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

=== An Alternate History of Jewish Lives and Russian Ruptures ===

===== As Russia lurched unevenly into the second decade of the 20th century, the Gershovitz family was straddling the line between marginal integration and cultural subversion. The suppression of the 1905 Revolution had restored a brittle peace, but new technologies, ideas, and ideologies were spilling across the Empire like spilled ink. =====

The city of St. Petersburg, soon to be renamed Petrograd, was itself changing—electrified, wired, and increasingly uneasy.

===== Now a teenager, Israel had become heavily involved with underground socialist literary circles. By 1913, he was writing poetry under the pseudonym Izya G.—a fusion of his given name and a nod to the Russian revolutionary nom de guerre tradition. =====

His early work reflected the dual influence of Jewish messianic yearning and Marxist determinism—long, incantatory verses invoking both Isaiah and Karl Marx. A typical line from his 1912 cycle Chto Yest’ Chelovek? ("What Is Man?") reads:

: 

His affiliations brought risk. Moishe begged him not to be foolish. Rosa, who secretly copied his poems by hand, simply asked that he use different shoes for revolutionary meetings so the police wouldn’t trace muddy footprints home.

===== By 1910, at the age of 12, Yakob had been granted special permission (via Polyakov’s tireless advocacy and a bribe involving a military officer’s piano) to enter the Moscow Conservatory’s junior preparatory program—one of only three Jewish students admitted that year. =====

There, he encountered the seismic aesthetic shifts then shaking Russian music. A performance of Stravinsky’s early works, including Fireworks and sketches for The Firebird, left Yakob stunned. He called the music “a machine made of feathers and thunder.”

Even more potent was his exposure to Prokofiev, then a swaggering student at the Conservatory who scandalized professors with his sarcastic harmonies and violent energy. Prokofiev’s Toccata in D minor, performed in 1912, became an obsession for Yakob. He began to experiment with pieces that mashed up Orthodox chant, Yiddish lullabies, African-American ragtime, and avant-garde dissonance.

This “Gershovitz Mode” was exhilarating—and dangerous. More than one instructor warned him he was "cultivating chaos."

He didn't stop.

===== While his brothers wrote manifestos in verse or sound, Artur, still a boy, was already forming habits of control. He collected neighborhood rumors, tracked who visited whom, and began filing things into what he called his “Administrative Memory.” =====

By age 14, Artur was working part-time as a clerk for a Jewish-owned import firm. He showed an unnerving skill for form-filling, inventory management, and quietly “editing” reports to align with the expected narrative.

When asked later how he survived so well under Stalin, Artur would reply:

: 

===== Franka, the youngest, grew into a slender, expressive child who imitated everything—birdsong, wind patterns, the gait of limping neighbors. Rosa encouraged her to dance, to be light, to never speak too freely. By 1916, at age 10, she was in a junior program at a private dance studio run by a former prima ballerina of the Imperial Ballet. =====

Franka adored the stage and feared it in equal measure. She was still trying to decide whether she wanted to be seen—or disappear into her motions completely.

===== The outbreak of the Great War in 1914 shattered even the fragile social order the Gershovitzes had relied on. Anti-Semitic scapegoating re-emerged in the press and street; pogroms flared again in the southwest. St. Petersburg was renamed Petrograd, and war rationing began to bite. =====
* Moishe was contracted to repair military transport machines and worked 14-hour days under military supervision.
* Rosa ran black-market bread lines in the Jewish district, using Artur's bookkeeping to maintain plausible deniability.

Israel, now 18, was recruited into a propaganda cell affiliated with the Bolsheviks. His pamphlets combined poetic cadence and revolutionary slogans, and by 1916, he was editing an underground publication called Krasnaya Iskra ("Red Spark").

Yakob Gyorgi, reluctantly drafted into a military musical unit in 1916, narrowly escaped front-line duty thanks to a conservatory contact. He composed short, brutal pieces mocking patriotic marches—earning him admiration from modernists and suspicion from censors.

===== In February 1917, the Tsar abdicated. =====

The Gershovitz home became a rotating salon of whispers. Israel was exultant, Rosa skeptical, Moishe cautious. The Provisional Government seemed promising, but by October, Israel had thrown his lot in with the Bolsheviks—publishing his most famous early work, “Red Psalm in a City Without God,” just days before the storming of the Winter Palace.

Yakob, back in Petrograd after his unit dissolved in the chaos, witnessed the revolution's soundtrack first-hand: workers' songs twisted into strange modern symphonies, church bells drowned by artillery, and the eerie silence after.

===== By 1918: =====
* Israel joined the People's Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros) under Lunacharsky, writing ideological poems and overseeing street theater for workers.
* Yakob was named assistant musical director for a workers’ theater in Moscow—where he premiered "Fragments for a Revolutionary Piano", a cacophonous composition alternately hailed as genius and condemned as "bourgeois nihilism."
* Artur began work with the local Soviet's administrative department—filing requisition forms, identifying counter-revolutionary “errors,” and quietly building a reputation as a reliable, discreet fixer.
* Frankhezka, now 12, danced in a children’s performance honoring the Revolution's first anniversary—barefoot, in a red sash, to a Yakob-composed piano piece.

Moishe and Rosa, exhausted, sat in the front row. Moishe whispered, “They’ve all chosen their gods. Now we pray their gods are kind.”

Would you like a narrative story from this period—a slice of life from the Revolution through the eyes of one of the children? Or shall we press forward into 1918–1928, as the Soviet system consolidates and Stalin begins to rise?