Kiev and Vitebsk prerevolutionary art schools produced at least as many celebrated artists as Odessa did musicians (Marc Chagall, Iosif Chaikov, Ilya Chashnik, El Lissitzky, Abraham Manievich, Solomon Nikritin, Isaak Rabinovich, Issachar Rybak, Nisson Shifrin, Alexander Tyshler, Solomon Yudovin). Meanwhile, Odessa produced almost as many artists (including Boris Anisfeld, Isaak Brodsky, Osip Braz, and Savely Sorin, in addition to Pasternak) as it did musicians (or poets). And this not counting Natan Altman from Vinnitsa, Chaim Soutine from Minsk, or David Shterenberg from Zhitomir. All of these artists and musicians had to deal with anti-Jewish laws and sentiments, and some of them left the Russian Empire for good. But probably most of them would have agreed with the critic Abram Efros, who said, referring to Shterenberg, that the best thing to do was “to be born in Zhitomir, study in Paris, and become an artist in Moscow.” The Russian fin de siècle—literary as well as artistic—is as difficult to imagine without the refugees from the “ghetto” as are its German, Polish, or Hungarian counterparts. 34 Before one could become a Russian artist, however, one had to become Russian. As elsewhere in Europe, the Jewish success in Russian business, the professions, and the arts (often in that order within one family) was accompanied by a mastery of the national high culture and an eager conversion to the Pushkin faith. In St. Petersburg, the proportion of Jews who spoke Russian as their native language increased from 2 percent in 1869 to 13 percent in 1881, to 29 percent in 1890, to 37 percent in 1900, to 42 percent in 1910 (during the same period, the share of Estonian-speaking Estonians grew from 75 to 86 percent, and Polish-speaking Poles, from 78 to 94 percent). Jewish youths learned Russian by themselves, in schools, from tutors hired by their parents, from mentors they met in youth circles, and, in wealthy families, from their Russian nannies, who would, in later recollections, become copies of Pushkin’s Arina Rodionovna. Lev Deich’s father, for example, was a military contractor who made his fortune during the Crimean War, performed Jewish rituals “for business purposes,” had learned Russian by himself, spoke it “without an accent, and in appearance—a broad flat beard, a suit, etc.—looked like a perfectly cultured person, a Great- Russian or even a European entrepreneur.” His son, the famous revolutionary, had a Polish governess, a “tutor in general subjects,” and, as a small child, a Russian nanny “with pleasant features” whom “we children loved very much, both for her kind, friendly nature and especially for the wonderful folktales she told us.” Having graduated from a Russian gymnasium in Kiev, he became a