By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel — The events described in this story took place in Kiev, where many Jews still lived. It had long since ceased to be Sholem Aleichem’s Yehupets, having become the capital of atheistic Soviet Ukraine and witnessed the mass executions of Jews in Babi Yar on Judgment Day in 1941.
But at that time, the memory of the Jewish market, which was liquidated in 1952, was still alive, and Yiddish was still spoken in many parts of the city. At that time, Jewish musicians played in the orchestras of the Opera House and the Philharmonic, but Jews no longer appeared in the official lists of peoples living in the USSR. Jews were there, and yet they were not.
Hairdresser Chaim knew the history of the Jewish people much better than professional historians. He knew things about Jews that even the most knowledgeable scholars did not know. Chaim paid no attention to the opinions of historians, for he himself was a historian and loved to tell stories about Jews. His customers left his shop with their hair cut, their beards shaved, smelling of cologne, and filled with interesting stories from the barber.
When I first met him, Chaim was about 60 years old. One could say that Chaim had lived to see gray hair, if he had any hair. But Chaim was bald, which was a poor recommendation for professional skill: if a hairdresser couldn’t keep his own hair, then he couldn’t give advice to clients on how to properly preserve their hair and care for it optimally.
Apparently realizing the significance of this paradox, Chaim showed his clients an old photograph of himself as a young man with a full head of hair. He explained that he had lost his hair due to working at a metallurgical plant in Zaporizhia: the workshop was extremely hot, causing even the curliest-haired men to lose their hair. He liked to talk about how he had endured terrible heat in Uzbekistan during World War II. When Haim cut and shaved, he stood, and his limp was not noticeable. I did not know how he had injured his leg.
“Chaim” means “life” in Hebrew. Chaim worked in a Kiev barbershop during a period when all Soviet citizens, including Jews, were supposed to have a happy life. In Yiddish, this was called gliklekh lebn. The Soviet government ordered its citizens to have a happy life. Those who refused to have a happy life could face serious trouble from the authorities.
Hairdressers in Kiev were called perukarnya in Ukrainian. But Jews liked certainty. Therefore, they called the hairdresser where Chaim worked Gliklekh Lebn, meaning “happy life.” The barbershop was located in a small basement on Vladimirskaya Street, opposite the Opera House. At the Gliklekh Lebn barbershop, Jews not only had their hair cut and shaved, but also talked about life, in particular Jewish life. In the basement of the barbershop, in a kind of underground, Jews listened to Chaim’s stories about Jewish history.
Once, when two Jews, including me, were waiting for our turn to get a haircut from Chaim, he gave us a lecture on recent Jewish history.
“I returned to Kiev from Uzbekistan immediately after its liberation from the Nazis. My house near the Jewish market was still standing, but I had no family left: my parents had been killed in Babi Yar, and my wife and daughter had died of starvation in Uzbekistan. The house survived, but the apartment where I had lived before the war with my parents, wife, and daughter was now occupied by the family of a Ukrainian firefighter named Skovoroda. According to Soviet law, I had every right to return to my apartment, but Skovoroda refused to vacate it. The city authorities did not help me. My Ukrainian neighbors refused to confirm that we had lived in that apartment. Officials claimed that Skovoroda had an advantage over me: he had a family, while I was single. But I did not remain alone for long. The logic of the struggle to return to my apartment required a change in tactics. I understood that individual existence under socialism was “reactionary” and illegal. I needed to create a collective, a family collective. And so, I joined forces with a woman and her child, who, like me, had been trying unsuccessfully to regain their pre-war apartment. Instead of a happy Soviet family, two unhappy remnants of the war were forced to coexist.
“In 1944, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine and Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars Nikita Khrushchev gave a speech at the first session of the Supreme Council of the Ukrainian SSR describing the suffering endured by the population during the years of occupation, but he did not mention the tragedy of the Jews.
“Jewish poet David Hofstein, who lived near our barbershop, insisted on holding the third anniversary of the execution of Jews in Babi Yar, but the city authorities refused: since there was no tragedy, there was no need to hold mourning events. In 1948, Hofstein was arrested, and in 1952, he was shot as an enemy of the people along with other members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.
“For me, the tragedy of the Jewish people was personal and familial. I had nowhere to live, and then one day in 1944, a new client came to me for a haircut and shave. He was a literary editor for the newspaper Kievskaya Pravda (Kiev Truth), and his name was Yaakov. He was Jewish and remained my client for a long time, until 1949, when he was fired from all his jobs as a ‘rootless cosmopolitan.’ He had to leave Kiev, and I haven’t heard from him since. I told Yaakov about Skovoroda, about my grief, about my homelessness. A few days later, he brought me a newspaper. It was an issue of the newspaper Ukrainske Slovo (Ukrainian Word), which was published by the Nazis in the building of Kievskaya Pravda.
“On the front page was a photograph of the fire chief Vasily Skovoroda greeting German officers. I brought this photograph to Skovoroda and told him that I would show it to the city authorities if he did not vacate my apartment. He was afraid of being exposed as a collaborator. So, I returned to my late parents’ apartment, where I lived with my wife and daughter. But one evening, on my way back from the barber shop, I heard a shot and felt a burning pain in my leg. Look how I paid for returning to my home.
“Chaim unbuttoned his trousers. There was a deep scar under his knee, the mark of a bullet.”
The literary editor of the newspaper Kievskaya Pravda who brought Chaim the photograph that returned his house to him was my father, Yaakov Gordon.
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Alex Gordon is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education, and the author of 11 books.