her revolutionary youth. Hodl’s life as she would have remembered it had no childhood (except perhaps a brief mention of her family’s poverty), no Kasrilevka, and no Tevye. It had no adulthood and no old age. The revolution turned preexisting revolutionaries into “Old Bolsheviks,” and Old Bolsheviks had nothing but their revolutionary youth to remember (or look forward to). The 1930s Soviet present belonged to Hodl’s daughters’ happy childhood. Hodl’s daughters’ memoirs all have childhoods—happy 1930s childhoods and happy 1930s adolescence. They adored their nannies and their parents (but not necessarily their grandparents—supposing Tevye was still around, living quietly in Hodl’s new apartment). They loved their schools, their teachers, and their friends. They took piano lessons, worshiped famous tenors, and knew all the Maly Theater actors. They read a lot of nineteenth-century novels and lived nineteenth-century intelligentsia lives. Their memories of New Year celebrations are versions of canonical Christmas reminiscences, and their descriptions of their dacha summers are Nabokovian evocations of the Russian gentry’s paradise lost. Even Meromskaia’s sarcasm—in a book entitled Nostalgia? Never! —dissolves in the presence of the Soviet version of manorial Arcadia. Oh, those vistas and evenings outside of Moscow, in the dacha settlements with their wooden houses with open verandas overlooking small gardens enclosed by picket fences or wildly overgrown yards, which were, in effect, fenced-in sections of the woods complete with mushrooms and berries. The cultivated ones overflowed with lilacs, jasmine, and wild cherry. The flower beds smelled of mignonette and looked bright and pretty thanks to the pansies and all sorts of other members of the friendly flower family. Under the windows, the Romantic dachniki planted aromatic nicotiana, nondescript during the day but sweetly pungent at night, while the more pragmatic ones planted gorgeous dahlias, which looked nice but would not get stolen. Beyond the gate, there was a narrow beaten path running alongside the fence. And somewhere close by there was always a river or lake, and, of course, the woods: the mixed forests south of Moscow and the dry, warm pine forests to the north and west— the tall, slender trunks smelling of resin, and the ground strewn with black pinecones half covered by yellow needles. In the evenings, after a “long day’s work,” we would wash ourselves with warm water heated by the sun and put sandals on feet hardened by many hours of barefooted recklessness. And then we would join the grownups over evening tea or, more often, talk endlessly, into the night,