Contents

Cover

About the Book

About the Author

Also by Irène Némirovsky

Title Page

Translator’s Note

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Introduction to the French Edition

Copyright

About the Book

Ada grows up motherless in the Jewish pogroms of a Ukrainian city in the early years of the twentieth century. In the same city, Harry Sinner, the cosseted son of a city financier, belongs to a very different world. Eventually, in search of a brighter future, Ada moves to Paris and makes a living painting scenes from the world she has left behind. Harry Sinner also comes to Paris to mingle in exclusive circles, until one day he buys two paintings which remind him of his past and the course of Ada's life changes once more…

About the Author

Irène Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903, the daughter of a successful Jewish banker. In 1918 her family fled the Russian Revolution for France where she became a bestselling novelist, author of David Golder, Le Bal, The Courilof Affair, All Our Worldly Goods and other works published in her lifetime or afterwards, such as Suite Française and Fire in the Blood.

Némirovsky was prevented from publishing when the Germans occupied France and moved with her husband and two small daughters from Paris to the safety of the small village of Issy-l'Evêque (in German occupied territory). She died in Auschwitz in 1942.

Sandra Smith is a fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge, and has translated ten of Irène Némirovsky’s novels into English.

Also by Irène Némirovsky

Suite Française

David Golder

Le Bal (including Snow in Autumn)

The Courilof Affair

Fire in the Blood

All Our Worldly Goods

Jezebel

The Wine of Solitude

The Misunderstanding

INTRODUCTION TO THE FRENCH EDITION

Irène Némirovsky was born in Kiev on 11 February 1903. She was raised by a French governess, and spoke only French with her mother, with whom she had a difficult relationship (reflected in several of her novels). Her father was an important banker. When the October Revolution of 1917 broke out, a price was placed on his head, forcing him to go into hiding in Moscow with his family. It was at this time that Irène, for whom French had become as much her maternal language as Russian, discovered the short stories of de Maupassant, J.K. Huysmans’s À Rebours (Against the Grain) and Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray. The Némirovskys managed to flee to Finland; they then spent a year in Stockholm before settling in Paris in 1919, where her father managed to rebuild his fortune.

In 1929, after graduating in literature, Irène published her first novel, David Golder, which was greeted with unanimous critical acclaim. During the 1930s, she would publish nine novels and a collection of short stories: Le Bal (The Ball), Le Malentendu (The Misunderstanding), Les Mouches d’automne (published in English as Snow in Autumn), L’Affaire Courilof (The Courilof Affair), Films parlés (Spoken films), Le Pion sur l’échequier (The Pawn on the Chessboard), Le Vin de solitude (The Wine of Solitude), Jézabel (Jezebel), La Proie (The Prey) and Deux (Two). Les Chiens et les Loups (The Dogs and the Wolves) was published in 1940. While taking refuge in the Saône-et-Loire region during the war, she wrote three books that would be published posthumously: La Vie de Tchekhov (The Life of Chekhov), 1946, Les Biens de ce monde (All Our Worldly Goods), 1947 and Les Feux de l’automne (Autumn Fires), 1957. While in the process of writing an ambitious novel opening with the exodus from Paris in June 1940, she was arrested in July 1942, sent to a transit camp at Pithiviers, then deported to Auschwitz, where she died in August 1942.

After her death, the Albin Michel Publishing House and Robert Esménard took responsibility for educating her two daughters, who had spent the rest of the war in hiding with their governess. They had been entrusted with their mother’s last notebook, which contained the first two parts of the novel Suite Française, published in the autumn of 2004.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

The Dogs and the Wolves was originally published in French in 1940 as Les Chiens et les Loups. As with many of Irène Némirovsky’s titles, its translation was problematic for it evokes a particular expression in French. ‘Entre chien et loup’ means ‘dusk’: the time of day when it is difficult to distinguish clearly between similar shapes. Simultaneously, dogs and wolves are members of the same family: the ones domesticated, the others, savage. Though the subtlety of the French expression is lost in English, the recurring theme remains clear.

Throughout the work, Némirovsky also uses variations on the word ‘étrange’. In French, this word has several connotations: ‘strange’, ‘foreign’, ‘different’, and, as a noun, ‘outsider’ as well. As a translator, it is necessary – though frustrating! – to choose one meaning. Readers should therefore keep in mind the many implications when these words arise.

The novel opens in a Ukranian city that is home to two distantly related Jewish families: the Sinners. The wealthy Sinners live high up on the hill, while their poor relations are confined to the worst part of town, down near the river. The novel follows the two sides of the family as they move to Paris, where their destinies become more and more entwined. As with many of Némirovsky’s works, The Dogs and the Wolves explores the intricate social problems foreigners faced in 1930s France as they try to assimilate. In addition, Némirovsky provides great insight into the complex relationship between the different social classes within Jewish society itself.

The use of the family name ‘Sinner’ is also striking, particularly given the fact that Némirovsky had excellent English. When I asked her daughter, Denise Epstein, if she felt the choice of name was significant, she replied that she thought it had been chosen deliberately. Throughout the novel, Némirovsky plays on the concept of sin by forcing her characters constantly to make moral choices.

The Dogs and the Wolves is an important novel. It combines Némirovsky’s lyrical prose with a perceptive exploration of Russian history, French society between the two world wars, immigration and religion, against the backdrop of passionate love.

Sandra Smith, Fellow
Robinson College, Cambridge
April 2009

1

THE UKRAINIAN CITY in which generations of the Sinner family had been born was, in the eyes of the Jews who lived there, made up of three distinct regions. It was like a Medieval painting: the damned were at the bottom, trapped among the shadows and flames of Hell; the mortals were in the middle, lit by a faint, peaceful light; and at the top was the realm of the blessed.

In the lower part of town, down by the river, lived the scum. These were the unsavoury Jews, the self-employed craftsmen, the tenants of sordid little shops, the vagabonds, the people whose children rolled in the mud, spoke only Yiddish and wore ragged clothes with enormous caps perched above their frail necks and long dark curls. Far, far away, where lime trees crowned the tops of the hills, and important Russian officials and members of the Polish nobility had their houses, were a few beautiful villas owned by wealthy Jews. They had chosen this location because of its clean air, but most importantly because in Russia, at the beginning of the century under the reign of Nicholas II, Jews were tolerated only in certain towns, certain districts, certain streets, and sometimes only on one side of the street; the other side was out of bounds. Such restrictions, however, applied only to the poor: it was unheard of for a bribe not to circumvent even the most severe laws. It was therefore a point of honour amongst the Jews to defy them, not out of any sense of insolence or pride, but to send a message to other Jews: to show that they were worth more, had earned more money, got a better deal for their beets or corn. It was a convenient way of demonstrating wealth. So and so was born in the ghetto. By the time he was twenty, he’d made a bit of money so he could climb a rung of the social ladder; he moved and went to live away from the river, near the market, on the edge of the lower town. By the time he got married, he was already living on the even-numbered side of the street (the forbidden side); later, he climbed another rung: he moved to an area where, according to the law, no Jew had the right to be born, to live, to die. He was respected. To his friends and family, he was simultaneously an object of envy and the very symbol of hope: proof that it was indeed possible to attain such heights. Hunger meant nothing; being cold, living in filth meant nothing given such prospects. And from the lowest, poorest part of town, many eyes looked upwards, towards the cool hills where the rich men lived.

Between these two extremes was a middle ground, a drab land where neither great poverty nor great wealth existed, where the Russian, Polish and Jewish middle classes lived together, more or less in peace.

Yet even here, halfway up the hill, the community was divided into little groups who were envious and despised each other. At the top were the doctors, the lawyers, the managers of large estates; at the bottom were the common rabble: shopkeepers, tailors, pharmacists and the like.

But there was one section of society that served as a link between all the different districts, and whose members scraped a living by running from one house to the other, from the lower end of town to the top. Ada’s father, Israel Sinner, was one of this brotherhood of maklers or go-betweens. Their profession consisted of buying and selling on behalf of other people – beet, sugar, wheat, agricultural machinery, all the usual merchandise of the Ukraine – but they could also get hold of silk and tea, Turkish Delight and coal, caviar from the Volga and fruit from Asia, depending on their clients’ needs. They begged, they pleaded, they belittled their rivals’ goods; they moaned, they lied, they used every ounce of imagination, all the subtle arts of persuasion to win a commission. You could tell who they were by their rapid speech, their gestures, the way they hurried (at a time and in a country where no one hurried), by their humility, their tenacity, and by the many other qualities unique to them.

Ada, who was still little more than a baby, sometimes went with her father to do his buying. He was a short, thin man with sad eyes who loved her and found comfort simply in holding her hand. For her, he walked more slowly; he bent towards her anxiously, made sure the heavy grey wool shawl she wore over her old coat and little brown velvet hat with ear flaps were properly arranged, cupped his hand over her mouth in winter: on the street corners, the bitter wind seemed to lie in wait for the passers-by and slap their faces with joyful ferocity.

‘Be careful. Are you cold?’ her father would ask.

And he told her to breathe through her shawl so that the freezing air would warm up a bit as it passed through the wool. But it was impossible: she felt she was suffocating. As soon as he looked away, she used her fingernail to make the little hole in the shawl a bit bigger and tried to catch snowflakes on the end of her tongue. She was so thoroughly wrapped up that all you could see of her was a small square bundle on top of thin legs, and, from close up, two large black eyes peering out between the dark cap and the grey shawl; her eyes looked even bigger because of the dark circles beneath them, and their expression was as intense and fearful as a wild young animal’s.

She had just turned five and was beginning to take in everything around her. Until now, she had wandered about in a world so out of proportion to her scrawny body that she barely realised it existed; it dwarfed her. She gave it no more thought than an insect hidden in the grass might. But she was older now and determined to know life: those motionless giants standing in the doorways, icicles hanging from their moustaches, who breathed out the fetid odour of alcohol (curiously, their breath seemed to transform into a spurt of steam, then into little needles of snow), were in fact ordinary men, dvorniks, caretakers who looked after the houses. And those other men whose heads seemed to disappear into the clouds and who dragged shining sabres behind them, they were called ‘officers’. They were frightening because whenever her father saw them he clung to the walls and seemed to try to make himself even smaller. But, despite this, she believed they belonged to the human race. For a while now, she’d dared look at them: a few of them wore grey greatcoats lined in red (you could see the scarlet fabric, symbol of their rank of General, when they climbed into the sleighs), and some of them had long white beards, like her grandfather.

At the town square, she stopped for a moment to admire the horses. In winter, they wore green or red blankets decorated with pom-poms, so that the snow they kicked up didn’t fly on to their backs. The square was the heart of the town – there were beautiful hotels, shops, restaurants, lights and bustle – but soon she and her father descended once more down the narrow, steep streets that sloped towards the river, had gaps in the paving stones, and were poorly lit by lanterns, until finally they stopped in front of the home of some potential client.

In a smoke-filled, half-lit room with a low ceiling, five or six men were screaming, like chickens whose throats were being slit. Their faces were all red; their veins throbbed on their foreheads. They raised their arms and pointed to the heavens or beat their chests.

‘May God strike me dead on the spot if I’m lying!’ they said.

Sometimes, they pointed to Ada. ‘I swear to God on the life of this innocent child that the silk wasn’t torn when I bought it! Is it my fault, me, a poor Jew with a family to feed, if the mice got at some of it while it was in transit?’

They argued, they walked out, they slammed the doors; on the doorstep, they stopped, they came back. The buyers drank tea from large glasses in silver holders, feigning an air of indifference. The go-betweens (there were always five or six of them who showed up at the same time once they’d caught wind of a deal) accused each other of cheating, theft, fraud or worse; they looked as if they might tear each other to pieces. Then everything calmed down: a deal had been struck.

Ada’s father took her hand and they left. Once in the street, he let out a long, deep sigh that ended with a nod of his head and a mournful, heavy moan: ‘Oh, my God, my dear God!’ Sometimes he groaned because the gescheft, the deal, hadn’t worked out, and all his efforts, the weeks of endless discussions and schemes had been in vain; sometimes because he’d actually managed to win out over his rivals. But he had to sigh or moan no matter what happened: God was immovable and ever-present, like a spider at the centre of its web, stalking man and ready to punish anyone who seemed proud to be happy. God was always there, fervent and jealous; it was necessary to fear Him and, while simultaneously thanking Him for His goodness, also to make sure that He didn’t believe He had granted all of His creature’s wishes, so that He didn’t lose interest and continued to provide protection.

Afterwards, they visited another house, and then another. Sometimes they even went up to the wealthy homes. Ada would wait in the entrance hall, so overwhelmed by the magnificent furniture, the number of servants and the thickness of the carpets, that she dared not move. She sat dead still on the edge of a chair, staring wide-eyed and trying not to breathe; sometimes she pinched her cheeks so she wouldn’t fall asleep. Finally, they would return home on the tram, in silence, holding hands.

2

‘SIMON ARKADIEVICH,’ SAID Ada’s father, ‘I’m like the Jew who went to complain to a zadik, a holy man, to ask his advice about his poverty…’

Israel Sinner mimed the encounter between the poor man and the saint:

‘“Oh, Holy One, I am poverty stricken; I have ten children to feed, a difficult wife, a mother-in-law in perfect health, with a hearty appetite and plenty of energy … What shall I do? Help me!”

‘And the holy man replied: “Get twelve goats and let them live with you.”

‘“But what will I do with them? We’re already piled one on top of the other like herrings in a barrel; we all sleep on thin straw mattresses. We’re suffocating. What will I do with your goats?”

‘“Hear me, ye of little faith. Take the goats into your house and you will be glorifying God.”

‘A year later, the poor man returned: “Well, are you happier?”

‘“Happy? My life is a living Hell! I’ll kill myself if I have to keep those damned animals!”

‘“Well, now you can get rid of them and you will appreciate the happiness you didn’t realise was yours before. Without their stench and their butting horns, your poor hovel will seem like a palace to you. Everything on this earth is relative.”

‘In the same way, Simon Arkadievich, I complained about my Fate. I had my father-in-law to lodge and my daughter to feed. It was hard to find work and they had little to eat. But it is natural for man to sweat a great deal to earn a little bread. I was wrong to complain. Now I find that my brother has died and my sister-in-law, his widow, is coming to live with me with her two children. Three more mouths to feed. Work, toil, pitiful man, poor Jew: you can rest when you are deep beneath the ground …’

That was how Ada learned of the existence and imminent arrival of her cousins. She tried to picture their faces. It was a game that kept her occupied for hours on end; she saw and heard nothing of what was happening around her, then seemed to wake up as if out of some dream. She heard her father say to Simon Arkadievich:

‘Someone told me about a shipment of raisins from Smyrna. Are you interested?’

‘Leave me in peace! What would I do with your raisins?’

‘Don’t get angry, don’t get angry … I could get you some cotton from Nijni cheap?’

‘To hell with your cotton!’

‘What would you say to a batch of ladies’ hats from Paris, just a tiny bit damaged after a railway accident? They’re still being held at the border and would cost half what they’re worth.’

‘Hmm … how much?’

When they were in the street, Ada asked: ‘Are my aunt and cousins going to live with us?’

‘Yes.’

They were walking down an enormous empty boulevard. As a result of ambitious planning, a number of new avenues intersected the town; they were wide enough for a squadron to march between the double row of lime trees, but only the wind rushed from one end to the other, swirling the dust around with a sharp, joyous whistle. It was a summer’s evening, beneath a clear, red sky.

‘There’ll be a woman in the house,’ Ada’s father finally said, looking sadly at her, ‘someone to take care of you …’

‘I don’t want anyone to take care of me.’

He shook his head. ‘Someone to stop the servant from stealing, and I won’t have to drag you around with me all day …’

‘Don’t you like me coming with you?’ asked Ada, her little voice trembling.

He stroked her hair gently: ‘Of course I do, but I have to walk slowly so your legs don’t get tired, and we brokers earn our living by running. The faster we run, the quicker we get to the rich people’s homes. Other brokers earn more than me because they run faster than me: they can leave their children at home, where it’s nice and warm.’

‘With their wives …’ he thought. But you weren’t supposed to speak of the dead, out of a superstitious fear of attracting the attention of disease or misfortune (demons were always lying in wait), and so as not to upset the child. She had plenty of time to learn how difficult life was, how uncertain, how it was always poised to steal the things you cherished most … And anyway, the past was the past. If you dwelt on it, you lost the strength you needed to keep going. That was why Ada had to grow up barely ever hearing her dead mother’s name, or anything about her or her brief life. There was a faded photograph in the house of a young girl in a school uniform with long dark hair spilling down over her shoulders. Half-hidden behind the heavy curtain, the portrait seemed to watch the living with a look of reproach: ‘I was also once like you’ those eyes seemed to say. ‘Why are you afraid of me?’ But no matter how shy, how sweet she may have been, she was still frightening, she who lived in a realm where there was no food, no sleep, no fear, no angry arguments, nothing, actually, that resembled the fate of humans on this earth.

Ada’s father feared the arrival of his sister-in-law and her children, but really, the house was too neglected, too dirty, and his little girl needed a woman to look after her. As for himself, he was resigned to never being anything but a poor man, uneducated, even though he’d dreamt of better things when he’d got married … But his own desires, he himself, in the end, counted for little. You worked, you lived, you had hopes for your children. Weren’t they your flesh and blood? If Ada managed to have more than he had on this earth, he’d be happy. He imagined her wearing a beautiful embroidered dress with a bow in her hair, like the rich children. How could he know how to dress a child? She looked old-fashioned and sickly in her clothes; they were too big and too long. He’d bought them because the fabric was of good quality, but sometimes the colours didn’t go well together … He glanced over at the Tartan dress she was wearing with the little black velvet bodice that Nastasia, the cook, had made. He didn’t like his daughter’s hairstyle either, that thick fringe on her forehead that came right down to cover her eyebrows, and the uneven dark ringlets around her neck. Her poor little thin neck … He put his hand around the back of her neck and gently squeezed it, his heart bursting with tenderness. But since he was Jewish, it wasn’t enough to dream of his little girl with plenty to eat, well cared for, and, later on, making a good marriage. He would love to find within her some talent, some extraordinary gift. Perhaps she could one day be a musician or a famous actress? His desires were modest and limited out of necessity, since he only had a daughter. Ah, vain wishes, hopes dashed! A son! A boy! It hadn’t been God’s will, but he consoled himself with the thought that the sons of his friends, far from being the delight of their twilight years, were the affliction, the disgrace and the obvious punishment inflicted by the Lord: they were involved in politics; they were imprisoned or exiled by the government; others wandered from one place to another, far away, in foreign cities. Not that he would object to sending Ada to study in Switzerland, Germany or France when she was older … But he had to work, tirelessly save money. He looked at the filthy little notebook where he made notes on the various merchandise he had to sell, and walked faster.

3

IN THE EVENINGS they drank tea, squeezed together on the leather settee in the narrow dining room, one glass after another of strong, hot tea, with a slice of lemon in it and a sugar lump to nibble, until Ada fell asleep in her seat. The kitchen door was always left open, allowing the smoke from the stove to pour into the room. Nastasia rummaged through the dishes, stirred the wood in the stove, sometimes singing as she went, or muttering, her voice sounding tipsy. Barefoot, wearing a scarf on her head, she was fat, heavy, flabby and smelled of alcohol; she suffered from chronic toothache, and an old faded shawl framed her wide red face. Nevertheless, she was the ‘Messalina’ of the neighbourhood, and rare were the nights when there wasn’t a pair of boots belonging to one of the local soldiers standing in the kitchen, just in front of the dirty, torn curtain that screened off her bed.

Ada’s maternal grandfather lived with his son-in-law. He was a handsome elderly man, his face adorned with a white beard; he had a long thin nose and a receding hairline. His life had been strange: when he’d been a very young man, he’d escaped from the ghetto and travelled in Russia and Europe. He hadn’t been motivated by a desire for wealth, but rather a thirst for knowledge. He’d come home as poor as when he’d left, but with a trunk full of books. His father had died and he had to support his mother and find husbands for his sisters. He had never spoken a word to anyone about his travels, his experiences or his dreams. He had taken over his father’s jewellery business: he sold moderately priced silver, along with rings and brooches decorated with gemstones from the Urals which newlyweds from the lower town liked to buy. But even though he spent his days behind a counter, when night fell, he padlocked and chained his door closed and opened the trunk of books. He would take out a wad of paper and the old quill pen that made a scratching sound and work on his book, a book that Ada would never see completed; all she would ever know was its incomprehensible title: ‘The Character and Defence of Shylock’.

The shop was on the ground floor of the Sinners’ house. After evening tea, it was her grandfather’s habit to go down into the shop, the manuscript under his arm and carrying a small pot of ink and his pen. An oil lamp burned on the table, while the stove, filled with logs, roared, spreading warmth and casting a reddish glow throughout the room. Ada, whose father had gone back to town, would leave Nastasia in the arms of her soldier, and go downstairs to sit beside her grandfather, rubbing her heavy, tired eyes. She would slide silently on to a chair next to the wall. Her grandfather would read or write. An icy draught slipped through the crack in the door and made the end of his long beard flutter. These winter nights, full of tranquil melancholy, were the sweetest moments of Ada’s life. But they were about to be lost because of the arrival of Aunt Raissa and her children.

Aunt Raissa was a thin, energetic, dry woman with a pointy nose and chin, a scathing tongue and eyes as sharp and shining as the point of a needle. She was rather vain about her slim figure, which she made look even slimmer by wearing a narrow buckled belt and the full corset popular at the time. She was a redhead; the contrast between her flamboyant hair and her thin, aging body was strange and painful to behold. She wore her hair like the French cabaret singer Yvette Guilbert, with thousands of tiny red curls falling on to her forehead and temples. She stood up very straight, her small bosom thrust slightly back in her effort to stand tall. She had thin, tight lips, darting eyes beneath half-closed lids, and a piercing, frightening expression that missed nothing. When she was in a good mood, she had a peculiar way of puffing herself up and slightly moving her shoulders that made her look like a long, thin insect flapping its wings. Because of her slimness, her vivacity and jaunty maliciousness, she resembled a wasp.

In the days of her youth, Aunt Raissa had had many admirers – at least, that was what she implied with her little sighs. She was an ambitious creature; her husband had been the owner of a printing works, and she felt that her widowhood had forced her down into a lower social class. She, who had met intellectuals, she would say with a proud little scornful smile hovering about her lips, she was now no more than a poor relation! She’d been taken in out of charity. She had to live, supreme indignity, in the Jewish quarter, above a miserable shop.

‘But really, Isa,’ she would say to her brother-in-law, ‘don’t you owe it to your good name to raise your children somewhere cleaner, with a better reputation? You seem to have forgotten, but as long as I live, I will never forget that my poor husband’s name, and yours as well, is Sinner.’

Ada listened to her, sitting in her usual place, on the old settee, between her cousins, Lilla and Ben. It must have been shortly after Aunt Raissa’s arrival. It was one of Ada’s earliest memories. They were drinking their evening tea. Her grandfather, her father and Aunt Raissa were sitting on cane chairs with dark wooden backs that were called, she never knew why, ‘Viennese chairs’, even though they’d been bought second-hand from the man on the square, while the children sat on the brown leather settee with its tall, stiff back. To Ada, the house had always seemed dark and unwelcoming, which it was, to tell the truth … It was an old building; its four rooms led off to small, dimly-lit corridors with large cupboards, and the rooms were all on different levels so that in order to walk around the entire house, you had to go up and down rickety staircases, and through icy spaces paved with brick and serving no particular purpose. When night fell they were lit by the pale, flickering light of a street lamp out in the courtyard. Ada often felt afraid in this house, but the settee was a haven to her: she loved it there. It was where she waited for her father, where she fell asleep at night while everyone around her talked, not thinking to send her to bed. Behind the cushions, she hid old pictures, broken toys – the ones she loved most – and coloured pencils. The settee was worn out; the torn leather hung down in ribbons in places, the springs creaked. But she loved it. Now it was Ben’s bed; she felt ejected, cast out.

She held her cup of tea in both hands and blew on it with such concentration that her little face seemed to disappear into the large cup and all you could see of her was her thick, dark-brown fringe.

Her aunt looked at her and, wishing to be kind, said: ‘Come here, Adotchka. I’ll tie back your hair with a pretty ribbon, darling.’

Ada obediently stood up, but she had to make her way through the narrow space left between people’s legs and the table, and it took her a long time. When she finally arrived, her aunt had forgotten all about her. Ada slipped on to her father’s lap and listened to the grown-ups talk, while trying to poke her finger through the smoke rings that came from her father’s cigarette; it made little bluish rings, light and moist, that disappeared as soon as she reached out to touch them.

‘We are the Sinner family,’ Aunt Raissa said with pride. ‘And who is the richest man in this town? Old Salomon Sinner. And in Europe?’

She turned towards Ada’s grandfather. ‘You’ve travelled, Ezekiel Lvovich, have you ever seen the family’s mansions in London and Vienna?’

‘We’re not as closely related as that,’ Ada’s father said, laughing slightly in surprise.

‘Really? Not closely related? And just what makes you say that, if you please? Wasn’t your own grandmother the first cousin of old Sinner? Both of them ran barefoot through the mud. Then she married your grandfather who sold clothes and old furniture, in Berdichev.’

‘They’re called rag merchants,’ Ben said suddenly.

‘Keep your mouth shut,’ his mother said harshly, ‘you don’t know what you’re talking about! Rag merchants carry bundles of old clothes on their backs and go door to door trying to sell them in the slums. Your grandfather had a shop and an assistant, two assistants, when things were going well. Back then, Salomon Sinner worked hard, made money, and his sons did well and made even more money, so much so that today their fortune is worth at least as much as the Rothschilds’.’

But now, given the incredulous looks on their faces, she could sense she had gone too far.

‘They may have a few million less than the Rothschilds, two or three million less, I can’t remember, but they are hugely wealthy and we’re related to them. That’s what we mustn’t forget. If you were to put yourself forward a bit more, my poor Isa, and stop looking like a sad little dog – you’ve looked like that since the day you were born – as your brother always said, you could be someone in this town. Money is money, but blood is blood.’

‘Money …’ her father said quietly.

He sighed, smiled slightly. Everyone fell silent. He poured a little tea into his saucer and drank it, nodding his head. Everyone thought money a good thing, but to a Jew, it was a necessity, like air or water. How could they live without money? How could they pay the bribes? How could they get their children into school when there were already too many students enrolled? How could they buy permission to go here or there, to sell this or that? How could they avoid military service? Oh, my God! Without money, how could they live?

Her grandfather moved his lips slightly and tried to recall the quotation from a Psalm he needed for chapter XII, paragraph 7 of his book. His family’s chatter simply did not exist as far as he was concerned. The external world was only important to base creatures who didn’t know how to shut it out through spiritual meditation and intellectual thought.

Aunt Raissa looked at the shabby, messy room, full of smoke from the kitchen, and could barely hide her disgust. The wallpaper, a dingy green decorated with silver leaves, was dirty and torn. The only plush armchair was threadbare and wobbly. From the riverbank they could hear the unearthly shouting of a drunkard being beaten by police. She had given up all hope of increasing her fortune by herself now. She’d done her very best in the past, though. When she was single, she hadn’t been content to allow a marriage broker to find her a husband; she’d looked for a suitable man herself amongst the university students in the town because they were responsible and intelligent, they had good prospects. Several times, she had gone on the prowl, tirelessly … until finally one of them fell into the trap – and how much trouble she had gone to! How many silk skirts had she patiently hemmed, how many old hats mended in her room, in the silence of the night. How many long walks had she taken along the wide avenues of her hometown where, at dusk, young men and unmarried women paraded themselves. She’d had to endure lascivious glances, crude comments. And all her craftiness, the endless, unrelenting schemes to finally steal the chosen one from her more beautiful or richer friends! It had been such a long, cruel, silent war. But what could she do now, a helpless, penniless widow? She was old, and the husband she had conquered after so many battles – a good husband, owner of the town’s first printing works – had died suddenly, leaving her to bring up two children, the pretty Lilla, aged twelve, and that rascal Ben! Lilla was her only hope.