Boris Abramovich Ansky—Abraham Ansky

Abraham Ansky’s relationship with his son, Boris Abramovich Ansky, is defined by affection, humor, and separation. A Jewish shirt seller in Kostekino, Abraham and his wife welcomed Boris as their only child when they were already approaching old age; when Boris returned years later, Abraham died within months. The brief family history frames Boris’s departure for war and his eventual return as movements between public catastrophe and a home whose ordinary life cannot be restored.

Family and life in Kostekino

Boris was born in 1909 in the house that, much later, Hans Reiter occupies while reading Boris’s papers. Abraham bought shirts wholesale in Dnepropetrovsk and sometimes Odessa, then resold them in neighboring villages. Boris’s mother raised chickens and sold eggs, while the family’s small, well-tended garden supplied its vegetables. The account presents a modest household sustained by trade, farming, and local connections, and stresses the parents’ happiness at having an only son late in life.

Abraham’s joking about his son’s place in the family gives that affection a distinctive form. He told friends that Boris was so spoiled he sometimes thought the boy ought to have been sacrificed when he was small. He then punctured the grim biblical comparison: instead of sacrificing his firstborn, he had sacrificed a hen, and repeated the joke about the hen that laid golden eggs. The teasing is not a sign of distance; it makes the child’s cherished status legible through Abraham’s comic exaggeration.

Departure and separation

At fourteen, Boris enlisted in the Red Army. The family’s farewell was painful: Abraham began to weep inconsolably, Boris’s mother followed, and Boris finally threw himself into his parents’ arms and wept as well. The scene makes the enlistment a rupture in the family’s close domestic life, not merely a step in the boy’s political or military history.

Boris’s journey to Moscow was his first departure from Kostekino beyond two earlier trips with his father to sell shirts in the region. At the recruitment office, he repeatedly asked to fight forces that had already been defeated. An older soldier explained that news reached villages late and asked where the boy came from; Boris answered that he was from Kostekino, near the Dnieper. The contrast between the parents’ grief and the delayed news that greets their son in Moscow places the family’s separation within a rapidly changing political world, without suggesting that Abraham himself shares or directs Boris’s military ambitions.

Return and loss

After leaving Moscow, Boris eventually returned to Kostekino without papers. His mother opened the door and did not recognize him. The reunion is therefore not a simple restoration of family life: Boris has come back, but his absence and changed circumstances mark him as unfamiliar even in his own home.

A few months after his return, Abraham died. The narration describes his death as if he had been waiting for Boris to arrive before going into the next world; this is a figurative account of the timing and emotional force of the loss, not a stated cause of death. Boris’s mother arranged the funeral. Afterward, Boris sat beside his father’s grave at night, while during the day he slept in the attic and at night read by the fire near his mother’s bed. The pattern places grief within the household’s remaining routines: the father is gone, the mother is still there, and Boris inhabits the home as a returned son who has nevertheless been changed by absence.

Narrative significance

The father-son relationship is conveyed through a handful of concrete episodes rather than an extended portrait: the family’s work and garden, Abraham’s golden-hen joke, the tearful farewell, the mother’s failure to recognize Boris, and the grave-side vigil. Together these details establish a bond that is both intimate and vulnerable to historical disruption. Abraham’s affection cannot keep Boris from leaving, and Boris’s return cannot undo the losses accumulated during his absence.

The family history also gives a human scale to the larger narrative of war and displacement. Boris’s papers are read by Reiter in the very house where Boris was born, so the account of Abraham and his son reaches the reader through documents encountered long after the family’s shared life has ended. The father’s brief, domestic presence thus stands against the vast political chronology around Boris, anchoring that history in the particular experience of a son leaving home, coming back, and finding his father dead.