with our girlfriends—and with the boys too. From each terrace came the sounds of the gramophone: sultry tangos, Utesov, Shulzhenko, the semibanned Leshchenko, sometimes Ellington’s “Caravan,” but mostly “Me and My Masha by the Samovar.” Gradually, all these familiar dacha sounds would die down, the dachniki would go to bed, and night silence would fall, interrupted by an occasional train whistle or the beckoning call of mothers and grandmothers. The moon would emerge slowly from behind the trees. A slight smell of smoke would hang in the air. 72 Most of the dachniki —and generally most members of the Soviet “new class”—were not Jews. But few Soviet groups, however defined, had as good a chance of finding themselves among Meromskaia’s dachniki as did the immigrants from the former Pale of Settlement. More of Hodl’s children than just about anybody else’s had the proverbial Soviet “happy childhoods.” In 1937, Inna Gaister’s grandmother Gita came from Poland to Moscow to see her children. She had seven sons and daughters. The youngest still lived with her; all the others had moved to Moscow. Rakhil (Inna’s mother), a Party member since 1918, worked as an economist at the People’s Comissariat of Heavy Industry; her husband, Aron Gaister, was deputy commissar of agriculture; their youngest daughter, Valeria, was named after Valerian Kuibyshev, one of Stalin’s top lieutenants. Khaim, a civil war veteran married to an ethnic Russian, was deputy head of the Military Chemical Academy in Moscow. Veniamin was a history Ph.D. (“doctor of sciences”) and a researcher at the Institute of World Economy and International Politics. Lipa was an engineer at a factory; her first husband was a Soviet secret agent in Hungary, her second an engineer at the Moscow Automobile Plant. Pinia was a navy pilot, a student at the Air Force Academy, and, like Khaim, a colonel. Also like Khaim, he was married to a Russian woman. They named their son Valery, after the famous Soviet pilot Valery Chkalov. Adassa had immigrated to the Soviet Union illegally in 1923; she had since graduated from college and was working as a chemical engineer. Finally, Leva had arrived in 1932, gone to work at the Moscow Automobile Plant, and enrolled as a student by correspondence in the Bauman Superior Institute of Technology. Grandma Gita did not speak Russian, so Adassa met her at the border town of Negoreloe. From the Belorussky Railway Station she was taken to Lipa’s in my father’s car. That night all seven children and their spouses