I often wonder whether I have in me a single gene or drop off blood inherited from my biblical ancestors, or even from the ghettos of the old Spanish and German cities. Who knows, perhaps I have? Where else could I have got the staying power that enabled me to survive and preserve M.’s poetry? For this one needs a maniacal obstinacy bred only by centuries of disaster, persecution, pogroms, and gas chambers. Things like this temper the spirit and toughen the fiber. One way or another I expect I shall now live out my life to the end, spurred on by the memory of Akhmatova’s Russian powers of endurance: it was her boast to have exasperated the accusers who had denounced her and her poetry that they all died before her of heart attacks. (“I go deaf from the raucous curses/I have worn my padded coat down to the thread.” )
–Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned
