The Mirvis Family and the Piano

Dictated by Yefim Ladyzhensky

Other stories by Yefim Ladyzhensky

In this story, Ladyzhensky illustrates the tremendous economic disparities between the families who passed through his building on Bazaar Street around the time of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, contrasting one family’s wealth and consumption with his own family’s extreme poverty.

Ladyzhensky evidently held a particular fascination with – or perhaps, contempt for – the Mirvis family. He narrates, “The Mirvis family grew rich,” while his own parents “were impoverished.” In describing the general scarcity of these times and the struggles of his family and neighbors, he tells of his neighbors using “stolen floorboards to heat their apartments.” Meanwhile, “Madam Mirvis…never stepped away from the tiled kitchen stove…Something was always gurgling, boiling or frying on all four burners.” The children directed their envy toward the Mirvis family’s chickens. Ladyzhensky says, “the chickens incredibly annoyed us hungry kids,” so they “drove them around the yard, not allowing them to peck at the grain which the younger Mirvis had fed them.”

Afterward, Ladyzhensky says, “We picked up the grains from the ground, washed them as if we were gold diggers and gnawed at them with our still strong young teeth, imagining that we were satisfying our endless hunger.” Despite his childhood contempt for the prosperous Mirvis family, Ladyzhensky recalls their musical and extravagant household with fondness, noting how the music from their piano has a “direct and endless connection” to his own art.