Sidney humbug. But we learnt Yiddish, and
read Hebrew literature, and discussed repatriation, and maintained that
the Jews were the brains of the world. It was a cross to our parents. But
far more bitter to them than even my change of name was Rosalind's
engagement, this spring of 1919, to Boris Stefan. Boris had been living
and painting in London for some years; his home had been in Moscow; he
had barely escaped with his life from a pogrom in 1912, and had since
then lived in England. He had served in the war, belonged to several
secret societies of a harmless sort, painted pictures that had attracted
a good deal of critical notice, and professed Bolshevik sympathies, of a
purely academic nature (as so many of these sympathies are) on the
grounds that Bolshevism was a Jewish movement. He and I differed on the
subject of Bolshevism. I have never seen any signs either of constructive
ability or sound principles in any Bolshevik leader; nothing but
enterprise, driving-power, vindictiveness, Hebrew cunning, and a criminal
ruthlessness. They're not statesmen. And Bolshevism, as so far
manifested, isn't a statesmanlike system; it holds the reins too tight. I
don't condemn it for the cruelties committed in its name, because
whenever Russians get excited there'll be fiendish cruelties; Russians
are like that--the most cruel devils in earth or hell. Bolshevist
Russians are no worse in that way than Czarist Russians. Except when I am
listening to their music I loathe the whole race; great stupid, brutal,
immoral, sentimental savages.... When I think of them I feel a kind of
nausea, oddly touched with fear, that must be hereditary, I suppose.
After all, my father, as a child of five, saw his mother outraged and
murdered by Russian police. Anyhow, Bolshevism, in Russian hands, has
become a kind of stupid, crazy, devil's game, as everything always has.

But I don't want to discuss Bolshevism here. Boris Stefan hadn't really
anything to do with it. He wasn't a politician. He was a dreamy, simple,
untidy, rather childlike person, with a wonderful gift for painting.
Rosalind and I had got to know him at the Club. They were both beautiful,
and it hadn't taken them long to fall in love. One Russian-Jewish exile
marrying another--that was the bitterness of it to our very Gentile
mother and our Sidneyfied father, who had spent fifty years living down
his origin.

So I was called in to assist in averting the catastrophe. I wouldn't say
an