Life Histories
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LIFE HISTORIES 127 128 HENRIETTE KÄRSNA-ISRAEL Filiae Patriae Sorority Born in Tartu in 1913, died in 2004 Education: Tartu University, Economics Deported in 1941 Returned to Estonia in 1956 As far as I know, I am the fi rst person in my family to have received a college education. Father was born in 1870 and attended school for two years in Tartu. He was completely fl uent in all three local languages – Estonian, German and Russian. But in math, father only knew to add and subtract. When I started school, he couldn’t help me with multiplication and division. He relied on addition and subtraction to multiply and divide. That was probably the reason he stayed at the lowest level of Tartu’s middle class. My mother was a prototypical country girl. Her parents didn’t own their own farm. Her father worked as a woodcutter on an estate. They had their own little house in Karksi-Nuia but this house didn’t have a chimney. Years later a Viljandi schoolteacher brought his class to see this chimney-less house where smoke came out through the door. A large pot hung from the ceiling, and that’s where food was cooked. There were two rooms, one with a wood fl oor where the family’s oldest member, a grandmother lived. The other room had a clay fl oor and a tiny window that barely let in light. There was a table under the window with a large bowl in the center, and that’s where soup or curdled milk was poured so everyone at the table could eat from it with their wooden spoons. I was very little, but I remember the only time mother took me to visit the home where she’d been born. I think I was a daddy’s girl when I was young, because I was very mischievous, and I imagine father as also having been mischievous. He had been apprenticed to a cobbler, but because he didn’t like repairing shoes, he had run away and found work as a smith’s apprentice at the Müta estate near Tartu. The work of a smith was much more to his liking. His parents waited for him to come home and searched for him without success. They had him declared lost in church the following Sunday, and for the second time the Sunday after that. Finally after having been declared lost on the third Sunday, he was considered lost. Some time much later he suddenly appeared at home, wearing nice clothes, with money in his pockets and declared that he wouldn’t become a cobbler, because he liked 129 to work as a smith. At the Müta estate he met other young men who all talked about moving to St. Petersburg. And that’s what they did. As far as I know father worked at many different technical jobs there. He married a German woman named Schmidt, and lived with her for many years in St. Petersburg, until she died. When he was visiting Tartu just before the First World War he apparently became very fond of my mother. In other words, they made a baby, and I was that baby. Father liquidated his home in St. Petersburg and moved his household to Tartu. They bought a little house for some lottery tickets he held. It was on Kalevi street which at the time was on the outskirts of the city, with no houses beyond it. My start in school is an interesting story. My parents hadn’t planned on enrolling me in school that year, but their friends, the Linnas family, had a daughter a year older than me. Mr. Linnas asked my father, “Mr. Israel,” (they always referred to each other formally, using “Mister,” never “you”), do you think your wife could enroll my daughter in school? She is due to start school this year, but my wife is at the maternity home delivering our baby.” That’s how it was that my mother went to the school, holding me by one hand and Lisette with the other. I was still very short, almost a head shorter than Lisette. At the school I watched as they fussed with Lisette to enroll her, but no one paid me any attention. And then, despite the fact that I was only 6 at the time, I felt this very One-year old Henriette with her father, mother and uncle. 130 feminine urge to act up and I started to cry. My nose hardly reached the table’s edge. I started demanding that they enroll me too. If Lisette could be enrolled, then I should be as well. And so the offi ce clerk enrolled me. I didn’t know any letters or numbers at the time. Some of the girls in that fi rst class were three to four years older than me and they knew quite a lot. I don’t know how that poor teacher managed, because there were very few others who were as ignorant as I. In the fourth year we had to start learning German as our fi rst foreign language. They used all sorts of little verses to teach us German. It was hard! The teacher wasn’t very happy with me because I was a poor student and had such a hard time keeping up. The others were older and did better. The fi fth year I had to repeat the grade. That changed everything. I didn’t want to study at all any more and school became distasteful. That’s how it continued until the tenth year when I had 5 D’s on my report card. Four D’s were in actual subjects, but the fi fth was for behavior. It still amazes me! Had they assigned a D for behavior earlier, I might have started to apply myself earlier. That D really hurt. I walked home along the length of Kastani street with tears running down my cheeks, all because I had been given a D for behavior. Well, they didn’t have much choice since I was a D student. It had such an effect on me, that by spring there was only one subject in which I hadn’t managed to improve my grade. Behavior wasn’t a D any more, and three subjects were improved. By the time I graduated, I was on par with my classmates and allowed to graduate in the spring. All the subjects were either B’s or C’s, and I had completed the entire curriculum. In those days there was a great deal of unemployment and most women stayed at home. Once I had completed high school I started looking for a job. I was hoping to become a civil servant because their jobs seemed to have the most security. But when I went to look for a job, they laughed at me, and told me that women belonged in the home. I could have found work on a farm, or become the mistress of a farm, had a farmer married me. Lisette went on to the university. Of course, I had to follow her. I wanted to study physical education but that department only accepted applicants every other year. Who knows how much need there was for physical education teachers. In those days there was no interest in sports trainers. Sports weren’t as important as they are today. I fi gured that business was something I might be good at. There was no business school at the time; business was taught in the law school. Now of course it’s different, business is even more prominent than law. I had become active in sports already in my third year of high school. I liked to dance and be active. At fi rst an elderly gentleman taught us old fashioned dances like the padespan, but he was followed by Oskar Luts’ brother who later became an Estonian fi lm producer. He worked with us for a year or six months 131 and taught us modern dances like the tango. He was followed by his wife, Aksella Luts, and she would use me to demonstrate dance steps to the others. I liked that. I immediately gained self-confi dence. At some point during my high school years an ad in the newspaper announced that track and fi eld training was being offered to high-school students. That really stirred my interest. I wanted to know what track and fi eld was all about. We were taught to run, to long jump and high jump, and boys were taught pole vaulting as well. I became acquainted with Ira Kõiv and she convinced me to enroll in the Academic Athletic Club. Enrollment took place in the rooms above the University Café, and high school students were eligible. It was through sports that I met my future husband. Once, at the end of the long jump and high jump competitions, this boy hung around, raking the ground. He offered to walk me home, and naturally I had no objections. That boy was Aarne Kärsna whom I later married. His great friend was Karl Sule, and the two of them started visiting me. We three met during my junior year of high-school and started going together. During my university years I had other beaus, including Nikolai Kütis, a Narva boy who held the Estonian record in the triple jump. He too started visiting me. But Aarne Kärsna had a very sensitive nose. As soon as he sensed that some other boy was visiting me, he’d come over as well.