Editing Openai/6874b524-4134-8013-b5e6-0601c853d841 (section)

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By age 10, Israel had already read large portions of the Tanakh in Hebrew, as well as Pushkin and Lermontov in Russian. He was a solitary, thoughtful boy—drawn less to other children than to his father's disused textbooks and the clandestine pamphlets that sometimes appeared in the workshop via apprentices and army men.

His earliest attempts at writing—melancholy couplets about injustice and ice—were scribbled in the margins of his mother's recipe books.

Rosa, while wary of revolutionary zeal, did little to suppress his impulses. She saw in him the kind of intellect that could command words and perhaps wield them like Moishe wielded his tools.

====== By age 8, Yakob could replicate piano pieces by ear after a single hearing. His fingers were fast, and his sense of rhythm unsettlingly complex for a child. Moishe scraped together money for a battered upright pianino and, eventually, a tutor: Lev Polyakov, an Armenian-Jewish pianist and frustrated conservatory dropout with leftist leanings. ======

Polyakov introduced Yakob to Bach, Beethoven, and—scandalously—Scott Joplin. The latter he called “Negro genius from the new world,” and Yakob became obsessed.

His music, even early on, was wild—syncopated, dramatic, improvisational. His parents feared he might become too conspicuous.

====== Only a toddler during this decade, Artur watched the world quietly and preferred counting and organizing to stories or toys. He would line up Rosa’s kitchen spices by weight and alphabet, then scold her for rearranging them. ======

Rosa whispered to neighbors that he would be a lawyer or a clerk. Moishe was less sure. “He has the eyes of a man who will never let truth stand in the way of necessity.”

====== The baby of the family. Nicknamed "Franka" by her brothers. Born during the freezing December of that year, Rosa nearly died in childbirth, but survived thanks to a Jewish midwife from the outskirts of the city. Frankhezka was delicate and sickly in her infancy, but already her fingers stretched and flexed as if shaping invisible worlds in the air. ======