happiness—“all those things he had inherited from the humble generations brought up on mendacious fables.” Mindlov’s wife Leah Sorkina (who died of consumption and revolutionary exhaustion) “had easily abandoned her ancestors’ religion—relentless, incomprehensible, and overburdened with tiresome ritual.” Some went further. According to M. D. Baitalsky’s memoir, the Cheka agent Khaim Polisar “confiscated his father’s hardware store for the needs of the revolution.” While Grossman’s Faktorovich was a Cheka agent, he arrested his uncle, who later died in a concentration camp. “Faktorovich remembered how his aunt had come to the Cheka office to see him and he had told her of her husband’s death. She had covered her face with her hands and said: ‘Oh my God, oh my God.’ ” After Stalin’s death, Grossman would return to the character of a Jewish true believer in Forever Flowing . Faktorovich would not change (except for the name), but Grossman’s language would: Was it the age-old chain of abuses, the anguish of the Babylonian captivity, the humiliations of the ghetto, or the misery of the Pale of Settlement that had produced and forged that unquenchable thirst that was scorching the soul of the Bolshevik Lev Mekler? . . . He served the cause of good and the revolution in blood and without mercy. In his revolutionary incorruptibility, he threw his father into prison and testified against him at a Cheka Collegium meeting. Grimly and cruelly, he turned his back on his sister who begged him to help her husband who had been arrested as a saboteur. In all his meekness, he was merciless to the heretics. The revolution seemed to him to be helpless, childishly trusting, surrounded by treachery, the cruelty of villains, and the filth of lechers. And so he was merciless to the enemies of the revolution. 146 This was a view from the disillusioned future. In the first decade of the revolution, the Bolshevik scorching of the soul was a matter of strength, pride, duty, and “personal responsibility.” The soul was being scorched because it had to be—because it was necessary. In 1922, another proletarian writer, A. Arosev (a childhood friend of V. Molotov and future head of the Soviet Committee for Cultural Ties with Foreign Countries), published a novel entitled The Notes of Terenty the Forgotten . One of the characters is the Cheka agent Kleiner, who does not wash very often, always wears the same leather jacket, sleeps on an old trunk, and has the smooth face of