themselves to be Jews but considered everything to do with Jewishness a thing of the past. I remember thinking of my father’s stories about his childhood, heder, and traditional Jewish upbringing as something consigned to oblivion. None of that had anything to do with me. There was no active desire to renounce one’s Jewishness. This problem simply did not exist. 69 The Soviet Union was building a unique blend of Apollonianism and Mercurianism, and the rapidly expanding Soviet intelligentsia consisted of grateful young beneficiaries. The children of Jews were acquiring Apollonian bodies and belligerence; the children of “workers and peasants” were gaining Mercurian cleverness and mobility. Both despised their parents (for the half- humans they were), and both were being trained as brothers, as well as prophets. Vasily Stalin once told his little sister Svetlana, “Our father used to be a Georgian.” Or, as Sholem Aleichem’s little Motl put it, “I am lucky, I’m an orphan.” 70 The story of the Jewish social rise, Jewish patricide, and Jewish conversion to non-Jewishness (of whatever kind) is of course not peculiar to the Soviet Union. What is peculiar is that there was no preexisting elite to compete with or alienate, no special membership fee analogous to baptism, and—up until the late 1930s—no official discrimination of any kind (given total ideological purity, of course). Hodl’s husband Perchik, who had always considered himself a “member of the human race,” would have become one de jure and possibly by profession when he arrived in Moscow after the Bolshevik Revolution. Assuming he did not die in the civil war and did not join an opposition, there is a good chance he might have ended up running a publishing house, a People’s Comissariat, and perhaps even a special agency directly responsible for ideological purity. Indeed, the Soviet secret police—the regime’s sacred center, known after 1934 as the NKVD—was one of the most Jewish of all Soviet institutions. In January 1937, on the eve of the Great Terror, the 111 top NKVD officials included 42 Jews, 35 Russians, 8 Latvians, and 26 others. Out of twenty NKVD directorates, twelve (60 percent, including State Security, Police, Labor Camps, and Resettlement [deportations]) were headed by officers who identified themselves as ethnic Jews. The most exclusive and sensitive of all NKVD agencies, the Main Directorate for State Security, consisted often departments: