Actually, there were two gods rather than one in my childhood. My very old grandmother—my mother’s mother—also lived in our apartment. She slept in a small room off the entryway, and I always picture her lying in bed. . . . Her room was stuffy, foul-smelling, and for some reason frightening. Grandmother would tell me about her God and about the Bible. Grandmother’s God—unlike Nanny’s—was mean, and was always throwing rocks and fighting wars. For the longest time, those rocks would remain my only memory of the Bible. Perhaps that was because Nanny and Grandmother kept feuding with each other, and I was always on Nanny’s side. 38 Orlova’s grandmother was indistinguishable from Babel’s and Mandelstam’s. Her mother asked to hear Pushkin on her deathbed. Her nanny’s name was Arina. Pushkin Street stretched from the dark rooms of the old Pale to the center of both Russia and the Soviet Union (in the late 1930s, three-quarters of all Leningrad Jews lived in the seven central districts of the old imperial capital). Hodl’s children grew up speaking the language of Pushkin and the language of revolution. They spoke both natively, and they spoke them more fluently and with greater conviction than anyone else. They were the core of the first generation of postrevolutionary intelligentsia—the most important and most influential generation in the history of the Soviet cultural elite. They considered themselves the true heirs of Great Russian Literature and the Great Socialist Revolution at the same time. As Baitalsky put it, “we inherited the moral ideals of all the generations of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia: its nonconformity, its love of truth, its moral sense.” And as the same Baitalsky put it a few pages later, “we all prepared ourselves to be agitation and propaganda officials.” Only those of them who died during World War II succeeded in creating a sublime blend of the two. The survivors would have to choose. 39 But back in the 1930s, when they were young and, by most accounts, happy, their greatest challenge was to discover a language worthy of paradise. As one of Raisa Orlova’s classmates (Anna Mlynek) said in a famous—and apparently deeply felt and passionately received—speech at a nationwide high school graduation ceremony in 1935, Comrades, it is difficult to speak today, but there is so much I would like to say, so much that needs to be said. One searches for the right words to respond to our dear older comrades, the right words that would express the