or his mother as Jewish.” His mother, a doctor, had thought of herself as Jewish once, but that was many years ago, before Pushkin and the Soviet state “had made her forget.” When the Nazis forced her to remember, she had to pack up her things and move to the ghetto. I got a pillow, some bedclothes, the cup you once gave me, a spoon, a knife and two plates. Do we really need so very much? I took a few medical instruments. I took your letters; the photographs of my late mother and Uncle David, and the one of you with your father; a volume of Pushkin; Lettres de mon moulin ; the volume by Maupassant with Une vie , a small dictionary. . . . I took some Chekhov—the volume with “A Boring Story” and “The Bishop’—and that was that, I’d filled my basket. 52 Evgeny Gnedin, whose birth in 1898 had been announced by his father, Parvus, as the birth of an enemy of the state with no Motherland, went on to become the head of the Press Department of the People’s Commissariat for External Affairs. His whole generation, he wrote in his memoirs, was formed by “two currents of intellectual life: the socialist revolutionary ideology and the humane Russian literature.” During the collectivization of the peasants, he worked as an “agitator,” and when he was later locked up naked in a cold punishment cell for a crime he had not committed, he recited Pushkin, Blok, Gumilev, and Viacheslav Ivanov, along with his own poetry. 53 Lev Kopelev was a collectivizer, poet, and Gulag inmate too. He was also an IFLI student, a bilingual Russian-Ukrainian speaker, and a card-carrying citizen of the world (“Satano,” in Esperanto). One thing Kopelev was not—as far as he was concerned—was a Jew. He did identify himself as “Jewish” on standard Soviet forms and his internal passport, but that was because he did not want to be seen as “a cowardly apostate,” and—after World War II—because he did not want to renounce those who had been murdered for being Jewish. “I have never heard the call of blood,” he wrote, “but I understand the language of memory. . . . That is why in all the formal questionnaires, to all the official questioners, and to anybody who is just curious, I have always said and will always say: ‘Jew.’ But to myself and my close friends, I speak differently.” To himself and his close friends, Kopelev spoke the language of international Communism, Soviet patriotism, and world culture, which—to him, his close friends, and all Jewish immigrants to the Soviet capitals—was Russian. As Mayakovsky put it, and Kopelev repeated “as his personal conviction,”