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vengeful Moscow, Marja Skłodowska was the baby of her family and like all Polish husbands, wives, pets, children, and cherished possessions, she and her brothers and sisters all had nicknames. Zofia was Zosia; Bronisława, Bronya; Helen, Hela; Joseph, Jozio; and the youngest, Marja, went by Manya, Manyusya, and Anciupeccio. The birth of her fifth and last child led mother Bronya to resign her position as head of a Warsaw school, where the family had resided in complimentary housing; she now worked from home, as a cobbler. Then, she became ill, the beginnings of a family cataclysm. Bronya had been taking care of her husband’s younger brother, sickened with tuberculosis. The brother passed, and soon enough Bronya herself was infected, having likely contracted the disease from her good intentions.
    Three years before Manya’s birth, Polish nationalists waged revolutionary assaults against the Russian colonial authorities and were defeated. Tens of thousands were interned in Siberian slave-labor camps; hundreds of thousands fled to live in exile, and the rulers began a program of “Russification.” Manya’s daughter, Eve:“For the children, the dreadful nature of Czarist occupation was in the Russian-appointed head of the gymnasium, Ivanov. They were taught that Poland was a province and their language a dialect, and forced to recite their Catholic prayers in Russian.” Manya:“Constantly held in suspicion and spied upon, the children knew that a single conversation in Polish, or an imprudent word, might seriously harm, not only themselves, but also their families.”
    Manya’s grandparents had been comfortably well-to-do, and the furniture in the family’s study revealed this prosperous ancestry: a desk of French mahogany, Restoration armchairs in red velvet, a green malachite clock, a table inlaid with a marble checkerboard; the portrait of a bishop; and a collection of scientific apparatuses, including an oak-mounted barometer and a gold-leaf electroscope. But Manya’s parents’ sympathies with the Polish liberation movement destroyed their earnings as a state-employed teacher and school administrator, and that combined with poor investments erased their inheritance.
    Eve described what happened next:“While his wife was being treated on the Riviera in Nice, his brother-in-law had lost 30,000 rubles of the family’s money in a steam mill; the father was forced to take in boarders. The proper family was unraveled into chaos and cacophony; Manya had to study with her thumbs in her ears. But she became so absorbed in whatever she turned her mind to that the family made a joke of making a tremendous noise around her and watching as she continued to read and pay them no attentions.” The girl would have this power of concentration for the rest of her life, as Manya herself said,“Weak as I am, in order not to let my mind fly away on every wind that blows, yielding to the slightest breath it encounters, it would be necessary either to have everything motionless around me, or else, speeding on like a humming top, in movement itself to be rendered impervious to external things. . . . One must make of life a dream, and of that dream a reality.”
    Mother Bronya then returned from Nice, her condition unimproved. Eve:“One of the boarders infected Bronya and Zosia with typhus, killing the elder sister. Their mother, too weak to leave the house, watched from the windows as the cortege took her first born away forever.” Manya was eight when her beautiful sister Zosia died, but this was not the end of the family’s sorrow. The children prayed every night for their mother’s health to be restored, but on May 9, 1878, she died as well. Manya was ten, and “would often sit in some corner and cry bitterly. Her tears could not be stopped by anybody,” sister Hela said, while Manya remembered,“For many years we all felt weighing on us the loss of the one who had been the soul of the house.” The family was forced to