Vera by Stacy Schiff Read Free Book Online Page A

the Empire. Over the next eight years—when Evsei Lazarevich would himself have relinquished the idea of sitting for his law boards—only fifteen Jewish candidates were approved. Jewish lawyers represented a particular embarrassment to the State because they were able to argue against the laws that had been promulgated to keep them in their places.
    And this was, in part, what Evsei Lazarevich spent the next years doing. His actual legal career was short-lived: He worked as an apprentice for the four years following his graduation, for two Jewish barristers, the second of whom had an established practice and appears to have arranged for his lodging. Almost certainly because of the new restrictions—this was the year he should have passed the bar—he moved house and changed professions; the year of his marriage found him working for a large tile business, evidently owned by the Jewish family of a law school classmate. Possibly with the help of his wife’s dowry, he opened akitchen tile company in 1900, which he ran for several years. The business entitled him to a trade certificate but did not automatically confer on him the rights of a merchant of the second guild. Whatever he did immediately afterward proved profitable, as he was able to buy a building in 1907 and to obtain his first telephone number. Other members of the family joined him in the capital: a brother, Iser Lazarevich, practiced dentistry and lived with his family in Slonim’s building, into which a cousin, an engineer, moved a few years later. An older brother, David Lazarevich, appears to have moved to Petersburg with or just before Evsei Lazarevich, but not to have stayed in the city. An uncle enjoyed some prominence in business circles.
    Véra Nabokov remembered her father as a lumber merchant. He was “a born pioneer in the truest sense, having taught himself forestry and priding himself on never allowing a tree to be felled without having one planted in replacement. He also built a little railway, a kind of feeder line, on one of the estates to bring timber close to the bank of Zapadnaya Dvina, down which river it was floated to Riga, tied up into enormous rafts by skilled peasants.” At least after 1909, he did so in conjunction with a Dutchman namedLeo Peltenburg, a man who became a close friend and who would be instrumental in helping Slonim to transfer his assets abroad at the time of the Revolution.Also the father of three daughters, Peltenburg was a kindhearted man, quick to dispense wisdom and good cheer. Véra reserved a soft spot for him in her heart; she corresponded with him all her life. Leo Peltenburg ran a one-man firm, with agents throughout Russia and Germany; he traveled often to Petersburg, along with his daughters. For Evsei Slonim there were more than the usual advantages in having a foreign partner. What Véra Nabokov left unsaid in her impressive report on her father is that the timber trade—Russia’s second-largest export business at the time—was a predominately Jewish one. And as such, additional regulations applied. The Jewish lumber merchant could not freely fell timber. He could not build or operate sawmills. He was obliged to ship his timber abroad in log form, which was less profitable than shipping lumber. He could ship only through specified ports (Petersburg was not among them); he could not lease land from the railroads in order to store his inventory. Of this Véra made no mention. There was every reason, however, why she would have a natural ear for a narrative technique later described as a “system wherein a second (main) story is woven into, or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent one.”
    Slonim put his legal training to good use over these years. In a number of court petitions he represented Pavel Vladimirovich Rodzianko, an eminent industrialist—his brother was chairman of the Duma—engaged in a number of gold-mining operations. Slonim