(Enokh Gershenovich) Yagoda. 21 Of the many Russian revolutions, the Jewish version was (by 1934) one of the most implacable and most successful. Yagoda’s father had been a goldsmith (or, according to some sources, a pharmacist, engraver, or watchmaker). Ester Markish’s father, who had been a wealthy merchant, was tortured in prison by a man named Varnovitsky, currently the head of the “gold expropriation” campaign in Ekaterinoslav and formerly Perets Markish’s classmate and fellow Yiddish poet in Berdichev. The Cheka agent Khaim Polisar did not “surprise or offend” any of his Komsomol friends (according to Mikhail Baitalsky, who was one of them) when he confiscated his own father’s hardware store. And, of course, Eduard Bagritsky, who publicly renounced his “hunchbacked and gnarled” Jewish parents, was the most popular of all the “Komsomol poets.” Mikhail (Melib) Agursky, Anatoly Rybakov, and Tsafrira Meromskaia all had grandparents who were classified as lishentsy (persons subject to official discrimination in politics, education, employment, and housing on account of their “class alien” origins or occupations), yet all of them (like Ester Markish, the daughter of a lishenets ) were proud and privileged members of the Soviet elite. As V. G. Tan-Bogoraz (a former Jewish rebel and a prominent Soviet anthropologist) put it, In Rogachev, the grandfathers are Talmudists, the sons are Communists, and the grandsons are tref —not purified by Jewish circumcision. And so a grandfather smuggles such uncircumcised contraband into the synagogue with him and seats him on a table, next to a huge volume in a leather binding that smells of mice and decay. “What are you going to be when you grow up, Berka?” To which Berka responds with much deliberation and self-importance: “First of all, my name is not Berka but Lentrozin [Lenin-Trotsky-Zinoviev], and as for what I am going to be—I am going to be a Chekist.” 22 There was little to prevent young Berka from realizing his dream (once he had dropped “Lentrozin” to become Boris), and nothing at all to keep him from leaving Rogachev for Moscow or Leningrad. There, chances are, he would have gone to school—and done very well. The Jews were, consistently and by a substantial margin, the most literate group in the Soviet Union (85 percent, as compared to 58 percent for Russians, in 1926; and 94.3 percent, as compared to 83.4 percent for Russians, in 1939). Relatively free access to public education, coupled with the destruction of the prerevolutionary Russian elite and the