Living with Daniel and Klara, with her children surrounded by their children, it was almost possible for Sonya to imagine that her past belonged to someone else’s life—not hers, that nightmare; not hers, that sense of guilt, anger, and sorrow.
The government, fearing international exposure, held its trials of the murderers and looters behind closed doors. Daniel and his colleagues in the capital rallied to win compensation for the losses suffered by the Jews of Kishinev.
They were, for a while, hopeful. But then the tsar himself launched a campaign to blame the Jews of Kishinev for what had befallen them. There was blame on both sides, he told the international press—to the horror of Jewish people everywhere. There would be no compensation forthcoming for the lost lives, the lost homes, the ruined livelihoods. The Jews had been compensated well enough, said the tsar, by the donations sent in by their sympathizers and co-religionists from around the world.
Sonya received nothing.
How had it all disappeared in just a matter of days? Her home, her husband, the family business—everything she’d so naively assumed would last forever. She felt like one of the walking dead, going through the motions of being a mother, a sister, an aunt. Her food tasted like ashes.
Daniel’s family took pains to organize activities and amusements for Olga and Naomi, who day by day seemed to forget they’d ever had a father—or had ever lived anywhere but Saint Petersburg. Naomi loved playing with her big girl cousins, who petted and spoiled her. But every once in a while, she would get a stricken look in her eyes and say, “When will Papa come back to us?” Sonya would distract her by putting the child’s hands on her belly to feel her baby brother kick.
Little Olga spent every unsupervised moment in her uncle’s library. They all said with amusement that she was “looking” at the books. One day, at breakfast, she gave all of them a shock by reading out the headline of Daniel’s newspaper. “It’s not such a great surprise,” he said, with a wistful look at his own children, none of whom had shown any particular genius. “I myself was also a very early reader.”
Attended by her sister-in-law and a midwife, Sonya gave birth in October to a healthy baby girl. She wept because Asher’s dream of a son would never come true now—and because this girl would never have a father, at least not one who could ever claim her.
The baby’s name was chosen by Daniel, in honor of a long-dead great aunt on their father’s side. As soon as Baila was weaned, Sonya begged Daniel to lend her enough money to buy a new sewing machine, rent a storefront, and start over again.
“I saw a place with a sign on it, on Zagorodny Prospekt,” she told him before he left for work one morning. “It’s very small, but the light is good.”
“But we love having you here, Sonya. You and the children.”
“It’s just one room—and there’s no apartment attached to it. We would continue to live here, until—” Her voice trailed off, as it so often did, these days.
“Of course,” said Daniel, as if he knew what she was thinking but didn’t say, out of delicacy.
Sonya had overheard her brother and sister-in-law discussing men they thought might suit her, when her mourning was over—all of them widowers, with children of their own.
Sonya gave some of her earnings every month to Daniel, determined to pay him back as soon as possible. The rest, she put into a travel fund. She hated being in debt to her brother. She hated thinking that her daughters would come to see themselves as impoverished relatives in an otherwise prosperous family—or that she would school them, through her example, that the only path to success, for a woman, involved marriage.
She needed some way to make her shop stand out in Saint Petersburg, where all the fashionable ladies wanted to wear Parisian designs.
In 1904, she wrote a letter to Paul Poiret, whose new maison du couture on rue Pasquier was winning him fame as far away as the Russian capital. Sonya would be glad for the work, she told him, if he needed extra help in his atelier. She said nothing about Baila’s birth—and offered no explanation about why she was now living in Saint Petersburg. She only told him that she hoped, eventually, to move with her children to Paris.