multinational,
open to many winds and influences. Southern
ebullience, love of the spectacular, and warm emotionalism
predominated in the temperament of the people of Odessa.
During the seven or so years of his stay there it was not so much
the city and its temper, however, as the home of the Spentzers
that was to mould Lyova's mind and character. He could
hardly have come into a family which contrasted more with his
own. At first the Spentzers were not too well off; Spentzer
himself was handicapped by his expulsion from the University,
and, for the time being, his wife, headmistress of a secular school
for Jewish girls, was the family's mainstay. Later Spentzer rose
to be an eminent liberal publisher. Max Eastman, the American
writer who knew the couple about forty years later, described
them as 'kindly, quiet, poised, intelligent'.• They began by
teaching the boy to speak proper Russian instead of his homely
mixture of Ukrainian and Russian; and they polished his manners
as well as his accent. He was impressionable and cager to
transform himself from a rustic urchin into a presentable pupil.
New interests and pleasures were opening before him. In the
1 Max Eastman, Leon Trots/rY: Tire Portrait of a routh, p. 14-