—and thus easily and justifiably escapable—with regard to the legacy of Communism, which was almost as strongly committed to cosmopolitanism as it was to mass violence. Communists might have children, in other words, but Communism did not. The children of Communists who did not wish to be Communists could go back to their tribal or cultural genealogies, however defined. For Hodl’s children and grandchildren, this meant being a Jew and a member of the Russian intelligentsia (in various combinations). As Raisa Orlova wrote in her Memoirs of Times Not Past , I know so little. It’s shocking how little I know. I know nothing about my roots, I know nothing about my genealogy. I don’t even know my maternal grandmother’s first name and patronymic, and she lived with us for a long time—she didn’t die until after I was married. And now it is vital for me to find out. To see in my mind’s eye the Kiev-Warsaw train that took my future parents on their wedding trip in March 1915. Their honeymoon. . . . The wheels are pounding. That coach in the Kiev-Warsaw train is moving forward, and the two happy passengers do not know what lies ahead. I never heard the pounding of the wheels on that train before—but now I hear it more clearly all the time. 196 What does she hear? Her parents’ move to the center of both Russia and the world revolution (Gorky Street 6, next to the Kremlin) and their rise to the top of the Soviet bureaucratic and later cultural elite is a part of the Communist abomination she needs to forget if her true “roots” are to be recovered. What is left is her parents’ rejection of Judaism, their prerevolutionary college education (Commercial Institute for her father, School of Dentistry for her mother), and her mother’s passionate, lifelong love of Pushkin (“perhaps she had read Pushkin to my father on their honeymoon?”). In the 1960s, when Orlova was writing her memoirs, one of the most popular books among intelligentsia teenagers was Alexandra Brushtein’s The Road Leads Off into the Distance , an autobiographical coming-of-age story about a sensitive girl from a Jewish intelligentsia family growing up in prerevolutionary Vilna. An engaging collection of literary clichés from the late nineteenth century, the book contains a warm and caring mother, a morally upright father (a doctor who divides his loyalties among his indigent patients, Pushkin, and the revolution), a silly German tutor, a faithful peasant nanny, and a rich collection of revolutionary exiles, ignorant priests, fat industrialists, book-reading