Who’s In My Family?
I’ve been thinking about my dad, who died in 2020, aged 94: his hundredth birthday was a few days ago, on February 2nd.
***
I grew up in the sixties. One of the facts of life back then was the phone book: if you wanted to call somebody, you looked up their number in the White Pages. There were pages and pages of Johnsons and Smiths and Jones. But there was only one Laties in the entire White Pages. I thought it was great that we were the only Laties. I didn’t have a big family, but we were unique.
As a kid, I knew there was a complicated story about how our family came to America—so complicated I couldn’t possibly remember it all. By the time I went to college, I’d heard all the twists and turns quite a few times—but I think it wasn’t till I was thirty that I was able to really recount the entire saga.
So I thought.
The year I turned thirty—that was when my dad and my uncles decided to do something impossible. They figured that with the reforms in the USSR, they could try get in touch with the Russian branch of the family my grandfather had left behind when he escaped in 1922.
This was before the World Wide Web. The Eastern Bloc was still very separate from the West. They had to come up with a clever strategy to locate the Russian relatives.
Four years later, I was in Moscow, visiting several dozen cousins. A few years after that, dozens of cousins had emigrated to the United States—with assistance from my father and my uncles. I found out I liked having a big family!
Ten years after my trip to Moscow, I wrote this account:
***
Orwell
My father and my uncles had re-established contact with our Russian cousins, and my father had taken me and Chris to Moscow in 1993 to meet them. This trip was certainly an eye-opener.
My father’s first cousin, Leonid Leites, had met us at the airport in Moscow. He’d cranked his car, with a hand-crank, to get it started! The traffic on the highway in from the airport was very heavy—but there were no painted lanes on the road—the cars just wove in and out at 50 miles an hour. Lonya did plenty of weaving himself while talking non-stop in heavily accented English. He kept turning his head completely around to look at me in the back seat as he made some point or other. My father, sitting beside him in the front seat, called repeatedly as we swerved through the cars, “Lonya! Look at the road!”
Somehow, we got to his apartment safely.
In 1968, Lonya had decided he wanted to find out who his extended family was—and he’d taken the stunningly risky and audacious step of calling up everyone named Leites in the Moscow phone directory. There were forty people on the receiving end of his calls, and most were terrified. But three people had talked to him at length—and he was off into a new avocation—assembling our family genealogy. By the time my father and my uncle Alan were exchanging letters with him, in 1989, his family tree was seven generations deep and a dozen family-lines wide. Looking at his chart, I learned about 2nd cousins, 3rd cousins, 4th cousins and 5th cousins. My week in Moscow was spent visiting these relatives.
As Lonya put it, Russia in his lifetime was exactly like the Orwell novel, 1984. In fact, as he told family stories, he made this point repeatedly. “Exactly like Orwell. Exactly like Orwell.” He pointed up to the light-fixture above the eating table. “There was the microphone. To have a private conversation, we had to go into the bedroom and whisper.”
Reagan
My cousin Larissa and her husband Sergei had been involved in the uprising that swept Yeltsin to power. Sergei showed me a group photograph of seventy-five smiling men. “This is my team!”
“What do you mean—your team?” I asked.
“My team! All across Moscow, there were dozens of teams like ours. Waiting until the day when we would be needed. When the army took Gorbachev captive, and Yeltsin announced he wouldn’t let the army take over, all our teams knew what to do. We came to Red Square, ready to fight the army.”
“I heard that only five thousand people actually showed up that night. You couldn’t really have beaten back the army, if they’d decided to attack you, could you?”
He shrugged.
Then he said, “You know, it’s all because of your president. You had the greatest president the world has ever seen. You should be very, very proud of your President Reagan. He freed the Russian people!”
I practically gagged. “Reagan is an imbecile! He’s an idiot! His war-mongering practically got us all killed! And he destroyed the social services in the United States.”
Sergei looked at me quite seriously. “I don’t know about that. What he did—forcing the government here to spend so much on the army—brought the economy to its knees. This was the only way the Communist government could have lost power. All Russians owe him a great debt. Social services in the United States—this is unimportant.”
Sergei and Larissa had traveled in the US: hey are both accomplished scientists. He’s a physical chemist, and she’s a chemical physicist. Their researches have been funded by the Soros Foundation for years—through a series of grants whereby George Soros has underwritten a huge percentage of science in Russia, in order to prevent brain-drain to the West. So, I knew that Sergei’s opinion of the needs of the US in terms of social services were based on personal observation. He felt the people in the US had enough opportunities and enough basic wealth already, and that the accomplishment of destroying the Soviet Union was clearly more important, as it released hundreds of millions of people from a life “Just like Orwell.”
Stalin
On the other side of the fence from Sergei was another cousin, Galina, who was an editor for the Soviet Encyclopedia. When we visited her apartment, she treated us to a ringing tribute to Stalin, the greatest leader in history.
I asked her—thinking back to my reading of Han Suyin, who so strongly defended Mao Tse-Tung, “So, it was worth fifty million lives to overturn the horrible pre-Soviet Czarist system, and establish a more equal economic relation among the classes?”
“Exactly! Without Stalin, Russia could never have achieved the advances she has made, elevating the peasants to a better standard of living, delivering education to women and the poor.”
Sitting behind Galina, her eighty-year-old mother Julia was mugging a disgusted face, holding up Devil’s horns with her fingers!
Joy
At Lonya’s dacha, in a forest outside Moscow, Chris conducted a long, slow conversation with Lonya’s ninety-one-year-old mother, my Great-Aunt Sonia. My cousin Anya, who had spent a year in the United States, translated for us.
Chris asked Sonia, “How did you greet the Communist revolutionaries when they reached your village?”
Sonia’s wrinkled, alert face lit up as she remembered her girlhood—the year 1917. “With joy! When they marched into town holding the Red Flag we cheered. All of us girls brought them flowers. My father had started as a schoolteacher—but he had opened a bookstore in 1915. When the revolutionaries told him he had to give the books away to the people, he did so gladly.”
“So, he had to close the bookstore?”
“Of course—everything changed.”
“Did you come to feel that the Revolution wasn’t what you’d expected?”
“Yes, of course. But this didn’t happen all at once. I was able to go to university. I became a chemist and a professor. This would not have happened without the revolution. A woman couldn’t have done these things.”
Research
Back at his apartment, Lonya told us his personal survival strategy. “In 1952, I was walking past this building—this very one where I now have this apartment! It was one of seven built by the KGB in the 1930s, in a ring around central Moscow. Everyone felt nervous walking near these buildings.”
“It was the time of purges—the Doctors’ Trials—when Stalin’s personal doctors—who happened to be Jews—were suddenly accused of trying to kill him. I was walking past this building, and the thought came to me—‘If Stalin is so smart, how could he have been deceived all these years? Why did he let those doctors make him so sick?’ As these thoughts passed through my mind, I looked up and saw this KGB building, and I suddenly realized that the KGB possibly could read my thoughts—perhaps with an electronic antenna. I resolved to never allow myself to think these kinds of questions again. This is why I am alive today.”
Despite Lonya’s resolve, he did finally share his unvoiced questions in 1968, on a winter afternoon in a cemetery, near the grave of the great writer Boris Pasternak. He was visiting this grave with his long-time friend and colleague, Ervin Nagy. The two engineers noticed, as they stood before the grave, a microphone hidden under a bench next to the gravestone.
They wandered away from the grave, into a forest.
Lonya described this talk, which lasted a few hours, as the first time he expressed to anyone his doubts about the Soviet system. For both he and Ervin, it was an incredibly daring and dangerous conversation.
It was shortly after this talk that Lonya began his genealogical researches. These were always innocent: no-one dared speak about anything but family members’ lives and careers.
Eventually this research led Lonya to us.
My father and my three uncles had been enjoined by my grandfather, based on an urgent 1936 letter from my great-grandfather, to attempt no contact with our Russian relatives. But in 1989, the brothers decided it might be safe at last for the Russian cousins to talk with their American cousins.
However—all contact had been severed. Fifty-three years was a long gap. The American cousins didn’t know where to start.
My father and my Uncle Alan, being scientists—and therefore engaged in the ongoing international conversation scientists held throughout the years of East-West separation—knew of an index listing the authors of all scientific publications in all scientific journals worldwide: the Science Citation Index. Reasoning that since the American family had a number of scientists, there must be scientists in the Russian family too, they decided to search the Science Citation Index for the previous hundred years, world-wide, for anyone with a name resembling ours. That would be: Laties, Leites, Leitis, Leytes, Leytis and so on.
They found forty scientists, in all sorts of disparate fields, from all over the world, who had published scientific articles in the previous hundred years, with names like ours.
They decided to contact the man they deemed the most prominent: Dmitri Leites, a Swedish mathematician who specializes in something called Super-Algebra. He had just completed a stint at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton.
They wrote a letter to Sweden introducing themselves: Victor Laties, Professor of Psychology at University of Rochester, and Alan Laties, Professor of Ophthalmology at University of Pennsylvania. They asked him if he thought they might be relatives of his.
Dmitri Leites’ response was a family bombshell. He was quite matter of fact. He said we were not closely related to him, as he was a member of the branch of the family known as the Tolochin Leites’s—whereas we were of the Mstislavl Leites’s. He said the two branches—named after their respective villages—diverged in the 18th century. He said we should contact the family genealogist, in Moscow: Leonid Leites.
A few days after the arrival of Dmitri Leites’ letter, a letter from Lonya himself arrived: Dmitri had forwarded my father and uncle’s letter to him already. Lonya’s letter contained two additional astonishing pieces of news. He was my father and uncle’s first cousin: his father was my grandfather’s brother. And—Lonya’s son—my second cousin—had just arrived in Boston THE WEEK BEFORE as a refugee.
Lonya’s letter contained a family tree showing that my grandfather, Syoma (or Simon, as I knew him), after leaving Russia in 1922, was essentially lost to the Russian family. Below him, in the midst of the branches of the family tree, was a question mark. Did he have children? No-one in Russia seemed to know about my father and his three brothers.
So, when Lonya’s son arrived in Boston he knew of no American relatives.
My father called him up, using the information from Lonya. My second cousin Grisha, in Boston, thought it was a trick: the KGB following him to America!
Grisha (Gregory Leites) is exactly my age—he was born one day after me, in 1959.
Warned
Lonya and Ervin Nagy took Chris, my father and me to visit St. Basil’s Cathedral, next to the Kremlin in Red Square. Looking at a huge painting of Christ, in which Christ forms a circle with his thumb and forefinger, I commented to Ervin that it seemed to resemble one of the Buddha’s finger positions.
He considered this, and said, “Yes, I know very well these Buddhist finger positions.”
I asked, “Are you interested in Buddhism?”
“Not so much—but I lived in Japan.”
“You lived in Japan? When?”
“As a child.”
“So – you were in Japan in the 1930s? Why?”
“My father was a Soviet diplomat in Tokyo.”
I found this fascinating: a Russian boy in Tokyo in the 1930s! “What was it like?” I asked.
He paused. “I was a very young boy. When we left, I was only seven. But,” and here he halted. “I liked it very much. I could go out and play with the other children—it was quite free for me.”
“And why did you leave Japan?”
“My father was recalled to Moscow.”
“Why?” I kept asking, curious, fascinated.
“Well—maybe the government was going to issue new instructions—a change of policy. But—the day before we left, I was playing at the house of a friend. This boy was the son of a Japanese diplomat. He said, ‘My father says that you must give your father this message: Do Not Go Back To Russia.’”
“Did the boy tell you why?”
“He didn’t know—he just said his father had told him to give me this message.”
“And did you tell your father.”
“Of course.”
“And?”
“He said it was just children talking.”
“So, you went back then?”
We were walking slowly through the cathedral.
“Yes, my family returned to Moscow.”
“And—was there anything to worry about.”
“Yes, shortly afterward, my father was arrested and killed.”
Snowball
It is the great sorrow of the Jewish “Haskallah” Enlightenment that the Russian Revolution—in which Jews were instrumental theorists—ended up betraying exactly the Jews. Orwell’s novel, Animal Farm, allegorizes this tragedy, casting the brilliant political thinker Leon Trotsky—an atheist Jew—as the pig Snowball, who convinces all the other farm animals to join with pigs in the overthrow of the Farmer, in preparation for a utopian future where “All animals are equal.” And yet, after the expulsion of the farmer, Snowball is himself ousted by the power-mad pig Napoleon—that is, Stalin—who proceeds to implement a totalitarian dictatorship in which “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
Trotsky’s destruction by Stalin remains a puzzle for all utopians. Will intellectuals always lose to thugs? What if Lenin had lived, to continue mediating the Trotsky-Stalin relationship he’d pragmatically brokered? Would Soviet Russia then STILL have inevitably devolved to Totalitarian Terror?
Was the Russian Revolution a missed opportunity? Or was Leon Trotsky simply wrong that All Animals could ever live as equals?
Jean-Francois Revel points out that while Authoritarian governments of the Right – like Hitler’s—were responsible for perhaps fifty million deaths in the 20th century, Totalitarian governments of the Left—led by Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and others—killed one hundred million. Revel’s math compellingly reveals that Leftist egalitarian Utopias are MORE Hellish even than Right-wing genocidal holocausts.
As for my family—so many were killed, by Right and Left both.
***
Today, in his apartment in Queens, Lonya Leites, 94, has accumulated thousands of documents from his lifetime of genealogical research. He hopes to publish the family history.
Remembering my dad…I need to visit Lonya.
