86 pages • 2 hours read
Esther HautzigThe Endless Steppe
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | YA | Published in 1968A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Key Figures
Esther Hautzig
Esther Hautzig is the author and the central character. At the beginning of the book, Esther is 10 years old. The next five years are formative ones; she returns to Poland as a young woman. As the author, Hautzig reflects on her experience from an adult perspective. Situations that she took seriously at the time—such as plotting to cross paths with Yuri, a boy from school—are told with a twist of self-deprecating humor.
From the very beginning, Esther has a strong personality. As a four-year-old, Esther insists that she needs colorful panties to attend nursery school. Her mother disagrees, saying: “Very well. Don’t go” (3). Stubbornly, Esther “stayed home until it was time for [her] to go to grade school when [she] was seven” (3). In the first chapter, Raya’s responses to her daughter develop Esther’s character for the audience: “Esther, for once do as you’re told without asking questions” (7).
Throughout the book, Esther’s stubborn independence helps her overcome challenges. She adapts to life in Siberia and begins to walk to school on her own. Looking back as an adult, the author writes: “It never occurred to me that for a child to walk down a Siberian road, in every possible way the outsider […] required some courage” (100). Facing the blatant opposition of a teacher, Raisa Nikitovna, Esther overcomes the obstacles in front of her—the demand to return to the school with shoes before performing for the contest—and earns a “grudging respect.” Even in confrontations with her mother, Esther manages to negotiate her point of view; for example, she convinces Raya to let her knit and embroider as a way to earn some money. Acquaintances in the village comment that Esther walks “around the village holding [her] head up high, as if [she] were a child of one of the chiefs, not like a poor little deportee at all” (148). These observations, reported through Raya, give the audience an outside perspective of Esther and her mannerisms. Like the other members of her family, she clings to her pride.
Although Esther had a pampered life in Vilna, she demonstrates creativity and a strong work ethic. When she asks Raya if she can earn money, Raya “[pleads her] case before some unearthly court” (159). Esther herself, as the narrator, does not complain very much, so this speech from her mother informs the reader of how much she has taken on. Raya says: “She is only twelve years old, she helps keep house like a little old woman, she studies like a Talmudic scholar, she carries bricks back and forth” (159). Esther convinces her mother to let her earn money, and she works painstakingly to pursue orders and fill them. In school, Esther’s literature teacher notices her hard work and intelligence. She is assigned more challenging work, and, despite having learned Russian only three years earlier, she wins the position of editor for the school newspaper.
One of Esther’s most central characteristics is her optimism. At the gypsum mine, she spends her first hot morning weeding in a potato field. She confesses: “However, I enjoyed it. It was the best morning I had had in weeks” (56). At lunch, when she tells her father that she is “having fun,” he is stunned—despite his own optimistic disposition. Throughout the book Esther describes small pleasures with delight and admires natural beauty. She is “enchanted” by the first snowfall of the year and cannot help but love the steppe. When Esther and her mother abruptly leave the warm luxury of the factory director’s house and move into a cramped hut where Esther can only sleep stretched out if she puts her feet up on the wall, her irrepressible optimism immediately bounces back: “But since the chest backed the stove on the other side of the wall, it would be a lovely foot warmer in the winter” (187). Ironically, this optimism—Esther’s ability to carve a good life out of exile—makes it difficult for her to leave Siberia at the end of the book.
Although Esther feels like an outsider in many ways, her peers’ response to her demonstrates that she is actually well-received. She gets attention from her classmates, eventually winning over Svetlana herself. At her new school, she makes other friends, is voted as the editor of the newspaper, and is loyally admired by Shurik.
As both character and author, Esther plays an important role in her family’s history. Grandmother quizzes Esther about their life in Vilna, particularly her grandfather’s garden, and is relieved that Esther remembers. The author writes: “‘And you will never forget?’ No, I would never forget. ‘Good!’ Now my memory was to be honored, she seemed to say; it as to become the archive of her beloved past” (133). By the end of the book, against the unfathomable loss of the Holocaust, Esther’s role as archive becomes even more important. Through writing the book itself, Hautzig safeguards her family’s “beloved past.”
Samuel Rudomin/Father
Samuel Rudomin is Esther’s father; from the beginning of the book, it is clear that she idolizes him and he adores her. While the Rudomin family is quite formal, Samuel calls Esther by a pet name, lalinka. Raya sees Samuel as an “indulgent” parent, while Esther sees him as someone who understands children. On the train to Siberia, Samuel takes Esther’s questions about their location seriously: “Father knew children; he knew they needed to know where they were” (26). Another child, five-year-old Boris, also attaches himself to Samuel. Later in the book, Samuel is understanding of Esther’s social needs. Esther longs to go the movies, but Raya believes it would be a frivolous use of money. Samuel firmly ends the conversation, stating, “The child must go to the movie” (123). Out of Raya’s sight, he winks at Esther.
Samuel’s gentleness endears him to children, but he is also a capable leader. In the cattle car, he takes charge of the deportees. Esther writes: “A gentle man, yet with a great capacity for making his presence felt and his orders obeyed, he now directed the older people to take the lower bunks and the young ones to climb to the uppers” (23). He is an electrical engineer and a successful businessman; the inefficiency of Communist work assignments frustrates him. When the Rudomins learn of Grandfather’s death, Samuel’s raw emotions are unspoken, but his face is “white-faced and grim, his eyes blazing with anger as well as grief” (110). Like the other family members, Samuel is self-controlled and dignified. He withstands the interrogation and bribes of the secret police, refusing to spy on his fellow deportees. Esther embraces him and feels “proud, very proud of [her] father” (120).
One of the ways Samuel sustains and protects his family is through his optimism. After the first day of hard labor at the mine, Samuel uses his storytelling abilities to entertain them with an anecdote about forgetting to hitch his horse. When he is called to the front, he comforts them and optimistically hopes that the war will end soon after he arrives. When he leaves, Esther’s grief demonstrates his importance to her: “The day Father left was the worst day of my whole life […] Not even Siberia had been able to extinguish my father’s love of life—his charm and his gaiety. In Siberia, I had warmed myself at this bright light time and time again” (145). While Esther is afraid to return to Poland at the end of the book, she is overjoyed to be reunited with Samuel; clutching his hand, she faces her unknown future.
Raya Rudomin/Mother
In many ways, Raya Rudomin is a foil to Samuel, her husband. Although she is described in the first chapter as happy and quick to laugh, “at an early age [Esther] found out that she was a strong-minded lady who thought that one indulgent parent was quite enough for an only child” (3). While Samuel gives in to Esther’s desire to go to the movies, Raya resists them. Throughout the book Samuel is described as an optimist, while Raya is “the pessimist and the perfectionist” (189). When her husband bounces back from bad news with a hopeful plan—for example, when he suggests that the war might end by the time he gets close to the front—Raya doubts him.
In Samuel’s absence, however, Raya changes. She steps into his role as optimist, lifting Esther out of despair by throwing her a birthday party. Although she thinks that Esther’s desire for new boots and a quilted jacket are ridiculous, she gives in and allows Esther to purchase them before their return to Poland. In a tender moment, Raya laments the ways Esther has been forced to grow up and take on adult responsibilities in Siberia; here, she longs to preserve Esther’s sheltered childhood.
The entire Rudomin family is anchored in social norms and pride, but Raya more than anyone else. When Raya is hurriedly packing for their exile, she hides her emotion from Esther. Esther notes: “Tears were against the rules of our house; here we shared our joys and hid our sorrows” (15). On the train car leaving Vilna, Esther watches Raya and knows that “she would not weep, not Mother” (25). Near the end of the book, Raya surprises Esther by bursting into tears when she learns that they will return to Poland: “Mother who had been brave and strong, […] who had kept her sorrows, her loneliness, her troubles to herself, now wept like a baby from joy and relief—and perhaps some fear too of what was to come” (230).
Although Raya is practical and stoic, she also possesses mysterious “psychic powers.” Years before their exile, Samuel serves in the Polish army; contrary to reports about his death, Raya stubbornly believes that he is alive and even predicts the day he will return. Amazingly, she is right. Later, Raya’s strong sense of dread about the fate of her extended family is used as foreshadowing; eventually, the extent of the Holocaust in Poland is revealed.
Raya is changed by the suffering she experiences in exile. By the end of their time there, Esther recognizes that her mother is “sick and tired,” in need of “rest and decent food and freedom from worry” (229). Although Raya’s pride is “battered, eroded—and changed—by the years in Siberia” (170), she clings to it throughout the book. When she is assigned difficult work at the mine and at the bakery, she brushes off the sympathy of her family members. For most of the book, she refuses to allow Esther to accept anything from anyone else; later, she relents and allows her to accept a small amount as a polite expression of gratitude. In her friendship with Yozia and Zaya, Raya is determined not to be a burden and refuses their offers of help. As the author writes, “Fenced in by her pride, Mother was a difficult woman to help” (164).
Just as Esther’s optimism reflects her father’s temperament, Esther’s independence and pride reflect her mother. Although her parents are different and often contrast each other, they both love Esther deeply, and she respects them both.
Grandmother Anna
Grandmother Anna—referred to as “Grandmother” throughout the book—is Esther’s paternal grandmother. In the second chapter, Esther describes how her “stylish little grandmother” had “led rather majestically” at the family home in Vilna (26). Even in Siberia, Grandmother holds to the structures of tradition and class. Walking down the road to the village market, Esther recalls: “In spite of her tininess, Grandmother had always been the grande dame; walking down the dusty road that day, she still was” (67). After the first day of hard labor at the gypsum mine, Esther writes:
Sitting on the floor of a barren schoolroom in Siberia, covered with gypsum dust from head to toe, my tiny grandmother proceeded to push back her cuticle. Every night before she lay down to sleep she would continue to do this. She had exceptionally beautiful hands (60).
Through the seemingly insignificant task of maintaining her cuticles, Grandmother demonstrates her sense of pride and her stubborn refusal to give up her identity.
Grandmother’s dedication to social norms is put to the test by hunger. When bits of precious food go missing, Mrs. Kaftal implicates herself as the thief by her terrified reaction when Esther wants to call the police. Only Esther and Grandmother witness it, and it is Grandmother who, after a silence, decides to gloss over the revelation. She tells Esther that she must merely be imagining things and tries to continue her conversation with Mrs. Kaftal “in a brave voice” (108). When food goes missing again, the Rudomins don’t say anything, “as if the hunger that provoked the theft was a fatal illness to be kept from the patient” (108). For Grandmother, the social awkwardness of accusing Mrs. Kaftal—and admitting their level of hunger—would be worse than losing the food itself.
Although Grandmother clings to manners and status, she is also fun-loving and spirited. She is initially assigned to work at a collective farm, while the rest of the family is assigned to the gypsum mine, but, “[drawing] herself up to her full four feet eleven inches” (40), she somehow convinces the brutal Soviet officer to reassign her. Grandmother’s spirit is a special connection with Esther: “Grandmother and I had this in common, we were ‘very’ people—either very sad or very gay, with nothing in between” (71). Visiting the village market together for the first time, Grandmother and Esther happily enjoy haggling and gossiping.
Grandmother and Esther share an emotional temperament, and they both seek the privacy of the steppe to express it. Esther describes her grandparents as having a “truly great love for each other” (111), and Grandmother is devastated to be separated from her husband and to eventually learn of his death. Throughout that winter, she disappears for hours to “take her misery out on the steppe” (113).
