In the corner to the left of the window, you can see Leonid's very early, very tender portrait of his mother [1]. His mother was illiterate, but she was also a woman of great character – great gentleness, and great moral strength.
Long after Leonid died, I found a scrap of his reminiscences, typed out in Russian, describing what he called ‘my first pogrom'. Leonid was eight years old. His parents ran a coaching Inn in Odessa [2], [on the Black Sea – a busy seaport] in the Pale of Settlement for the Jewish population. It suffered a number of very serious pogroms. [3] This one was actually not the first, but maybe the second or third. Leonid was 8 years old, and he remembers waking one morning to find that the inn yard was curiously quiet. All the visitors that used to take rooms round the central courtyard had vanished and instead they could hear cries and shouts from the other side of the town, smoke in the sky, the sound of breaking glass, and the gradual crescendo of what sounded like some kind of roaring animal coming towards them. And this was a hostile crowd hunting out the Jewish population.
Leonid's father barricaded the gates into the courtyard and he and Leonid were patrolling it. Leonid had found a chain and was swinging it, thinking he would be able to protect his family with it, when he found that his mother [revert to [1]?] had already collected all their other children - there were seven of them - into a downstairs room on the ground floor of these lodging rooms. He was bustled into it, the door was shut and then [to his horror] Leonid saw his mother opening the window out onto the street outside. She climbed out of it and jumped down into the street as the crowd approached their gates. She threw herself on her knees in front of them, crying: "Please don't come in to us. Let us be. It's just me and my family". The leaders at the head of the crowd just slowed down; stopped and said: "Come on, let's go the other way". They went off, and she had rescued her family from this terrifying assault.
I remember Leonid went on to say that some neighbours got them onto a cart and hurried them to a different part of the town where they spent a couple of nights before everything had calmed down.
In Leonid's childhood, he was a very keen little boy who loved drawing. He was constantly picking up bits of charcoal from the fire and drawing on the walls or on any paper he could find. His parents were very worried by this because they didn't want him to be an artist when he grew up. They thought that that meant that he would either be, if he was lucky, painting inn signs or maybe just painting garden fences. So they wanted him to study and in fact he did take university courses in medicine and then law, and qualified in law, before he became an artist.
But his family was very poor. And when Leonid married his wife, Rosalia, the pianist, her family was comfortably bourgeois. There are several photos of Leonid’s mother in her habitual, traditional head scarf. [4] It’s what the Americans call a 'babushka' – which in Russian actually just means 'granny'. So, here she is with a granny on her head, and Rosalia leaning behind her.
In another, absolutely charming photograph [5], she's got little Alexander on her knees and Boris sitting beside her. Behind them, on our left, you have Rosalia smiling with her pince-nez on her nose. And sitting in front of Rosalia is a very large, broad bosomed, respectable middle class lady who is Rosalia's mother. Just look at the difference in sizes between this woman and Leonid's tiny, shrivelled, underfed, peasant mother. It’s – you know, it's a real social document.
