tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052870870237755432024-03-05T17:23:53.069-05:00Lubachka (A Work in Progress)Natasha Guralhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12459751717821434299noreply@blogger.comBlogger34125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805287087023775543.post-11280302349910676422020-06-23T09:53:00.000-04:002020-06-23T09:55:22.860-04:00The Din That Follows Silence: The Perpetual Sorrow Of Father's Day <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I leaped for the phone. I’d just come off an overnight shift at The Associated Press that ended mercifully after only ten hours. It was a slow news cycle.<br />
<br />Honestly, I preferred the one 39-hour shift, the ten consecutive days of working double or triple shifts, the two-hour break between back-to-back work weeks, during the two or so years my father was dying of cancer. It was much easier to focus on the world’s problems.<br />
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For nearly two years, I would catapult to the eighth and final floor leading to my walk-up studio on Thompson Street between Bleecker and Houston, if I heard that primitive landline ringing. It was almost always my father’s oncologist, and if I didn’t pick up, it would be hours until I could get him to call back.</div>
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This Thursday morning was different. As I lifted the the cheap cordless phone handset, it felt leaden, almost glued to the bulky base.</div>
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There was a pause. The oncologist, always in a hurry, would begin speaking as soon as I answered. It wasn’t the oncologist, and few others knew I had a landline. People knew to call me at work or on my clunky Sanyo flip phone, which came “free” with the thrifty calls-only contract. Texts were extra.</div>
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The silence dawdled. I said nothing, as tears began to well and my throat tightened.</div>
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“Yes,” my sister eked out.</div>
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“Yes,” our father, Michael “Brother Mike” William Gural, was dead.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicUSw2TgJh4Mp2i99qez97zoknUytxnqtbFVwzhD1cfWWvtohS9hGAvU-AGgqi4V7y_2ICra0iuZD5wQpQMeKnJTe-mSOHczsYCz8eWCjXwmGA0NJomvDOfa0EP-6g5zw1JdK8-OC_Su8/s1600/64569580_10218719170953149_3709328683916328960_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="936" data-original-width="937" height="319" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicUSw2TgJh4Mp2i99qez97zoknUytxnqtbFVwzhD1cfWWvtohS9hGAvU-AGgqi4V7y_2ICra0iuZD5wQpQMeKnJTe-mSOHczsYCz8eWCjXwmGA0NJomvDOfa0EP-6g5zw1JdK8-OC_Su8/s320/64569580_10218719170953149_3709328683916328960_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Eighteen years ago today, my father was waked at Kapinos-Mazur Funeral Home in Ludlow, Massachusetts. Western Massachusetts, like a pressure cooker, traps affliction as as soon as I cross the state line from nearby Connecticut, boiling over with wealth that's to be spread among the very few. He was waked again that Sunday at Holy Trinity Monastery and buried at the cemetery in remote Jordanville, in New York's forgotten Herkimer County. The monks permitted me to act as a pallbearer, lugging his casket, carrying his ravaged 6-foot-1 frame in a suit stuffed with paper to mimic the flesh that cancer devoured, along the dirt road from the church, past the seminary and the sprawling grounds that once served as a working dairy farm, to his freshly-dug grave.</div>
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I waited until today, the anniversary of his wake, where people from decades of western Massachusetts life gathered one last time to remember the professor who silently effected social change by opening minds and veering students away from careers in finance toward pursing any creative passion. Perhaps many are angry that he kept them from jobs that pay bills and even assure some semblance of financial security.</div>
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I kept silent this Father’s Day, mentioning my dad (silently) as my son Michael Alexander and I watched remote Liturgy and in prayer ahead of meals. I didn’t want to distract from celebrating my 10-year-old son’s father, as my own childhood was focused more on the dead and the dying — someone was always dying — than it was on</div>
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celebratory events like birthdays.</div>
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Did I make the right choice? The guilt was contained until early this morning when intestinal pangs began wringing out my stomach like a highway diner sponge. I rarely suffer gastrointestinal strife, as my degenerative and autoimmune diseases cause constant chronic musculoskeletal pain. These pangs are born of repressed emotion, or rather the repression of expressing those emotions on Sunday.</div>
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I’m sorry, dad. And I feel even worse for my mom. I wasn’t physically there for her when died 18 years ago, and I wasn’t there this past Sunday.</div>
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My mother never expected him to die so soon. He was Iron Mike, long before Tyson. He never smoked. He wasn’t a drinker. He read every food label like a convoluted Irish novel. He swam daily, still honing the competitive strokes of his multi-athletic youth. Licensed as an electrician and familiar with, even proficient at, nearly every skilled trade, he toiled around the house and yard when he wasn’t teaching or helping someone else complete projects that would have cost them thousands. Voracious reading was his only recreation.</div>
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Those pangs that rocked me awake around 2 a.m. are a blip compared with the emotional and physical spasms and twinges that torment my mother, all day, every day. Those seconds of silence on that phone call 18 years ago Sunday are akin to the constant clatter born of living in isolation that spares her no respite from immedicable headaches.</div>
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I won’t keep silent again. I can’t bear the din that creeps up.</div>
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Natasha Guralhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12459751717821434299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805287087023775543.post-2691128478005791732019-07-26T11:52:00.000-04:002019-07-26T11:52:34.701-04:00Dyadya Misha and the Holy Archangel Michael<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhf9HSLf032hWSIWqgMD0vWi64SOrkdootyU12NK-UWIEL1LhGC6WxIXivAfmdPbyNLzuRvz5HeLIo44pkpiD9i0N1OIdxIltwnoWq6iOUVMzKWtIhEyTbTlYueIy_lasNbLnOeKuIkBY4/s1600/Screen+Shot+2019-07-26+at+11.31.42+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="422" data-original-width="639" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhf9HSLf032hWSIWqgMD0vWi64SOrkdootyU12NK-UWIEL1LhGC6WxIXivAfmdPbyNLzuRvz5HeLIo44pkpiD9i0N1OIdxIltwnoWq6iOUVMzKWtIhEyTbTlYueIy_lasNbLnOeKuIkBY4/s320/Screen+Shot+2019-07-26+at+11.31.42+AM.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">“I really don’t think I
remember much of my childhood except a horrible war. And when the war sort of
ended, but it wasn't ended yet, the Germans were still there and they had let
us open some churches. My brother Mikhail, Michael, was still alive at that
time, and that's when he was baptized in the church, when it opened.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">“Oh, it was a beautiful, big
church. I saw angels singing on top of the church, but when I was telling
someone that I saw angels, they said I probably just heard people singing.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Tears well up as a girlish
smile emerges and Lubachka unearths some joy from the recesses of a brutal
early childhood. Lubachka is affectionate for Luba, which is short for Lubov,
which means love. Luba is my mother. Named for a Holy Martyr, who at age 9, was
tied to a wheel and beaten with rods until her body was covered with bloody
welts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She and her older sisters, Faith
and Hope, survived being burned over an iron grating, then thrown into a
red-hot oven, and finally into a cauldron with boiling tar.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Did Lubachka see angels? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Maybe.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Maybe it was the hunger or
the dehydration causing hallucinations.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Maybe it’s something none of
us can explain and some of us want to believe. The word angel is derived from the
Greek word angelos and the Latin word angelus, both meaning messenger. We all
hear messages. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">I hear voices, though they’re
far from divine. I hear voices when I’m asleep. I hear voices when I’m paring
down a few thousand words of analysis, emotion, and research into a thousand
never-quite perfect words, in an hour before I race out the door to school for
pickup, halted suddenly by the slow flow of leisure parents who have been
lingering outside the building for hours, complaining that they won’t be able
to head “down east” until Thursday this week. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">I hear voices when the subway
stops between stations for a sick passenger in another car and swim team
practice is about to let out and I have to get the puppy and walk her over to
the rec center to meet my son. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">I’ve heard a voice, just a
few times, that told me if I meander into rush hour traffic while an 18-wheeler
and a MTA bus blow through a red light, that nobody would suspect suicide when
I’m flattened into the pavement. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Sometimes I’m floating or cutting
through gentle waves in the Caribbean Sea, or pushed up against a throng in a
nostalgic trance on the floor at a show, and the voices stop. They always pick
up again when I can’t sort out which anxiety is keeping me awake and there’s
few precious hours before daylight.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Maybe it’s my Dyadya Misha,
my Uncle Mike, telling me it’s OK. Maybe he’s trying to break through my
stubbornness and ego to remind me that I have to be more forgiving of my mom,
not because she sees angels or hears voices, but because we all hear voices.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Maybe I should listen. We
invoke Saint Michael for protection from invasion by enemies and from civil
war, and for the defeat of adversaries on the battlefield. He conquers all
spiritual enemies. Over all the Nine Ranks of the Heavenly Powers, the Lord
appointed the Holy Archangel Michael (his name in Hebrew means “who is like
unto God”), the faithful servitor of God, as Chief Commander.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">At least little Michael,
Mishinka, lived long enough to be baptized. In the Orthodox faith, babies are
baptized about three months after birth. Mishinka was immersed in sanctified
water a little later, as there was no escape from holding places in camps to do
it secretly. Lubachka’s two younger brothers died in infancy, unbaptized.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Did angels appear when
Mishinka’s frail body was tossed into a mass grave?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Most of Lubachka’s loved ones
were dumped into unmarked pits, some with limbs mangled and dismembered,
genitals violated and mutilated, but essentially in tact to resemble the
remains of a human form. Others with brains blown out by the stock of a rifle,
to save bullets. Hitler explicitly ordered a surge in ammunition production in
early 1940, for fear of the shell crisis that’s widely blamed for toppling the
Kaiser’s armies in the autumn of 1914.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">The most traumatic memory
isn’t the moment of Mishinka’s death, it’s a moment of regret.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Lubachka’s memory impetuously
blinks back on, like a light bulb dangling from a frayed wire, to retrieve
another visceral early childhood experience, one she’d likely repressed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">“I do remember something
which I'm very upset about. My little brother Michael became sick because there
was this one room where we lived with four or five families because we all lost
our houses and everything. But it was not where I was born in Vitebsk Oblast near
the Russian border. It was somewhere farther away, closer to what is now the
Polish border. My mother was in quarantine because she had typhoid fever, and
my little brother Michael was still breast-fed at that time, and she wasn’t with
us and the two of us were left there, and this one woman in another room had a
cat, and it was a cold, a very, very cold autumn day.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">“It was very cold outside.
And, of course, he wasn't dressed, he only had a shirt, like some kind of an
undershirt. The woman with the cat came and threw him outside, and I wasn’t
able to pick him up or anything because I was too small. And then that's when
he got very sick. For what seemed like a long time, he was very sick, and there
was another girl that was my age that lived in that room, and we were playing
cards, and my little brother would cry, and I would get very angry at him
because he was disturbing me. To this day, it tortures me that I was angry at
him. That I did that.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">“The woman with the cat, she
was Polish, and her daughter had affairs with the German soldiers, so they had
everything. We didn’t have anything.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Everything, in this instance,
means enough clothing to cover a full body or enough food to keep children
alive.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">The cause of Michael’s death
remains unknown, but the timing spurs a rush of atrocious memories. In the mind
of a child, Mishinka was ill for a long time, but his feeble breath lingered
and his weak heart ticked only a little longer than that of his twin Ivan and
their youngest sibling Pyotor.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">“When my little brother
Michael died, that's when my grandmother, my father's mother, and his sister
were very brutally killed.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Michael died in “either
October or November. I don’t know. I don’t know what year it was. Maybe 1944,
probably 44. And the thing is, we were living at that time where the German
soldiers were, but my grandmother, my father's mother, and his sister that were
killed, they were killed in a place the Partisans watched in the daytime, and
the Germans would be there at night. The Partisans were there, or the Germans,
I don’t remember. But anyway, somehow, I do sort of remember going to the
graveyard, and they were all, as far as I know, all killed and just buried in
one, unmarked grave. But the graveyard was where we lived before the war
started.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Lubachka can’t recollect how
or why they’d returned to the border of Smolensk.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">“My aunt, at that time, was
in school in Russia where they had to learn German. The German soldiers took
her and another 16-year old, and they were asking who is living in this house,
and they had a list of people and they were told to burn down their houses.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">“She was 16, so of course,
she's going to say whose house it was. She was lucky because her father was
also a Partisan, and of course he wasn't there at that time, but he was in
their party. And my father was against the Bolsheviks and everything else, and
he was in a German zone. And so when the Partisans came after them, they told
him whose house it was.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">“They came to get my aunt,
they wanted just her. My grandmother, she ran after her daughter. And then they
took them a few miles away from there, but they had to cross some kind of a
river, and they were going to be interrogated there by the Partisans, where
their headquarters were. But what happened, it became close to nighttime, and
they had to get out of that region because I guess that's when the Germans were
coming or something, so the Partisans said that we know what's going to happen
with them. They didn’t want to waste the bullets.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">“So they used the other part
of the rifle, the wooden part, and they beat their heads open. That's how they
were killed, and when my father saw that, it really affected his mental state
for the rest of his life. And so then we had to just, I guess, put them in
ground, and we had to leave there because the fighting between the Germans and
Russians was about to start.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">“And then when we got back to
the place where we lived, and the second day, or I don’t know, maybe it was the
same day, I don’t really remember. I was outside. And I saw my brother who was
all in white, that's not the way he was buried. I guess I don’t know what he
was buried in, that I don’t remember, but I saw him outside and to me he had
represented an angel.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Some two decades before my
mother told me this story, I was standing over the open casket of her father,
my degushka, my grandfather, at a monastery in rural Herkimer County, New York,
a home for decades to the Shastokovich family for two generations. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Maybe I hallucinated. I’m
certain there was an apparition in the form of a body outlined in bright light.
There wasn’t enough sunshine pouring in through the stained glass windows of
the cavernous church to explain what I saw.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">I was tired. I had barely slept
for days. I rarely sleep enough. Those voices keep me awake. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">And when the time of our
demise shall approach, and of our liberation from this body of clay, leave us
not, O Archangel of God, without defense against the spirits of evil under
heaven, who surround us to close off the ascent on high for human souls; so
that, guarded by thee, without stumbling we may attain unto those glorious
habitations of Paradise, where there is neither sadness nor sighing, but life
without end.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<!--EndFragment--><br /></div>
Natasha Guralhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12459751717821434299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805287087023775543.post-70212074288379911512019-03-04T17:04:00.001-05:002019-03-04T17:04:08.328-05:00 Geography Of The Heart: Memory Eternal To My Babushka Alexandra<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhApc9LRZq87JX7GBgnbLILasgmXEyqCK7RhRHuFXFOOQoG2Yvkylh6H9_8pBlbd5Y8I1AK6UiLvRPaBntReQR8pWgqTPlzIhTeWd_tK1g14CWCuii4qZ850o-DqDDDRkCNuMHL8ucw1Y/s1600/IMG_4694.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1190" data-original-width="1600" height="237" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhApc9LRZq87JX7GBgnbLILasgmXEyqCK7RhRHuFXFOOQoG2Yvkylh6H9_8pBlbd5Y8I1AK6UiLvRPaBntReQR8pWgqTPlzIhTeWd_tK1g14CWCuii4qZ850o-DqDDDRkCNuMHL8ucw1Y/s320/IMG_4694.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Далеко. Далеко. (Pronounced “Daleko. Daleko,” it means “Far
away. Far away.”)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
From my early childhood until my maternal babushka
(grandmother) Alexandra Dimitrievna (Dimitrieva) Grishaev lost her ability to
speak and was bedridden for nine years until her death 21 years ago, she and I bantered
about where she would go when she died. She’s buried alongside my maternal
degushka (grandfather) Grigori Ustinovich Grishaev, at the largest of three
cemeteries at Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, New York, where celebrated
Russian composer and pianist Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich and his wife Nina
Varzar lived and left a home to their son, conductor and pianist Maxim
Dmitrievich Shostakovich.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Born March 3, 1913, in Dubrovka, a village in Vitebsk
Oblast, Belarus, my babushka died one day after he 85th birthday on March 4,
1998, in Wilbraham, Massachusetts. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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In stark contrast to all of my school and neighborhood
peers, I attended countless funerals as a young girl, and visited my
grandparents’ mostly older friends confined to some of the most dilapidated,
under-staffed, and sometimes unsanitary nursing homes, municipal homes, and
municipal and veteran’s hospitals, nearly every Sunday after Liturgy and
Orthodox Holy Days. This was the fate of so many forced immigrants from German
displaced persons camps who fell ill before they could save enough money
working hard labor jobs around the clock to pay for more humane facilities. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Death wasn’t a taboo subject as it was for most of my
non-church friends. It was an intrinsic part of daily life, and part of my
childhood dialogue along with visceral stories of the countless murders,
killings, and untimely deaths of my mother’s three infant brothers, dozens of
close family members, and hundreds of dear friends, under Stalin, the
Belorussian Partisans, and Hitler. My mother, her parents, and family and
friends, were trucked “like cattle,” by my mother’s recollection, from labor
camp to labor camp, with the fortunate few surviving to find access to food,
clothing, education, and church services at the DP camps in Germany. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Holy Trinity Monastery was some three hours without traffic
from my childhood home, mostly along a desolate stretch of I-90. To me that ride
always was the future route of my babushka’s final resting place. Somehow,
referring to it being “Далеко. Далеко.” made it easier to think about that last
drive following a speeding hearse on the fiercely policed interstate.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I was days shy of my 27<sup>th</sup> birthday when my
babushka died at my parents’ home, and thereby expected to drive the car. The
Ukrainian-American funeral director, who respected Slavic customs, illegally
agreed not to embalm her and not to seal the casket, which would remain open
overnight at the Monastery. I feared a State Trooper pulling over the hearse
and discovering this carefully rehearsed crime. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Bringing my babushka “home” to Jordanville didn’t seem “Далеко.
Далеко.” It seemed endless. She’d been waked, in an open casket, at my parents’
home where she spent the night in my parents’ dining room ahead of the voyage
to a hamlet in the town of Warren, Herkimer County, New York, at the
intersection of New York State Route 167 and County Route 155. It’s nowhere to
most people, but a sacred destination to thousands of Russian Orthodox
Christians. Settled by European Americans after the Revolutionary War, the name
was derived from the nearby Ocquionis Creek, which was used by settlers for
baptisms and likened to the Jordan River. Jordanville is now best known for the
Monastery. Most Russians from my grandparents’ and my mother’s wave of
immigration in 1950 refer to the Monastery and cemeteries simply as Jordanville.
<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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When taking our son Michael Alexander to his first sleepaway
camp on Lake Oneida this summer, I drove past the exit to Jordanville. Guilt
poured over me, even as my focus was the pending lifetime adventure for my son
and the complex emotions that accompany leaving your child alone for the first
time. I had to fight an impulse to make that left-hand turn. It’s been too long
since I’ve been to Jordanville. I’ve taken my husband Mike to see the graves of
my father and my maternal grandparents, but haven’t, in nearly nine years,
taken my son.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Далеко. Далеко. Jordanville is about four hours from my home
of two decades in New York City, as I-90 cuts through western Massachusetts
making the route from there an hour shorter. It may be far, especially for a
family that has to rent a car, but it’s forever close, imprinted on my psyche. <o:p></o:p></div>
<!--EndFragment--><br /></div>
Natasha Guralhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12459751717821434299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805287087023775543.post-8732465890041005582018-10-18T11:50:00.000-04:002018-10-18T11:50:30.716-04:00Discovering Joy In Memory Eternal<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Roaring laughter and exhilaration breathed new life into my
parents’ living room, where a group of my father’s closet friends and professorial
colleagues gathered on this day in 1996 to fete his 70</span><sup>th</sup><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> birthday.
It was a radical departure from the everyday remorse that created an atmosphere
in that room, so heavy that it was like trudging through cement while blinded
by fog.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span></div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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The small party was a surprise organized by my mother and me
to honor my father, Michael William “Brother Mike” Gural. The house where I was
raised and where my mother still lives alone, has played host to more
memorials, wakes (including my maternal babushka spending the night in an open
casket in the dining room), and other rituals focused on death and loss, rather
than cheerful festivities. Up until two years ago when my son Michael Alexander
guided me back to the church with a commitment to faith that didn’t involve
profound and constant sadness, misery, guilt, and mourning, I thought I was
“sinning” if I wasn’t constantly lugging a ponderous sense of worthlessness.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Looking back to Oct. 18 22 years ago, I now realize the joy
that transformed the living room into a celebration of life was the most truly
Orthodox experience I’ve had there, in the house where I was partly raised. (I
spent most of my formative years with my maternal babushka and degushka in a
very different multi-ethnic urban neighborhood, which made going to school in a
very white, very quintessential New England, suburb a culture shock.) My
babushka and my father died in that house. My babushka’s death bed remains as a
shrine, and my childhood bedroom where my father drew his last breath is where
my husband and I sleep when we visit. My mother tempestuously scolded me
several years ago when I commented that it was depressing to sleep in that room
and eat in that dining room: “Obviously, you didn’t love your grandmother or
your father!”</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPCBm5jaHK-w6Xpgpvdasgl5xoqbutcvej7sEp0Mk9ZpOu3XlG4VOxemLzsLSisNqxI91lFbHA7-FYf0vbqY-b8lbiwZniZBUrY2BoPMi3NdppeWI15KWl1DVBOi9lzfFdhZ-cRqBd_FI/s1600/DadLastVisit.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1059" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPCBm5jaHK-w6Xpgpvdasgl5xoqbutcvej7sEp0Mk9ZpOu3XlG4VOxemLzsLSisNqxI91lFbHA7-FYf0vbqY-b8lbiwZniZBUrY2BoPMi3NdppeWI15KWl1DVBOi9lzfFdhZ-cRqBd_FI/s320/DadLastVisit.jpg" width="211" /></a></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<o:p> (This photo was taken in the early 2002, at my 8th floor walk up on 178 Thompson St.. It was my dad's last visit to New York. His pain, walking up 24 tiny pre-WWI flights of stairs, didn't dull that trademark Brother Mike smile.)</o:p></div>
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<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
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I must remind myself to embrace that joyous Oct. 18, 1996,
when Brother Mike’s crystal blue eyes glistened and his impeccably white, straight
teeth shined as he flashed a fixed (well, for the duration of the celebration)
smile. That’s the image of my father I strive to hold dear, every minute. That
image reminds me so much of the grandson he never met. My son’s hand gestures,
when he begins to wax philosophical about a correlation he’s just discovered,
uncannily mimic those of the дідусь (didus) he never met. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Of course my father had a dark side, though the best of it
was his black humor and his penchant for classic horror and the occult, which I
immediately adopted. He told me, repeatedly over three decades: “If you can
accept that life in 99 percent disappointment, you may find happiness.” He
joked on Oct. 18, 1996, “You must all know something I don’t. Clearly, I’m
about to die.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
Brother Mike, who never took an aspirin or any prescription
medication, who swam and exercised every day, who labored outdoors every day,
who never smoked, who drank only socially, who ate vegetables he grew, who
voraciously studied natural medicine and curated his own supplements, was in
fact “dying” on Oct. 18. 1996. Specifically, despite his doctors’ incessant
claims that “you’re healthier than any of 30-year-old patients,” my father was
dying of cancer that went undiagnosed until four years later, when it was Stage
IV and metastasized to every vital organ, and eventually his brain. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In an effort to maintain the joy that permeated Oct. 18,
1996, I won’t rant about the failures of health care in western Massachusetts,
where fraud and incompetence are rampant. I will refrain from wallowing in the
regret that my parents chose to not seek treatment with top oncologists at Dana-Farber
or Memorial Sloan Kettering, where my former colleagues used their influence to
score “impossible” appointments. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
Memory Eternal, Michael W. "Brother Mike" Gural,
who was born in Newark, N.J., on Oct. 18, 1926, and who fell asleep in
Wilbraham, Mass., on Friday, June 21, 2002.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“It's life that matters, nothing but life—the process of
discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself,
at all.” _ Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment--><br /></div>
Natasha Guralhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12459751717821434299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805287087023775543.post-53216222649955032132018-06-21T15:16:00.001-04:002018-06-21T15:44:36.471-04:00On the Path to Humanbecoming<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">“You’re just like your </span><a href="http://lubachkathenovel.blogspot.com/2017/06/a-letter-from-your-dziadekdido-in.html" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;" target="_blank">father,</a><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">” my mother would say,
hundreds, if not thousands, of times, often as a back-handed compliment.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">
<br />
She accused me of “acting like a Communist, drinking from the same glass as
others,” even though she accepted Holy Communion from the same cup as others.
My <a href="http://lubachkathenovel.blogspot.com/search?q=brother+mike" target="_blank">father, </a>a card-carrying Social Democrat, imparted his progressive views to
me as part of a humanist education. Even though my parents were at odds politically
(and, moreover, both politically active), my mother respected my father for his
moral and ethical values and actions.<br />
<br />
My <a href="http://lubachkathenovel.blogspot.com/2016/11/remembering-unlikely-soldier.html" target="_blank">father </a>was patient (when he wasn’t brimming with the rage that comes from
enduring tyranny), a professor who had to thole thousands of pages of
poorly written essays which didn’t begin to demonstrate even a basic
understanding of the economic theory he so clearly explained, dumbing it down
to a level that made his soul quake. There were the exceptions, the scholars
who were misled into studying business or finance, who truly understood the
underlying value of mastering economic principles and how those principles permeate
our greater (or, too often, lesser) existence in an alleged free-market economy
and so-called democracy. Fewer were those who embraced Brother Mike’s teaching
to better comprehend how unjust life is for the majority of humanity throughout
the world. Many of his students weren’t in classrooms. A scholar by spirit and
nature, he would lecture to anyone willing to sit and listen. And those who
have done so have been captive for hours.<br />
<br />
If only my verbosity were layered with Brother Mike’s depth of knowledge and
prowess to connect the most sophisticated ideas across disciplines, all rooted
in his primary scholarly pursuit: philosophy.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1-I7-_d1iyghjP0qdfhLrm-MO-k1BJhLk5UjzJdP0zKP6yIG-aOXc5uCNJUXW1GVNUKPIE8tu2w8zjHXCBoWvpRo_Z0CNrx0iUGQxhMJdcGQJimaic2thA90FUXk4hQPuSLV8hVdoAB8/s1600/35485109_10216053457471978_3566025897494446080_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="849" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1-I7-_d1iyghjP0qdfhLrm-MO-k1BJhLk5UjzJdP0zKP6yIG-aOXc5uCNJUXW1GVNUKPIE8tu2w8zjHXCBoWvpRo_Z0CNrx0iUGQxhMJdcGQJimaic2thA90FUXk4hQPuSLV8hVdoAB8/s320/35485109_10216053457471978_3566025897494446080_n.jpg" width="283" /></a></div>
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<br />
There is so much I didn’t say. So much I did say that I regret. I only hope
that the sweeter side of my mother’s sentiment may eke out at an odd moment,
elevating me, even for a fleeting second, to the status of “humanbecoming.” He
would often say “there are so few human beings,” that to be a “humanbecoming”
is an accomplishment in our grossly corrupt and thoughtless society.<br />
<br />
We threw an intimate surprise party for my dad’s 70th birthday, where he joked
“what do you all know? Am I dying?” Even his most profound and spiritual revelations
were peppered with a trademark humor that was lost on some of shuttered mind.
He also publicity acknowledged my mom that day as a humanbecoming, which she
knew was mighty praise, never doled out carelessly.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br />
At the time, we had no reason to suspect his 80th, 90th, and 100th birthdays
would become memorials. Having never swallowed so much as an aspirin,
exercising and swimming daily, laboring <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>every day in the yard, and working as a
professor (employed at the time of his death because he had never taken a sick
day), Brother Mike’s last physical revealed, in his primary care physician’s
words “a man healthier than my 30-year-old patients.”<br />
<br />
Diagnostic tests at the time of the physical included a sigmoidoscopy, which
the PCP claimed “came back clear.” Just 10 days later, my mother noticed that
my father’s extremities were very cold and covered him with blankets as he reclined
in his dilapidated chair to read. “Mike,” she insisted, noticing a sudden
decline in his vigorous physical activities along with an uncharacteristic loss
of appetite. “You have to see a doctor.”<br />
<br />
I know I am maligned by some for loathing the area where I grew up, but it had already
become a healthcare wasteland, and my “healthier-than-a-30-year-old” father,
who never picked up a cigarette and drank only socially, went into surgery the
following day to remove “a single tumor from the sigmoid section of his colon.”
The former military doctor had been applauded by the insurance-fraud-machine hospital
system monopoly in the geographic area, as “precise.” Perhaps the U.S. military
taught this surgeon to carefully maneuver a scalpel, but it failed at conveying
any need for compassion, empathy or a basic ability to communicate with family
and patients. For the record, my father served in two wars for the U.S. Army, and
came out as a humanist. This surgeon, who was not approaching humanbecoming,
strode into the family waiting room and briskly instructed my mother and I to
“go into the private room.”<br />
<br />
In that isolation chamber, he gestured for us to sit, and blurted out: “the
good news is the surgery went well, and he’s fully conscious. The bad news is
the cancer spread to all of his vital organs and he has about six months to
live. I have to leave for the long weekend, so one of you has to tell him.
Also, tell him he has a colostomy bag.”<br />
<br />
As I began to hyperventilate, the surgeon shook his head in disgust and told my
mother, “she has to calm down or she’ll faint.” My mother said: “I can’t tell
him, and look at her, she obviously can’t do it.” He rolled his eyes and told
my mother, “Like I said, I have plans for the long weekend. I’m running late.
This is your responsibility.”<br />
<br />
“What about my daughter?” my mom asked him.<br />
<br />
“As I said, she needs to calm down. I can get someone to get her a chaplain to
talk to, but it may take awhile.” Without so much as an attempt at eye contact
or a tap on the shoulder, he waltzed out.<br />
<br />
I managed to use the phone to call my childhood friend Erica, who somehow
interpreted my cry-screams, found a neighbor to watch her then-young children,
and disregarded multiple traffic laws to race some 18 miles and hold me.<br />
<br />
Erica is one of my dad’s students. Not in a classroom (she and I were
undergraduates together at a different school), but during countless hours
spent in my parents’ home. “She’s brilliant,” he boasted. His delight was
irrepressible when she changed her undergraduate from something called hotel,
restaurant, and travel administration, to his primary passion philosophy. No
doubt Erica was a humanbecoming in the eyes of Brother Mike.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I hope my mother is right, that I am at least the slightest like
my father, save for the (occasional) rage which I fully acknowledge as
cultivated on my own. I lack his deep well of expertise across subjects and
have fallen so far from scholarship, not only leaving behind graduate degrees
despite competing coursework, but failing to read voraciously. I do hope I impart
a glimmer of his moral teachings to my son, Michael Alexander, who clearly
already has achieved humanbecoming. Like a broken record, I lament every year
that the pain of loss stings deeper s he never knew his only grandson or my
husband, Mike (Michael Damian), who also would have earned Brother Mike’s
designation of humanbecoming. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>Related Reading</b></span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; position: relative; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://lubachkathenovel.blogspot.com/2017/06/a-letter-from-your-dziadekdido-in.html" target="_blank"><b>A Letter from Your Dziadek/Dido in Search of the Empyrean</b></a></span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; position: relative;">
<a href="http://lubachkathenovel.blogspot.com/search?q=brother+mike" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>Lament, Regret, and the Eeriness of 14: In Loving Memory of Brother </b></span></a><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b><a href="http://lubachkathenovel.blogspot.com/search?q=brother+mike" target="_blank">Mike</a></b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://lubachkathenovel.blogspot.com/2016/11/remembering-unlikely-soldier.html" target="_blank"><b>An Unlikely Soldier: In Memory of Michael William “Brother Mike” Gural</b></a></span><a href="http://lubachkathenovel.blogspot.com/search?q=brother+mike" target="_blank"><b><br /></b></a></div>
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Natasha Guralhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12459751717821434299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805287087023775543.post-37493560832811905212017-06-21T14:35:00.000-04:002017-06-21T14:35:08.419-04:00A Letter from Your Dziadek/Dido in Search of the Empyrean<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal">
Dear Michael Alexander,<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I died 15 years ago today. I lived a healthy lifestyle. I
never smoked cigarettes. I despised their putrid stench, and I was perturbed
when your mother started smoking as a kid after your Babushka insisted she jump
from fifth grade at a perfectly fine public school to seventh grade at a
private girls’ school. One sure way to expose your kid to more vices is to send
them to school with scions defined by their family fortunes. I’m glad your mom kicked
those lousy coffin nails long before you were born so that you never had to see
one dangling from her mouth. I drank only at weddings and funerals. I hated hooch.
That’s short for hoochinoos, a type of distilled liquor made by Alaskan
Indians, but I mean all booze. Though I won’t deny that Degas, Manet, van Gogh,
Picasso, Poe, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Wilde, and Hemingway, and countless other
great minds, clearly got some inspiration from absinthe. Born into abject
poverty, I didn’t have the luxury of pursuing my primary passion: philosophy.
The drunks I knew as a kid your age, while crammed into a one-room efficiency
above a noisy saloon in Newark with my immigrant factory worker parents and
three brothers, were not gifted artists and writers, and they found no
inspiration in their spirits.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I always had to work, and you have to be sober to work all
the time and pick up slack from those who showed up late or called out sick because
their heads were still throbbing from the rotgut. I ate locally grown vegetables
and fruits and whole grains, and I researched<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>the best supplements to ease the inflammation of chronic arthritis that
plagued my joints after years of playing college football and working labor
jobs under conditions you hopefully won’t see in 2017 America, surely not in
the West Village. I never took narcotics or any other drugs doctors prescribed
until they detected the cancer that had been poisoning my body for years even
while the doctors claimed I was healthy as a horse, and they stuck IVs in my
arm. When I wasn’t at the college teaching, or working various other jobs, I
was landscaping or repairing the house I’d built in 1967. I made time to get to
the gym and swim every day. It was the only competitive sport that didn’t
further degenerate my joints. Tell your mom I’m sorry she inherited that
disease.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’d had a physical when I was 73 years old, and the doc told
me “you’re healthier than a 30-year-old.” About a week later, your Babushka,
who already grew suspicious when I was taking a nap on the recliner where I’d
read, came over to cover me with a blanket. “You’re feet are frozen, Michael.
Something is wrong.” I shrugged off her concern. “The doc said I’m in better
health than some punk half my age.” Finally, she forced to me to see a doctor.
They found a blockage in my colon, just days after that doc performed a
procedure that he said “proved” I’d live for another 30 years. A year later I
was dead. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If I were alive today to see you play chess tournaments, a
game I tried to teach your mom, solve complex math problems without making
those silly diagrams they force you to draw as homework, or race you across the
pool, I’d be telling you other stories – even some with happy endings. Did I
mention I had to pull my weaker Army buddies out of the ocean when a tsunami
struck in the South Pacific?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I warned your mom when she was your age that “life is about
99% disappointment. If you can get over that, you can be happy.” She knew I was
only half joking. Maybe I shouldn’t have said it over and over again. I think
she’s taken it a little too seriously. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You were born in Manhattan, the center of the universe. I
struggled to survive there, decades before your neighborhood was overrun by
people who don’t think twice about plunking down an obscene chunk of their
inheritance to own a $22 million townhouse where they spend 4-5 days a week
when they’re not on vacation. Obscene. You’ll understand more once you read
Adam Smith’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Wealth of Nations</i>. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Wherever there is great property, there is
great inequality.” That book was published a day before your mom’s birthday,
195 years before she was born, but it couldn’t be more true today, could it? <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So far, you’re doing OK there, even as last drops of
Bohemian culture are being siphoned out of your neighborhood landmarks by
greedy landlords. I’m sure your mom and pop have told you about the golden age
of your neighborhood, when you’d see William Faulkner and Eugene O'Neill walk
by instead of some gal who became famous playing a hare-brained, gold-digging
clotheshorse who somehow paid her rent by writing a weekly smut column for a
tabloid on a decades-old TV show. I think that pays some $2 in today’s
editorial dollars. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Did you know that Marcel Duchamp, who was a great chess
player, as well as a painter and sculptor, got his pals to climb on top of the
Washington Square Arch and set off a bunch of balloons proclaiming "The
Independent Republic of Greenwich Village" 100 years ago?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Can you imagine what the cops would do now?
That was a typical public display of liberalism in the West Village a century
ago. Now liberals are white women who can take off a couple days to stay in a
fancy Washington, D.C., hotel and wander around for a couple of hours in pink
pussy hats. How many of those people even vote in your local elections?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’m sorry you missed the heyday of the West Village. Even I
was just a couple years older than you are now when Café Society opened at 1
Sheridan Square, which you pass by nearly every day. It was the first nightclub
in the country to crush racial barriers and give music legends like Pearl Bailey,
Count Basie, Nat King Cole, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald,
Coleman Hawkins, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Burl Ives, Lead Belly, Anita
O'Day, Charlie Parker, Les Paul and Mary Ford, Paul Robeson, Kay Starr, Art
Tatum, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, Josh White, Teddy Wilson, Lester Young,
and The Weavers, a chance to perform in the same venue. Ask your dad about most
of these guys. His own grandfather played with some of them. Watch out, though,
your pop can probably tell you as much about Charlie Parker as your mom’s told
you about Andy Warhol and David Bowie.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There I go rambling on like an old dead man. Your
grandfather was known for keeping his audience captive as long as possible,
which was easy as most of them were plied with drink. I know I’ve made it all
sound so bleak. It’s not all lost. At least in a few weeks you can go swimming
around the corner at the public pool where another one of your mom’s heroes,
Keith Haring,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>painted a mural when your
mom was 15 years old. Once they paint over that, it’s really time to flee to a
new city like your parents kept threatening. I never got to leave the United
States outside of military service. I traveled the world only through books. I
hope you have the opportunity to see it all while retaining that compassion and
empathy that distinguishes you from those who have yet to approach human becoming.
That’s about as close to human being as most of us get. I made up a lot of
funny words. Your mom may still use some of them. I hear you still can’t quite
blow a bubble with chewing gum. Your mom was a quick study by the fireplace,
her favorite spot in the house I built where your Babushka still lives. Next
time you sit near a fireplace, think of your dziadek/dido. Don’t worry, that
sounds a lot better in Polish and Ukrainian, respectively. Ask your mom to
pronounce it.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I know you’ve told your mom you’re waiting for David Bowie
to come back as something else because he believed in reincarnation, having questioned
and embraced both Christianity and Buddhism throughout his life. She cried when
you chose Bowie to play while you bravely lay still during an hour-long MRI.
That’s Gural tough, because part of being a tough guy is knowing when to listen
to rules so that you can stay strong enough to break the ones that hold us back
and create your own set.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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The Anishinaabe people, who include a huge group of indigenous
peoples of Canada and the United States, carry down the Teachings of the Seven
Grandfathers. Think of it as basic rules for treating other people: wisdom,
love, respect, bravery, honesty, humility, and truth. Your school teacher
described your core trait as “integrity” above all else. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You’ve chosen a challenging path. Albert Camus said
“Integrity has no need of rules.” That sounds like fun, but I know not having
rules is no cake walk for you. You can blame your mom for instilling that ideology.
Maybe it’s better to listen to Moliere, who, like your pop, was a master at
writing funny plays. Sometimes we have to take the comedy most seriously. “If
everyone were clothed with integrity, if every heart were just, frank, kindly,
the other virtues would be well-nigh useless.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I have to remember you’re just 7 years old. I’ve been dead
twice that long. I have so much I want to tell you, so much I could have shown
you. If only I could just once watch you accept a medal at a chess tournament.
Your proud smile muted by an underlying shyness and modesty for fear of
gloating. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’ll leave you, for now, with first quote your mother
remembered me telling her when she was about your age: “The unexamined life is
not worth living.” It’s widely believed that Socrates said this at his trial when
choosing death rather than exile. Socrates was, above all, committed to the
love of wisdom. I’m glad your mom and pop like to yammer on as much as I do.
And I’m glad you listen to them and record every idea with your photographic
memory. Just make sure you weed out the silly arguments. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Your mom’s coping with the teachings of another ancient
Greek today, Aeschylus, who said “There is no pain so great as the memory of
joy in present grief.” No surprise your mom would turn to the one known as the father
of tragedy. Thanks for bringing her such joy and comfort. Sometimes she’s too
caught up in accepting that 99% rule. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Love,<o:p></o:p></div>
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Brother Mike, your dziadek/dido in search of the empyrean <o:p></o:p></div>
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Natasha Guralhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12459751717821434299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805287087023775543.post-66942181290481807062017-03-02T11:37:00.000-05:002017-03-03T15:20:29.766-05:00“Tsar Mikhail” and the Passion for Old World Techniques and Caviar<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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In Memory of Alexandra Dimitrievna (Dimitrieva) Grishaev:
March 3, 1913 (born) March 4, 1998<o:p></o:p></div>
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My 6-year-old son Michael Alexander can crack an egg in one
action without scattering a single shell fragment. He knows how to judge a
batter’s consistency, and that every effort may require slightly different
proportions of ingredients added gradually to attain it.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Yes, he’s very fortunate to attend a school and other
programs that recognize the need for children of all genders to learn the vital
life skill of cooking from natural, whole ingredients. However, his talents
emerged the very first time he begged to assist me in the kitchen. City kids
have the benefit of witnessing every household task rather than being holed
away in a basement. He had a knack for basic culinary and baking techniques
that instantly reminded me of my own youth.<o:p></o:p></div>
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That innate ability is handed down from the great-babushka
(grandmother) he never met.<o:p></o:p></div>
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My babushka, Alexandra Dimitrievna (Dimitrieva) Grishaev,
was a professional baker and her culinary excellence is lauded nearly two
decades after her death by the hundreds of people she served during huge
parties, memorials, and other special events in her own home, my parents’ home,
and other peoples’ homes for some 40 years. At the first major memorial after
her death on March 4, 1998, I helped my mother serve dozens of people at home,
preparing a fresh salmon dish that went from pan to table within seconds to
retain the interior succulence and the exterior crust of the fish. I also
helped my mother prepare hundreds of filled and folded blinchiki (Russian
crêpes) for the post-funeral meal at the monastery where she’s buried. Any
stress that normally comes preparing such delicate foods in volume was absent,
as if my babushka was watching over me. <o:p></o:p></div>
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When my son helps in the kitchen, I am draped in memories of
baking and cooking with my babushka and degushka (grandfather), as these were
not activities assigned to one gender in my childhood home. My degushka, Grigori
Ustinovich Grishaev, hand ground all the grains for his proprietary black and
rye breads. The two of them made sausage from select meats and casings they
bought from a German delicatessen by using a hand grinder clamped to the
countertop. He took the fish he caught to a local smoker. They brought home
five-gallon containers of raw milk from the monastery where they’re now buried,
and made their own smetana (sour cream), masla (butter), and pakhta
(buttermilk.)<o:p></o:p></div>
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As foodies, celebrated chefs, and other conscious eaters now
relish to these old world ways, I lament how many Americans were raised with
food products from boxes and cans. I am forever grateful to my babushka and
degushka for passing down these traditions that have manifested in the правнук
(pravnuk) they would have surely called Tsar Mikhail. <o:p></o:p></div>
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My maternal grandparents lost all three of their infant
sons, the eldest named Mikhail (Michael), to starvation and disease. Survivors
of wars and terror regimes who were unable to scrap food for their own children
do not take for granted the gift of foraging and preparing their own food. Even
if my son is undergoing a stage of rejecting certain (if not most foods that
aren’t comprised of the finest raw fish and caviar) I take comfort in his
ability to create foods from real ingredients just like his grand-babushka.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Natasha Guralhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12459751717821434299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805287087023775543.post-18841213813713737962016-11-11T14:09:00.000-05:002016-11-12T12:15:55.833-05:00An Unlikely Soldier: In Memory of Michael William “Brother Mike” Gural<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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My father, Michael William “Brother Mike” <span class="scayt-misspell-word" data-scayt-lang="en_US" data-scayt-word="Gural">Gural</span>, was a pacifist humanist. But being born into abject poverty to factory worker immigrant parents in Newark, NJ., in 1926, he enlisted as a Medical Administrative Corps (MAC) Officer with Army Serial #12102416 at Ft. Dix New Jersey in 1943, “for the duration of the War or other emergency, plus six months, subject to the discretion of the President or otherwise according to law.” .<a data-cke-saved-href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Bill#cite_note-1" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Bill#cite_note-1">[1]</a> He did it to send money back to his parents, so they could escape the crime-ridden, downtrodden neighborhood, where the family lived in a single-room efficiency above a rowdy saloon. One of his older brothers died as a child at the former NY Marine Hospital, known solely as the “Quarantine,” in Staten Island, where we was sent after a tragic injury. My paternal grandparents, who died before I was born, had no access to health insurance and no money for medical care. The dreaded Quarantine was the only option. They didn’t have a car, and couldn’t afford to travel from New Jersey to Staten Island to visit him. My father attempted to send them enough money to cover medical bills while he was serving overseas.<br />
<br />
My father's complete dossier was turned to ash in the National Personnel Records Center fire of 1973, sometimes called the 1973 National Archives fire, that destroyed as many as 18 million official military personnel records at the United States National Personnel Records Center (<span class="scayt-misspell-word" data-scayt-lang="en_US" data-scayt-word="NPRC">NPRC</span>) in the St. Louis suburb, Overland, Missouri. As a result, there is no digital evidence of his service before and during the start of the Korean War, nor his service in the South West Pacific <span class="scayt-misspell-word" data-scayt-lang="en_US" data-scayt-word="theatre">theatre</span>. I vividly recall him telling me about a typhoon (though I don’t think it was the Pacific Typhoon, of Dec. 18, 1944) while he was on a ship as a Radio Sergeant working in the kitchen. The crew was taking a recreational swim, and my father, a former competitive swimmer, was strong enough to pull himself and others out of the tumultuous waters.</div>
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His involvement in D-Day, however, is recorded at The
National WWII Museum, formerly known as the D-Day Museum, in New Orleans.
Further tangible proof is found on a plaque in the house my father built in
1966, and where my mother has lived since they married in 1969. (My father died
on June 21, 2002, of cancer.)<o:p></o:p></div>
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I’m unsure if my mother has any pictures of my father in a
military uniform. He embraced his identity as a scholar and a professor, and he
always noted that Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the
G.I. Bill, helped to lift him dire poverty.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<!--StartFragment-->
<span style="font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 12.0pt;">1. <a href="https://www.archives.gov/research/military">Online Military Records in
AAD | National Archives</a></span><!--EndFragment-->
</div>
Natasha Guralhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12459751717821434299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805287087023775543.post-64719672317698835052016-06-21T11:38:00.000-04:002016-06-21T11:38:18.161-04:00Lament, Regret, and the Eeriness of 14: In Loving Memory of Brother Mike<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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One of the many books my scholar father gifted me from his
vast collection to sate my passion for all things otherworldly was a book of
amulets and talisman. I cried just now when I couldn’t find it in our pared-down
West Village-sized library, though I found some comfort holding my prized copy
of “An Encyclopaedia of Occultism,” by Spence, Lewis (1874-1955).</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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Both those books served as the 1980s version of an open
Chrome tab, as I’d reference them constantly and apply my findings to subvert
anything and everything normative that I was forced to write or discuss. I’d
get written comments from teachers like “I’m not sure how this fits in. It
didn’t. Not in any contemporary and contemporaneous sense. Inserting strange
references to facts, myths, or theories that have been long debunked or
dismissed, was my way of rebelling, ever so strangely. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I recall re-reading parts of the tome on amulets and
talisman and being fascinated by the story of Osiris, the Egyptian god of the
underworld. Unlike my son Michael Alexander, who has a photographic memory of
everything he reads or learns about science, I have always struggled to
remember details and instead relied on my own ability to weave elaborate
stories around a few facts. One high school teacher commented on my report card
that “Natasha has a great ability to ‘write’ history.” Her interpretation of
that comment was meant to justify the lower “effort” grade that didn’t
correlate with the higher letter grade. I took it as a compliment.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Back to Osiris and his myriad identities. As I lay awake
early this morning profoundly saddened and anxious because Michael Alexander is
being repeatedly bullied and physically harmed at an after-school program (born
into poverty in Newark, N.J., my father taught me to always fight back, yet my
son must be a pacifist and is applauded by the program site director for his
“good behavior,” which means he does not strike back as the victim of ongoing
attacks by two boys), many random thoughts sifted through my brain. For some
reason, I thought of Osiris.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In some retellings of the myth (there are many), Osiris was slaughtered
and carved into 14 parts by his brother Set. Isis, the sister Osiris married, recovered
13 pieces of his body. The 14<sup>th </sup>piece, his penis, was devoured by
fishes. Somehow, 14 stuck in my head, the subject of a perverse and playful
song like a miscreant version of the “Number of the Day” segment that premiered
on “Sesame Street” in Season 33, which aired in 2002, the year my father died.
No, I was not watching “Sesame Street” daily before I had a child in 2010. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The 14 stuck in my mind like the jingle in Mark Twain's 1876
story "A Literary Nightmare.” I was stuck with that earworm, as the only
way to ditch it is by transferring it to another person. Somehow, 14 was
distinctly mine in the early morning hours enveloped in anxiety.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Michael W. "Brother Mike" Gural died 14 years ago
today, on June 21, 2002. It’s essential that I make Father’s Day a joyous
occasion for my husband and son. I last saw my own father on Father’s Day, June
16, 2002. Because of a female boss who treated my emotional struggle over my
father’s demise from Stage IV colon cancer spread to the liver, the peritoneum
(the lining of the abdominal cavity), and eventually the brain, with callous disregard,
I had just returned from a shift at The Associated Press when I got the call
from my sister on my landline. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigmaZxmmsWb0LmpkBNnqxt0l4u2MShJrPMcZggZrRxWKVcCQJolhduwpmDMTxXIPcDaIl7yzvZ9HInIxIicWQj_Z0_Drnsrl7rM5pTAUrRjDr8r8M8_ujy3N5VKy1JYL0tV3l1SgReMxo/s1600/10406966_10204021987132739_5476629703905806837_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigmaZxmmsWb0LmpkBNnqxt0l4u2MShJrPMcZggZrRxWKVcCQJolhduwpmDMTxXIPcDaIl7yzvZ9HInIxIicWQj_Z0_Drnsrl7rM5pTAUrRjDr8r8M8_ujy3N5VKy1JYL0tV3l1SgReMxo/s320/10406966_10204021987132739_5476629703905806837_n.jpg" width="283" /></a></div>
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<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
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How I could I not have been at his side? This cavernous
regret will follow me to my own grave, haunting me forever like an unwanted
spirit. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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After crying for a few hours, both because of my lament and
remorse over being absent at the time of my father’s death, and because I know
how enraged my father would be over the institutionalized abuse being
perpetuated by a program director who laughs off any criticism and leaves it to
her powerless site director to apologize but do nothing to stop the cycle of
bullying and attacks on my son, I fell asleep for a precious short time. Gurals
are not victims. Gurals fight back. Gurals do not put up with institutional abuse.
Yet my son is as much the prey of bullies who go unpunished, as I was the
sucker who worked extra shifts, filing thousands of pieces of copy, as my
father lay dying just four hours away. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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I can change my son’s fate by switching him to another
program in the fall, though he already has been conditioned to believe that
it’s “good news” when he won’t raise fist back at his assailant, which makes me
fearful and ashamed as the daughter of a man who taught her to always fight
back -- if not physically, socially. But I will never reclaim that moment when
my father took his last breath.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Waking with the alarm this morning, I was overcome by grief,
like Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s short story “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man.” Thankfully, I do
find value in the world and would not commit suicide, but in darkness and
despair I identify with the narrator ahead of his chance encounter with a girl
who reinstates his will to live and his faith in humanity.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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“Then such grief took possession of my soul that my heart
was wrung, and I felt as though I were dying; and then,” according to the
English translation by Constance Garnett, “then I awoke.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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It takes 14 days (or one fortnight, short for
fourteen-night) for the moon to wax from new to full or to wane from full to
new. Yesterday, at 22:34 UTC (6:34 p.m. in New York), the sun reached its
highest declination in the sky, its farthest point north for the year,
otherwise known as the June solstice. The June full moon occurred on the same
day. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Natasha Guralhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12459751717821434299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805287087023775543.post-407927067991656222016-03-03T15:42:00.000-05:002016-03-03T16:14:37.354-05:00Life Lessons From Babushka: Why I Bake Like I’m Blind and I Swim Like a Fish<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">I ignore recipes, even for
baking. (Unless I am trying to execute something with a high failure rate like
flourless chocolate cake for guests.) I'm able to understand most non-English
speakers enough to determine whether they are in eminent peril and whether I
can and should try to help. I've long been a tireless advocate for teaching
infants and toddlers to swim without any floatation device. Even if I still
panic when I see it, I know that head injuries can create a massive pool of
blood without being life-threatening.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 14pt;"><br /></span>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgmk4oeWmEkkvdP-otvEJe-DM4cAD5PkGRoy0KzsFoLoTViLFf87Jq77R2UaV1dnVJReo5VDCT7_M0rdBdJag7ZAU71fHiom-j5HAmUl5go7Nzgcg8YFr78yPY8DaOqw1P1kbeVvf4tbw/s1600/Babushka+and+Lubachka+1949.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgmk4oeWmEkkvdP-otvEJe-DM4cAD5PkGRoy0KzsFoLoTViLFf87Jq77R2UaV1dnVJReo5VDCT7_M0rdBdJag7ZAU71fHiom-j5HAmUl5go7Nzgcg8YFr78yPY8DaOqw1P1kbeVvf4tbw/s320/Babushka+and+Lubachka+1949.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: 14pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 14pt;">IMAGE: My mother and my babushka, 1949.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">All of this, and much, much
more I owe to my babushka who played one of the most critical and influential
roles in my early childhood.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">My mother’s mother, Alexandra
Dimitrievna (Dimitrieva) Grishaev, was born March 3, 1913, in Dubrovka, a village
in Vitebsk Oblast, Belarus. She died one day after he 85<sup>th</sup> birthday
on March 4, 1998, in Wilbraham, Massachusetts. (You can grasp why this week is
the toughest for my mother.) After decades of suffering, including losing all
three of her sons as infants in the 1930s, watching many of her closest
relatives and friends brutally murdered, toiling on the verge of starvation in
various prison camps, and nearly drowning after being forced to walk a plank en
route from Germany to England, she spent her last decade invalid, unable to
speak or walk. My mother was her primary caregiver, after the two of them spent
more than two years caring for my dying maternal grandfather, who also was
bedridden. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Nobody escapes reigns of
terror and mass murders without suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder,
but my babushka was generally able to repress any obvious psychological impact
throughout my early childhood. I was a toddler, maybe 2-years-old, the first
time I’d witnessed her in an emotionally fragile state. My mother, father, and
degushka (maternal grandfather), had gone to the maternity hospital, and I was
home with babushka. She was giving me a bath. Always eager to be in water, I
recall babushka signing to me in a joyful, buoyant voice. The telephone rang, and
she ran to answer it, in the days before cordless phones were ubiquitous in
suburban homes. She returned, kneeled down beside the tub, continued washing my
hair, and resumed signing. But the tune had become funerary, something anyone,
even a very young child, who has experienced Russian Orthodox mourning would
immediately recognize. My mother had lost the baby. Of course my babushka mourned
properly and purposefully at burials and memorial services, but with a powerful
voice that conveyed respect for tradition and the deceased. This was different.
It wasn’t until fluid had filled her brain and dementia went undiagnosed beyond
treatment that she would revert to that desperate, rote, haunting sound.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Because of my babushka’s
unflappable resilience and adoration of children, I lived a blithe childhood,
owed to her tenderness and unconditional love. I recall the intensity of her
smile, knowing she was there to nurture and protect me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">One of my fondest and most
vivid memories is kneeling on a high stool to reach the counter while making blinchiki
(crepes not to be confused with blini, which are more like pancakes). (Legally)
blind, likely from a combination of typhoid fever and near-drowning, my babushka
didn’t rely on recipes, even when working in a bakery or preparing feasts for
hundreds of people. She taught me how to measure and add ingredients gradually
by judging the texture of the batter, a skill that I’ve gratefully carried down
to my son.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Babushka made the cakes when
we celebrated my “burzdays.” Raised speaking mostly Russian and reading and
writing mostly English, I’ve always been proficient in what I joke is
“Immigrant” or “first-generation English.” Russian-speaking women have approached
me countless times on subway platforms asking in Russian how to get Corbin
Place. I’d have to apologize in Russian, saying I only know that the B train
goes to Brighton Beach. A couple months ago, an elderly Chinese woman who spoke
no English, walked directly to me as I exited a downtown 6 train at Spring
Street. Somehow, I figured out she needed to get uptown, so I walked her to the
proper entrance and had the attendant scan her MetroCard to prove that she’d
just swiped at the wrong platform. She smiled, nodded, and clenched my hand,
reminding me so much of my babushka. Tourists seem to sense this, as I’ve
somehow directed people to their destination without speaking the same
language. About 20 years ago, I interjected when I heard emergency room staff
say they needed a German translator for a newly-immigrated Polish family.
Without fluency, even proficiency, in Polish, I managed to translate enough to
ensure the elderly patriarch saw an orthopedist for the leg and hip injuries
he’d sustained in a fall, rather than the cardiologist the staff suspected he
needed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Because they didn’t have
YMCAs in prison camps and displaced persons camps, my mother never learned to
swim, though she loves and does not fear the ocean. Knowledge of my babushka’s
near-drowning (along with my affinity with immersion in all bodies of water) were
enough to convince me that swimming is one of the most vital life skills. My
babushka would be gratified to see my son swim with great confidence and zeal.
I started taking him to public swimming pools when he was just a couple months
old, much to the criticism of other mothers, caregivers, and city park
employees, including one who asked for name and contact information.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">One of the most terrifying
memories from my adolescence was finding my babushka lying in a pool of her blood
at the bottom of her basement stairs. While she assured me she would be fine as
she vigorously grasped my hand, I called my father, who – based on his
experience growing up in a rough Newark, New Jersey slum and fighting in two
major wars -- reassured me that “all head injuries are like that. There’s
always a lot of blood.” While I always worry, I am not squeamish and can pull
it together enough to seek proper medical attention at the sight of vast
quantities of spilled blood.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">My babushka is with us in
spirit. Her exuberance and unrivaled talents couldn’t be squashed by a
generation or two subjected to Americanization. Oh, how she and Michael
Alexander would enjoy each other. And my husband Mike would never get enough of
her piroshki, as my humble version needs practice. I’m sure Mike would advise
me that with practice, I could master the art and do hers justice. Maybe I’ll
make that a goal once Michael Alexander accepts that dumplings are a food just
like sushi. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Natasha Guralhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12459751717821434299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805287087023775543.post-49956685812094551042015-11-17T11:16:00.000-05:002015-11-17T11:16:28.764-05:00The Specialist and The Undertaker<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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“I tell you, the old-fashioned doctor who treated all
diseases has completely disappeared, now there are only specialists, and they
advertise all the time in the newspapers. If your nose hurts, they send you to
Paris: there's a European specialist there, he treats noses. You go to Paris,
he examines your nose: I can treat only your right nostril, he says, I don't
treat left nostrils, it's not my specialty, but after me, go to Vienna, there's
a separate specialist there who will finish treating your left nostril.” Fyodor
Dostoyevsky, <i>The Brothers Karamazov</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><br /></i></div>
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It seems finding the right medical attention would have been
easier in 1880 Russia than it is now for my mother in 2015 Western
Massachusetts. At least 135 years ago, there was some humor to be culled from
the absurdity of the process.<o:p></o:p></div>
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My mother has been ill with a few possibly related symptoms.
It’s easy to jump to conclusions, and naturally the worst-case scenarios plague
me day and night. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I’m not a doctor, so I cannot diagnose and treat her. The
problem is the person “treating” her isn’t a doctor either. Trapped in Western
Massachusetts, she is limited by the number of medical practitioners she can
chose from without having to travel to Boston or New York, or Paris or Vienna, which
she doesn’t want to do, at least not for repeat visits.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The utter incompetence wrangled in outright arrogance of the
Western Massachusetts “medical community” astounds me. My mother has been
mistreated in so many ways. I’m often tempted to find a lawyer to make the case
for medical negligence, even abuse. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Whether it’s personal or just the way this small-town system
disrespects the elderly, my mother sees a physician’s assistant rather than a
medical doctor. The practice claims this is all she deserves, despite have
Medicare along with a pricy state plan my father had paid into for decades as a
state university professor. My mother says this non-MD is “nice,” but yet every
time she leaves that office her health continues to decline.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Meantime, my mother has been banned from one of the few
specialist offices in this insular community, because she went to see another
specialist, one time. It is against the “office policy” to “allow patients back
after they have left the practice,” say the churlish staff who command the
phones and act as gatekeepers for anyone with any potential intelligence.<o:p></o:p></div>
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For my mother, the challenge of finding doctors to treat her
among these parochial confines, is complicated and restricted by an abundance
of those who have failed to diagnose and properly treat both my mother’s
parents, and my father. All three arguably suffered more than required and died
prematurely due to a lack of proper medical attention, even negligence. My
mother had been encouraged to file negligence claims. If only for fear of being
further ostracized from the Western Massachusetts pond of medical
professionals, she refused to take any legal action.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Yesterday, when I called her from my office to check on her
latest and most alarming symptom, I asked if she’d made a specialist
appointment. After enduring inane phone calls with the office that refuses to
allow patients who have “left the practice” back, I embarked on a search for an
office with any semblance of compassion.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I finally found another specialist practice, with a far less
surly receptionist who heard my plea for my mother’s immediate health woes. Her
symptoms constitute what merits a 911 call, but she’ll never make the trip to
the ER or consider the post-insurance expense of an ambulance. Meantime, her
“primary care” office, by denying her visits with a physician, repeatedly
dismisses these critical red flags.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In the midst of this painful conversation -- she was choking
back tears and riddled with anxiety and I was mustering any ounce of emotional
strength to not openly and loudly weep, instead gnawing the insides of my mouth
to keep mum – she shifts gears.<o:p></o:p></div>
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“I know you don’t like taking about funerals,” she opens her
new train of thought. This has begun many conversations that have lead along a somber
path in my mind and heart, and she knows that.<o:p></o:p></div>
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“But I have to make a decision about a pre-payment I made …”
<o:p></o:p></div>
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I’ll abort the conversation, as the minutae of this doesn’t
add any substance to the story.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Many hours after my unsuccessful attempts to answer her financial
advice query, my husband -- who is far wiser and better equipped to advise her on
such matters – managed to elicit her sardonic humor as he explained that her
pre-payment was “safe.” She joked that perhaps she’d selected the wrong coffin
color, as her eyes are blue, and they’d be closed anyway. I lack the disarming
charm to win her jest.<o:p></o:p></div>
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As my husband puts it, “all she knows is death.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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From her early childhood, as the sole surviving sibling,
watching her youngest peers, family, and other loved ones, shot down, blown up,
brutally murdered, or die from starvation or exposure to elements, it’s no
wonder this obsession with death seems “normal” to her. Moreover, none of the
lives taken during her early years in prison and work camps, and on the run from
various enemy factions, have any real existence after death. There are no
marked graves. She has vague recollections of which oblast (region) some were
dumped into mass graves. There was no opportunity to mourn properly, to
practice any ritual, to honor the dead in any way, at the time of their death.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Even in her “free” life as an American, she has witnessed
decades of anguish and torment, especially with the extended illnesses of her
parents and her husband, all of whom she cared for alone, at home. She spared
no expense for their funerals, but is frugal planning hers, aside from wanted
to be sure limo services, taking her survivors 180 miles to and from her home
to the monastery, are paid for.<o:p></o:p></div>
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To her, the right of burial is a great honor. I just wish I
could make it easier for her. Coming from a very different perspective – one of
weakness and a lack of the real-life experience that most people in a violent
world must endure -- I empathize, but so detest the business of death in the
United States, and want no part of it. For her, even the most gruesome of
“parlors” offers a dignity that doesn’t exist during war or in death camps.<o:p></o:p></div>
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By the time I was my son’s age, 5½, I’d attended dozens of
funerals with open caskets. After all, it’s just an extension of Russia’s
death-laden folktales or skazki. And those are for children.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Vladimir Propp's <i>The
Historical Roots of the Magic Tale</i> (1946) was criticized for being too
dependent on Western scholarship and, worse yet, placing Russian narrative in a
global context. Written 18 years after his <i>Morphology
of the Folktale</i>, which was panned for being too formalist, Propp aimed to
prove that folktales originated in ritual, especially initiation and funeral
rites. In order to avoid prison and losing his professorship, Propp’s
subsequent work, <i>Russian Heroic Epic</i>
(1958), would take on a more Marxian, even Marxist, tone. But seven years
before his own funeral, Propp returned to the acceptance and explanation of calendrical
ritual in <i>Russian Agrarian Holidays </i>(1963).<o:p></o:p></div>
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To this day, I dream of mass graves I have never seen, but
was told about as a young child, as well as funerals, past and future. My
science-focused son speaks frankly and openly about death and dying, even as it
relates to humans. But he has yet to ask me about a funeral. Trust that with my
own myth-steeped experience, that’s the “big talk” I most dread as a mother.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Natasha Guralhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12459751717821434299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805287087023775543.post-61606680016608151762015-11-11T15:32:00.000-05:002015-11-11T17:49:14.157-05:00A “Vetuchu” Perspective on Veteran’s Day<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I haven’t written about Veteran’s Day since I was assigned to do it by Wilbraham, Mass., public schools in the 1970s, or to cover memorial events as a cub newspaper reporter. I recall coming home from elementary school to delve into one of my father’s gargantuan etymological dictionaries to figure out how Veteran’s Day differed from Memorial Day, when we were doled out identical assignments. Basically, I learned it meant old, and specifically in Old Church Slavonic (still used in the Russian Orthodox liturgy) it was derived from “vetuchu,” meaning old.<br />
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The focus of Lubachka is on the civilian survivors and casualties of war, but today I’m writing about my American-born father and his U.S. military service. I know that witnessing so many civilian (as well as fellow soldier) casualties as such a young man had a tremendous impact on him, and certainly would help him empathize with the horrific plight of his future wife and her family.<br />
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Looking at this from a “vetuchu” perspective is unavoidable, as even fewer records of my father’s military service exist than those of my mother’s early childhood in work camps and civilian prisons. Michael William Gural’s military records were among the approximately 16-18 million destroyed in a July 12, 1973, fire at the National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) in St. Louis suburb.<br />
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Moreover, I generally avoid writing or speaking about Veteran’s Day because of my strong views opposing much of U.S. military policy and action, present and future. But none of that undermines the tremendous respect I have for those men and women who were either forced or volunteered to serve their country, or at least do what they thought was best at the time.<br />
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I have a lot of anecdotal evidence of my father’s various stints in the U.S. Army, including how he was one of few survivors of a leisure swim off a boat during a tsunami in the South Pacific. A broad-shouldered, former competitive swimmer, my father did what he could to save others swept away in the violent waters.<br />
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Other stories were less heroic or tragic musings on daily life in the bunker, like how other enlisted young men (never him, he stressed) would use isopropyl alcohol to set ablaze the toes of a sleeping solider, peeping out of worn socks and combat boots that had been busted open with overuse. (My father was more a big-hearted comedian than a prankster.)<br />
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I also recall my father saying he’d lied that he was two years older to gain access early to ROTC so that he could both send money home to his impoverished immigrant factory worker parents in Newark, N.J., and also qualify for the GI Bill.<br />
<br />
That evidence exists. The National Archives online database lists both the Michael Gural enlisting in 1943 at age 18. (He was born in 1926, and therefore was only 16 at the time.) Under serial number 32922859, my father is noted to have been “skilled occupations in the manufacture of miscellaneous products.” But based on serial number 12102416, my father reportedly enlisted in 1944, this time with his real birthdate of Oct. 18, 1926, as a Medical Administrative Corps (MAC) Officer.<br />
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I know he wore many hats during his years in the Army, also serving as a radio sergeant, a cook aboard the boat that encountered the deadly tsunami, fighting on D-Day, and eating horse meat while deployed ahead of the Korean War. <br />
<br />
For all his sacrifices, my father was punished despite his greatest efforts to help and protect the United States. When he volunteered to parachute into Siberia -- because: a) he was too poor to ever parachute recreationally and really wanted to do it; and b) he spoke Russian – he was red listed. That punishment carried on for decades, well into my childhood and teens. We had an unlisted phone number to avoid the harassing and threatening calls of “commie” and “pinko.” He also was fired after a brief stint in a dream job with The Bureau of Labor for his alleged affiliation with anti-American factions.<br />
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To temper my views on Veteran’s Day, I’ll leave you with three quotes from my father’s peer Kurt Vonnegut, who dropped out of Cornell in January 1943 to enlist in the U.S. Army. Deployed to Europe to fight in World War II, Vonnegut was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge, and interned in Dresden, where he survived the Allied bombing by hiding in a meat locker. <br />
<br />
Reflecting on his own experience: “The Second World War absolutely had to be fought. I wouldn't have missed it for the world. But we never talk about the people we kill. This is never spoken of.”<br />
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From my favorite Vonnegut novel, <i>Slaughterhouse-Five</i>: “You know we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock ‘My God, my God,’ I said to myself. ‘It's the Children's Crusade.’"<br />
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I risk enraging some who haven’t read <i>Cat's Cradle</i>, but this quote must be taken in the context of the novel. The tedious task of writing local Veteran’s Day feature articles slapped across the top of the front page with a sprawling American flag graphic that put nothing in perspective (while real wars played out in the streets, gang violence claiming young lives almost daily) always makes me recall it: “Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns.”<br />
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Natasha Guralhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12459751717821434299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805287087023775543.post-18239160653429743092015-03-03T11:57:00.000-05:002015-03-04T09:03:52.793-05:00My Name is GRISHAEV<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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GRYCHAJEW</div>
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HRYSCHAEV<o:p></o:p></div>
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GRYSEHAJEW<o:p></o:p></div>
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GRISCHAIL<o:p></o:p></div>
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GRISHAJEV<o:p></o:p></div>
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GRYSHAJEVA<o:p></o:p></div>
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GRYSHAJEV</div>
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These are among the many misspellings of my mother’s maiden
name as they appear on various prisoner, work and displaced persons papers from
Germany. The Anglicized, phonetic spelling my maternal grandparents choose was GRISHAEV.
Grishaev is a patronymic surname formed by adding a Russian suffix to the
personal name Grigori (Gregory). Grigori was my maternal grandfather’s first
name.<o:p></o:p></div>
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As many variations for the spellings of first names Grigori,
Alexandra (my maternal grandmother) and Luba (my mother) exist on those German
records. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The English spellings they choose were very important in
creating a permanent identity once they arrived in the United States in 1950.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Today is my Babushka’s birthday. She was born March 3, 1913,
in Dubrovka, Vitebsk Oblast, and died March 4, 1998, at my mother’s home and
under my mother’s sole care in Wilbraham, Massachusetts. As part of my remembrance
process (a hybrid of grief and fond and joyful recollection), I was going
trough photos and records mostly from the 1940s.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I have countless times compared the different misspellings
and what they might imply. Yet it only occurred to me this morning why mother
was so upset by my tween and early teenage practice of playing with different
existing and made-up spellings of my own name. <o:p></o:p></div>
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As a young girl I thought: it’s my name, I can do with it
what I want. As a westerner, why would I think otherwise? Clearly I’d shut off
my eastern mind and for decades shut out contemplating what drove my mother’s
emotional and adamant reaction to my name word play. To me it was as innocent
as practicing new eye makeup application techniques, one of my favorite 1980s
pastimes. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Poring over these papers this morning, entering all German
text into Google Translate, I was walloped with a fresh dose of guilt over all
the anguish my tween and teenage rebellion inflicted on my mother. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Of course she was angry that I’d want to spell Natasha,
which is the best phonetic transliteration of Ната́ша, any other way. I was
taking for granted being born in a country free of deadly domestic upheaval and
genocide. I was lucky that U.S. agencies and authorities agreed to document my
name as it was given.<o:p></o:p></div>
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As a student of Russian literature, I became obsessed with
the origins and meanings of names, but yet my own mother’s visceral objection
to my manipulation of the spelling of my name eluded me until now. In my
attempt to delve deeper into the meaning of 19<sup>th</sup> century texts, I’d
alienated myself from my own mother.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In my own ignorant defense, I meant nothing by adding or
subtracting or substituting letters in my name and now feel foolish for not
realizing why and how I’d hurt my mother. At the same time, I was inscribing
Bowie and Le Bon as my last name on the backs of notebooks and textbooks. My mother had no problem with the surnames, as long as Natasha was in tact. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Natasha Guralhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12459751717821434299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805287087023775543.post-30785242333955340212015-02-05T11:37:00.001-05:002015-02-05T12:31:17.032-05:00The Binds of Birthplace and Social Aspiration<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: left;">Certainly I cannot compare my early childhood with my
mother’s, as by all human standards I have been extremely fortunate. Yet we
both were plagued by very similar social pressures, brought on by our very different
circumstances of birth, manifesting in stereotypical opposites.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A first generation American born into the middle class, only
because my maternal grandparents and my parents worked around the clock at
menial jobs and spent as little money as possible, I envied the new money
spendthrift heyday of the 1980s and loathed the old money elitism of
established New England. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Constantly reminded that I was not like the other kids,
whether it was shopkeepers claiming I had a German accent or girls teasing me for
wearing off-label clothes, I quickly developed a complex further exacerbating
my abnormal behavior. My early attempts at embracing a preppy look were
thwarted by my inability to convert prominent Eastern European features into
generic Waspiness. My Sperry Top-Siders from Marshalls were “irreugular” (the
wrong shade of stone) and my whale print raincoat wasn’t reversible and maybe
not even real vinyl. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_PanB1KZ8DRixj8gDUDloLf5K9hO6_EfFSsrln85INp7G5LinEqZXpJf8P_h85Ot47VOuMBAou6BbPQcNkPoosQBJGINSSLmqnscmWfwCWrdutOcal_YQWo07KrSzQaqWMyS5WWhe1uY/s1600/MomAndDad.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_PanB1KZ8DRixj8gDUDloLf5K9hO6_EfFSsrln85INp7G5LinEqZXpJf8P_h85Ot47VOuMBAou6BbPQcNkPoosQBJGINSSLmqnscmWfwCWrdutOcal_YQWo07KrSzQaqWMyS5WWhe1uY/s1600/MomAndDad.jpg" height="320" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLtdrf5meYuXz83axAORN-RN7J39EwZyj2Oy2K_AmgSO2pNQmf1LlmKzXx-Rl_0nEKsORXvE_N7wZbp8xEUC3euh6bvU2HWFDL_GHoYQ1YV3q5qrZO5v3Ps_FP7WzOSTtkTwqsUgG4RW4/s1600/MomHeadshot.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLtdrf5meYuXz83axAORN-RN7J39EwZyj2Oy2K_AmgSO2pNQmf1LlmKzXx-Rl_0nEKsORXvE_N7wZbp8xEUC3euh6bvU2HWFDL_GHoYQ1YV3q5qrZO5v3Ps_FP7WzOSTtkTwqsUgG4RW4/s1600/MomHeadshot.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></div>
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<o:p><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I was barely a tween when I learned about David Bowie, and
from the son of a Russian Orthodox priest. I’d found my real cultural identity,
the one I still embrace, before I understood many of the concepts that defined
it. As I learned everything I could about the history of counter culture, I was
baffled at how my mother escaped any brushes with the celebrated 1960s youth
movement. How could she choose to become a social conformist over a free
spirit? It made no sense to me that someone who’d been persecuted and oppressed
from birth would opt out of the counter-culture and drop into the normative. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Not to undermine all her struggles of assimilating into
American society, as her first years in the United States brought on suicidal
thoughts. But owing to a regulation hottie status maintained by a daily diet of
three hard-boiled eggs and three small oranges, my mother blossomed into the
prototypical high school sweetheart with movie star looks. She ruled the
workplace in high fashion and perfectly coiffed hair, her bosses inviting her
on their family getaways, gifting her with golf clubs and pardoning her days off.
She effortlessly switched careers, without worry of scoring her next job in a
hetero-normative marketplace where a bright, educated woman with an exotic name
and a flawless complexion would always be hired. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For years I’d be told by people, mostly men, my mother had
worked with, studied with or socialized with in her younger years, that “she
was so beautiful,” even “the most beautiful woman,” and of course with a
“figure to die for.” This often was punctuated by “and you look just like your
father.” It was exactly what an insecure, self-conscious teenage girl did not need
to be told.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Somehow I was, by my physical imperfections, cursed by my
Eastern European heritage while my mother had transcended the ideal of American
beauty.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It’s taken me decades of feeling inadequate and inferior to
my mother’s enviable appearance in her younger years (she lost weight during
her pregnancy with me due to illness and complications and was stunning and
slender immediately after my birth), to realize how we could have chosen such
different social aspirations. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My mother’s desire to be a typical American teenager is born
from her lack of any identity, any access to clothing or amenities of any kind
and any connection to a society, as a young child. My exposure to the 1980s
stock- and real estate-market wealth explosion (and implosion), as well as the
old guard New England mainstay, would fuel my ongoing passion for a pop art,
post-punk rebellion. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I am ashamed when I curse America, knowing how being born
here is a privilege, particularly for someone of my family background. Still, I
see how this country continues to force outsiders into assimilation and how my
mother’s success at gaining one-time social prominence has made it more
difficult for her to cope with the struggles of post-traumatic stress and survivor
guilt as she now lives in (largely self-imposed) isolation. After giving up her
own life to care for at home her sick father and then her ailing mother and
then my cancer-stricken father, she never has regained any ambition to live the
American dream.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Natasha Guralhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12459751717821434299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805287087023775543.post-12615374736457870172014-05-13T16:22:00.002-04:002014-05-13T17:03:28.509-04:00The Quest for Childhood Memories<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Fairy tales do not give
the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already
because it is in the world already. What fairy tales give the child is his
first clear idea of the possible defeat of evil. The baby has known the dragon
intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for
him is a St. George to kill the dragon."</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">_ G. K. Chesterton<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As uncertain as the time and
place of her own birth, Lubachka can trace her family history back only to
“Russia someplace,” where her grandparents were born. Every detail is somewhat nebulous.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Affectionate for Luba or
Lubov, Lubachka is what my mother was called by her parents’ friends and anyone
their age or older. Diminutives are ubiquitous among Russians and nobody is
known by just one variant of their given name. To my mother’s elders, most long
dead, she is forever a child, a little girl who emerged from the darkest world
and triumphed over death. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIbUN8jn6GahlKOSL-S3x4sinVaH7JEdLc4jLmzW_F3PSjFp1fsRpMb0mZUEKHQ5vsxpoIrhtikG3foz6gJHC3LdxdAwqFNqgEM6dh-kXeALExSSe3T-zOE_ApDNdBVuZiX05hXyXKNPU/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-05-13+at+4.33.01+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIbUN8jn6GahlKOSL-S3x4sinVaH7JEdLc4jLmzW_F3PSjFp1fsRpMb0mZUEKHQ5vsxpoIrhtikG3foz6gJHC3LdxdAwqFNqgEM6dh-kXeALExSSe3T-zOE_ApDNdBVuZiX05hXyXKNPU/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-05-13+at+4.33.01+PM.png" height="320" width="279" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When my mother made her first
confession at the age of 6 or 7 to a Russian Orthodox priest, she clenched her
hands in prayer, tears stinging her innocent face and admitted to every sin
she’d heard of, including murder and adultery. (Her very confession was a sin, to
those who observe the most stringent interpretation of Orthodox faith, which regards
listing the sins you have not committed or things you have not done as likening
yourself to the Pharisee of the Gospel. It would be considered a form of boasting,
though thankfully this priest was not a fanatic.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The priest must have
struggled to not giggle. “Why my dear, Lubachka,” he said, “when did you find
all the time to commit these sins?” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Like her first confession,
Lubachka’s early childhood encompasses the laundry list of tropes found in
Russian folk tales as outlined by Russian formalist Vladimir Propp. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">1. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">The Initial Situation</b> (the setup) is a backdrop of war, attacks on
all fronts by multiple enemies.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">2. Though her parents
survived, Lubachka lost many others, including authority figures, making <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">The Absentations </b>(someone leaves or
dies) central to her tale. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">3. Lubachka’s father made
several <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Violations</b>, including
leaving the Soviet Army in fury.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">4. In a series of small
villages comprised of dueling ethnic and political groups, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Reconnaissance </b>was rampant, and often it’s unclear if someone is
the villain or the hero.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">5. There were countless
instances of<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> Delivery</b> (the searching
party discovers information), often by those disguised as friends and working
for an enemy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Lubachka’s first few years
encompass most of the more than 30 tropes, which haven’t lost their universal
appeal. These are woven through everything from <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">The Odyssey</b> to modern works such as <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Star Wars, Labyrinth</b> and <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Pan’s
Labyrinth</b>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Let’s stick with what is
known.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My mother’s mother, Alexandra
Dimitrievna (Dimitrieva) Grishaev, was born March 3, 1913, in Dubrovka, a
village in Vitebsk Oblast. My mother’s father, Grigori Ustinovich Grishaev, was
born Nov. 18, 1907, in Lagi, also Vitebsk Oblast. Both villages are located
near the Russian border, and my maternal grandmother would walk to miles to
attend services at the closest Russian Orthodox Church. The oblast (which means
administrative region) borders Russia, Latvia and Lithuania, and is a major
railway center with stations for lines between Russia and Ukraine, Russia and
Poland, and Russia and Lithuania. Her maternal grandparents were Dimitri and
Matrona, and her paternal grandparents were Ustin (Justin) and Natalia. She
only recalls that they were born “in Russia someplace.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My mother was the oldest
sibling, the only girl and the only survivor. Her brothers all died as infants,
and are still remembered as such in her daily prayers. She doesn’t recall
exactly when or where her brothers were born. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In her words: “One of my
brothers was born a year or so later than me. His name was Pyotr, which is
Peter in English. And my mother had twins; they were probably like two or three
years younger than me. One of them was Michael (Mikhail) and one was Ivan,
which is John. And actually one of them didn’t live that long. And I, for some
reason at that time, liked the name John better. And when they were lying on a
bed or something I used to switch them because I thought my mother and father
wouldn’t know the difference. [laughter] (My parents)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>said something that one of them was weaker,
and probably wouldn’t live too long, but they knew (I was switching the
babies).” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Lubachka’s attempt to save
her “favorite” baby brother echoes one of the four types of classic Russian
folk tales: magic tales with a female hero, usually a girl, and focused around her
ability to perform certain tasks. The others are: magic tales with a male hero;
animal tales and magic tales about everyday life. Heroines in Russian folklore
are held to higher ethical standards than their male counterparts. But the
rules aren’t quite carved in stone. Girl heroes aren’t allowed to lie, but “half-truths”
may be permitted. They can’t steal, but taking something from an evil character
may be admissible.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">While she survived, my
mother’s early childhood is a tragic tale. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Says my mother: “I don’t know
how my brother Peter died. I don’t know anything about that. He was an infant.
And John died when the war was almost to start, it was like 19 … I don’t know …
when the Second World War was starting. And John died soon after that. And
Michael … we did not have any, hardly any food, to eat, and he got very sick.
There were no doctors. He had pneumonia. And he was 2 ½ when he died.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My mother says her brothers
were buried in the tiny of village of Lemnitsa in Vitebsk Oblast, some 158
miles northeast of Minsk. There is nothing online but serial maps of Lemnitsa,
searching in English or in Russian. It’s as if it exists only as a tiny
pinprick on the massive expanse of a geographic region and only in the memory
of the few survivors like my mother.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For my mother, Lemnitsa
serves literally and figuratively as a giant grave, where nearly all members of
her family perished along with all its other inhabitants. “That's where also my
father's mother and sister were harshly killed, and his sister was 16 at that
time,” my mother says. “That's where they are buried, too.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Quests for Russian folk
heroines can be as mundane as gathering firewood, mushrooms or berries in the
forest or more like that of a male hero, a journey to a far-away magical land. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Even the everyday was magical
for Lubachka, when it involved the rare appearance of a mushroom or a berry.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Lubachka’s first happy memory
comes from when she was about three years old. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“Afterwards, when we moved
into this house that was built, and I was very little, we didn’t really have
that much food, usually, always, you know. And the people across the street,
they had these … they made them for me… it was like hamburger meat or<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>meatballs. Just a little bit of meat and
potatoes. And they gave me some. I thought that was the best thing I ever had.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“And the other thing that I
remember myself -- I really don’t remember too much of my childhood at all -- I
do remember someone giving me candy one time, and ironically, I must've really
wanted the candy for some reason, but I really don’t think I remember much of
my childhood except a horrible war. And when the war sort of ended, but it
wasn't ended yet, the Germans were still there and had let open some churches,
and my brother Michael was still alive at that time, and that's when he was
baptized in the church when it opened.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">She doesn’t recall the name
of the church or the priest, but she speaks of a mystical experience, which
punctuates her lifelong passion for Russian Orthodoxy and guilt, even now, over
her tardiness to liturgy, even when she’s ill. The girlhood hunger for faith
was as intense as the need for food to survive. My mother still thinks this
way. It’s an inescapable passion. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“Oh, it was beautiful, big
church. And I think, in my opinion, I saw angels singing on top of the church,
but when I was telling someone they said I probably just heard people singing,
and because there were probably paintings (of angels), so it was like a very
large church. Yeah, to me it looked very good.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">She doesn’t remember anything
about the cupolas, or onion domes, whether they were wooden or gilded. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“I don’t remember the
outside. I just remember the inside of it. And, oh yes, there were a lot of
people!” Most were strangers, bonded only by faith in Orthodoxy or at least a
transfixion with the church itself, finally erected, open and serving a safe
place to seek refuge for the soul or body. “I was too little. I didn’t really
know anyone there. The church was full.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My mother’s memory shifts
suddenly to retrieve another visceral early childhood experience, one she’d
likely repressed. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“And then I do remember
something which I'm very upset about. When my little brother was sick, Michael,
I was a little bit older, and well, actually, before he got sick, the reason he
got sick is because there was this one room where four or five families of us lived
because we all lost our houses and everything. But it was not where I was born
or where I lived, it was somewhere farther. (Possibly closer to what is now the
Polish border.) And what happened is, my mother, she was in quarantine because
she had typhoid fever, and my little brother was still breast-fed at that time,
and because she wasn’t with us and the two of us were left there, and this one
woman that had a cat in there, and it was a cold, a very, very cold autumn day.
It was very cold outside. And of course, he wasn't dressed, he only had a
shirt. Like a T-shirt, some kind of an undershirt on, and she threw him
outside, and I wasn’t able to pick him up or anything because I was too small
yet, too. And then that's when he got very sick. And he had to leave late in
the night. I don’t know if it was like a crib or something like that, for a
long time he was very sick, and there was another girl that was my age that
lived in that house, and we were playing cards with her, and my little brother
would cry, and I would get very angry at him because he was disturbing me, and
so that actually to this day tortures me. That I did that.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“The woman with the cat, she
was actually in the other room, but she was Polish, and her daughter had affairs
with the German soldiers, so they had everything. We didn’t have anything.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“Well, I don’t know. She was
a woman at that time because she did have a daughter, I think. She was not a
young girl. She was probably in her twenties. No. No, I don’t remember that
woman's name. And then at the same time, when my little brother Michael died, that's
when my grandmother, my father's mother, and his sister were very brutally
killed.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Michael died in “either
October or November. I don’t know. I don’t know what year it was. Maybe 1944,
probably 44. And the thing is, we were actually living at that time where the
German soldiers were, but my grandmother, my father's mother and his sister
that were killed, they were in a killed (by the Partisans) in a place that in
the daytime, the Germans would be there at night. The Partisans were there, or
vice versa, I don’t remember. But anyway, somehow, I remember, I do sort of
remember going to the cemetery, and they were all, as far as I know, all killed
and just buried in one grave. And but it was the cemetery, where we lived
before the war started.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My mother says they were
killed by the Belarusian Partisans, resistance fighters who fought the Nazis
and collaborationism during World War II. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“My aunt, at that time, was
in school in Russia where they had to learn German. The German soldiers took
her and another 16-year old, and they were asking who is living in this house
and this house, and they had a list of people who they were told to burn down
the houses. She was 16, so of course, she's going to say whose house it was.
She was lucky because her father was also a Partisan, and of course he wasn't
there at that time, but he was in their party. And my father was against the
Bolsheviks and everything else, and he was in a German zone. And so when the
Partisans came after them they told him whose house it was, they came to get my
aunt, they wanted just her. My grandmother, she ran after her daughter. And
then they would go and take them a few miles away from there, but they had to
cross some kind of a river, and they were going to be interrogated there by the
Partisans, where their headquarters were. But what happened, it became close to
nighttime, and they had to get out of that region because I guess that's when
the Germans were coming or something, so the Partisans said that we know what's
going to happen with them, so they didn’t want to waste the bullets, I guess.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“And so they used the other
part of the gun (rifle), the wooden part, and they beat their heads open.
That's how they were killed, and when my father saw that, it really affected
his mental state for the rest of his life. And so – [sobbing] then we had to
just, I guess, put them in ground and we had to leave there because the
fighting between the Germans and Russians would start. And then when we got
back to the place where we lived, and the second day or I don’t know maybe it
was the same day, I don’t really remember, I was outside. And I saw my brother
who was all in white, that's not the way he was buried. I guess I don’t know
what he was buried in, that I don’t remember, but I saw him outside and to me
he had represented an angel. That, I think, I just made up. No one was able to
tell me that. I think that I remember myself.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“I think I do remember, I saw
when the fighting was going on between the Germans and Russians -- I'm not sure
if it was Partisans or the or the, Russian Army. I don’t know, I never asked my
parents what army it was. But I know at that point I just saw the Germans
afterwards because they're the ones that took us as prisoners after, so I
really didn’t see any Russian soldiers after that. And there was a wagon full
of stuff and we were walking on one side, and this other girl, about my age,
was walking on the other side, and the grenade was thrown, and she was very
close to me, and she got killed, and I didn’t. And of course there were other
people that were killed but I remember her because she was a friend of mine,
you know? And that was very, very tragic.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“And then, after that,
Germans were moving us from one place to the other. And I remember we lived in
Poland for almost like nine months. In Lublin, which was going back from the
Russians to Poland.”</span><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Natasha Guralhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12459751717821434299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805287087023775543.post-34217550253499268212014-04-23T15:25:00.000-04:002014-04-23T15:25:00.431-04:00A Primeval Forest of Guilt<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A little girl lost in a forest, bewildered, in peril, not
knowing when she’ll find a clearing. Such a quintessential and universal image
would have been a fantasy for my mother, who watched the forests burn along
with houses, as loved ones, friends and other children ran screaming usually to be greeted by death elsewhere. Survival seems like a way out. And for her there was an escape,
but not to some idyllic land rich with frisky wildlife, ripe berries and fragrant
flowers. Instead her path out, a forced one, was paved with the stench of death
and not so much as a crumb to eat. The harsh environment wasn’t the worst of
it. Losing others when she, for no good reason in her young perception, made it out alive came with a lifelong condition: guilt that ran deeper than the Dnieper River and stung more than a bullet wound. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Belarus was effectively flattened in World War II, leaving little of
historic interest for tourists who flock to monuments and battle sites. But
within those thick primeval forests and picturesque villages is buried a
history of death and destruction. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Between 1937 and 1938, Stalin's NKVD secret police executed
more than 1,000 people per day, most with a shot to the back of the head. As
many as 1.6 million people were killed in Belarus during the Stalin-era purges,
according to historian Ihar Kuznyatsow, even as officials claim only 600,000
Belarusians were killed. By any account, it’s a staggering number. Belarusian President
Alexander Lukashenko has downplayed Stalin’s reign of terror, claiming that
mass graves don’t contain the NKVD’s victims. For parts of modern-day Belarus,
little has changed. The country still has Soviet-style collective farms and
there has been very limited privatization.</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLwNyJhxj7g7Bw2F3RjgqfYW5BVFlmV_wHmmbtf8aUFfkY3ef621GvozwaKOo8MqcRSyzkJY7C_1ovMKOOhsTovZc2gtaBgX_HFBewuiZhQXTsL1i6jkNKIMNPIhzSaQuD6KNRM8xmPSU/s1600/VitebskForest.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLwNyJhxj7g7Bw2F3RjgqfYW5BVFlmV_wHmmbtf8aUFfkY3ef621GvozwaKOo8MqcRSyzkJY7C_1ovMKOOhsTovZc2gtaBgX_HFBewuiZhQXTsL1i6jkNKIMNPIhzSaQuD6KNRM8xmPSU/s1600/VitebskForest.jpg" height="210" width="320" /></a></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">To the best of her recollection, my mother was born June 21st or
23rd by the Gregorian calendar (now internationally the most widely used civil
calendar) in either 1936 or 1938. As a Russian Orthodox Christian, my mother
observes holy days, or moveable and immovable feasts, by the Julian calendar, a
reform of the Roman calendar introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 BC. The Julian
calendar served as the civil calendar in some countries until as late as the
20th century. But her birthday, for all practical intents and purposes, has
been July 5th since she immigrated to the United States in 1950. It has nothing
to do with the differences between the two calendars. “When my father was
interrogated, when we were prisoners in Germany (circa 1946), he had made a
mistake about (some other fact) and he got scared and that's what he gave as my
date of birth,” she explains. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Whether she was born before or just as Stalin unleashed his
murderous rampage is irrelevant because her earliest memories would be of a
world ruled by this evil beast. As today’s evil dictator, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko (who was born in </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16.1200008392334px;">Vitebsk Oblast) </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">continues
to undermine the magnitude of the country’s losses, such historic events become
mythical. Without any records of births and deaths and no markings on mass
graves, it’s as if those who perished never existed outside the memory of
survivors like my mother. Most of my mother’s close relatives, including all
three of her brothers, and childhood friends were denied any burial ritual, all
becoming lost in the very soil they identify with using a term zemlak (or
zemlachka for women), literally meaning those from the same earth. For my
mother’s parents, there was a culture to identify with before all the
bloodshed. For my mother, there was nothing positive until she made it to a
displaced persons’ camp in Germany.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My mother has no truly youthful memories. Her memories from
youth don’t include any childlike whimsy that lends to the lighter side
of fairytales. She didn’t learn many of these tales until she was older. As a little
girl, these tales were passed down to me, both orally by my grandparents and
their friends, many much older and from vastly different villages and cities,
or in various tellings and translations. It’s unsurprising that my mother
identifies only with the tales of the church, as her first happy memories are
tied to hearing and singing liturgies. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Had my mother’s brothers lived, their story could have been
more like the classic tale “The Metamorphosis Of The Dnieper, The Volga, And
The Dvina,” of which the first and third run through Vitebsk Oblast. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The account recorded by 19<sup>th</sup> century Russian
scholar and translator William Ralston Shedden-Ralston, a close friend of Ivan
Turgenev, begins like this:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Dnieper, Volga, and Dvina used once to be living people.
The Dnieper was a boy, and the Volga and Dvina his sisters. While they were
still in childhood they were left complete orphans, and, as they hadn’t a crust
to eat, they were obliged to get their living by daily labor beyond their
strength. “When was that?” Very long ago, say the old folks; beyond the memory
even of our great-grandfathers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Well, the children grew up, but they never had even the
slightest bit of good luck. Every day, from morn till eve, it was always toil
and toil, and all merely for the day’s subsistence. As for their clothing, it
was just what God sent them! They sometimes found rags on the dust-heaps, and
with these they managed to cover their bodies. The poor things had to endure
cold and hunger. Life became a burden to them. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One day, after toiling hard afield, they sat down under a
bush to eat their last morsel of bread. And when they had eaten it, they cried
and sorrowed for a while, and considered and held counsel together as to how
they might manage to live, and to have food and clothing, and, without toiling,
to supply others with meat and drink. Well, this is what they resolved: to set
out wandering about the wide world in search of good luck and a kindly welcome,
and to look for and find out the best places in which they could turn into
great rivers—for that was a possible thing then.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Depressing to most, this would have been a far brighter
outcome for my mother’s siblings. For her, along with a childhood stolen, all hope is lost.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
Natasha Guralhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12459751717821434299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805287087023775543.post-88861774982758898082014-04-10T16:48:00.002-04:002014-04-10T17:22:18.762-04:00Spirit of the Skaska<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In a remote part of a sprawling land comprised largely of
forest and home to more than 2,800 lakes and 500 rivers, a baby girl was born.
The majority of those forests are centuries-old coniferous woods, which have
survived horrible battles that have claimed countless human lives. The girl’s
three brothers died as infants, along with friends and family, mostly innocent
victims caught in the crossfire of multiple conflicts led by cruel and unrelenting conquerors. She watched and wept,
not understanding why everyone was being killed, but also not knowing a life
without such constant horrors. Her first years spent in this forest marred by
bloodshed, bombs, grenades and murderous rampages, are forever imprinted in
that girl’s memory, even as many details remain a blur of atrocities. So many
tiny villages, so many large-scale attacks; it was impossible for those being
forced from their homes even to know who was striking at any time or why. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Like a Russian skazka, or fairytale, my mother’s early
years in small villages in Vitebsk Oblast in Belarus are fraught with horrific
and otherworldly images that tell a dark story that many would like to bury. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Today some 1.2 million people live in Vitebsk Oblast, which
borders Russia, Lithuania and Latvia. My mother, an ethnic Russian, was born
close to the Russian border. The region now boasts excellent road
infrastructure connected to several major international motorways, and international
railway lines offering access to Russia, Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania. When my
mother was born, the only path out for her and other survivors was through
labor and concentration camps in Poland and finally a displaced persons camp in
Germany. It was a war path, and even getting out alive left a legacy of pain
and suffering that few could comprehend.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The modern day Vitebsk Oblast would likely be unrecognizable
to my mother who has never returned to her homeland. The picturesque Belarusian
land of lakes, or Belaruskaye Paazerye, inspires art and awes tourists who
appreciate its natural beauty. This disputed land remains unsettled to this
day. From my mother’s perspective it’s a mass grave, with no markings, just
distant memories of where and when so many violently died or disappeared.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It’s easy to assume that Russians, or Slavs in general, are
more dramatic, darker and heavier of heart than westerners. Imagine your entry
into the world as a struggle to survive, and childhood realizations that you’d
be better off dead with the rest than cope with the guilt of getting away
alive. This lens obscures any hope of living a truly free life. Far worse than
fear is the belief that if you’d perished someone else, someone you loved,
would have thrived. Yet nobody thrives. Survivors of this kind of trauma,
especially in early childhood, are forever living in debt, as if they owe it to
those they watched die to live in some form of deprivation. They’re not
deserving of any happiness, any quality of life, any peace. At least this is
what I’ve learned from my mother, that little girl who never let her spirit
blossom.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Regarded as a seminal figure in modern Russian literature,
Alexander Pushkin also is significant for breathing new life into skazki,
which exemplify the true native literature of a people and a history that have
been cast into darkness. Sure there is levity and love and other conventions in
lighter tales, but most are cautionary at best and the Slavic versions of
classic European stories are handed down with a ponderousness in Russian. Mocking
the woeful, soulful voice of the quintessential Russian is a western sport. But
most westerners dismiss the root of this misery. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Alexander Afanasyev, a nineteenth century Russian folklorist
who published a record 600-plus folktales and fairytales, is known both for
depicting the archetypal figures found in universal stories in multiple
languages, as well as recording uniquely Russian characters including Koshchey the Immortal
(Bessmertny), Baba Yaga, the Swan Maiden and the Firebird.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">While most westerners have read or heard some version of
Baba Yaga, her male counterpart, Koshchey, tends to circulate more in Russian circles. He is an evil sorcerer
who gallops on his magic steed, naked, around the Caucuses. I’d be surprised if
Putin didn’t secretly regard him as a folk hero. A shape-shifter who takes on
the form of windstorms, </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Koshchey</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> steals away beautiful women, especially the brides
of heroes. His presence is preceded by dark clouds, thunder and lightning.
Think Loki, but much darker.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is
immortal (or “deathless,” which is a closer literal translation of bessmertny)
because what he calls his death (but may be interpreted as his soul or spirit)
is concealed and detached from his body. His death sometimes is hidden in a needlepoint inside a duck's egg, and Koshchey the Immortal may lose his
powers and die if a hero finds the egg. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As with all folk tales, there are many versions of this
story, and in Russian many words that could alter the meaning significantly.
But this is a dark tale by any standard. I remember hearing it as a child and
thinking it was perfectly plausible. After all, the tales of my mother, her parents and the few
others who survived weren’t any less morose or ridiculous by the standards of
where I was born.</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Even my mother’s birthday has been passed down like a skaska,
shrouded in mystery and blurred details. The first record of her birth was
created by a priest when she was a schoolgirl at a displaced persons camp in
Germany. As I attempt to retell what she remembers and what can be culled from
the few remaining documents and photographs, I aim to keep the spirit of the
skaska alive. </span><sup><o:p></o:p></sup></div>
</div>
Natasha Guralhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12459751717821434299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805287087023775543.post-89755906543506633362014-03-26T14:47:00.001-04:002014-03-26T14:47:05.262-04:00Reliving Trauma by Mourning "Bad" Deaths <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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It was something like: “Ooooowhoawoahoooo!” The exact sound
is impossible to convey in writing, but I can still hear it. </div>
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<br /></div>
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“Ooooowhoawoahoooo! Ooooowhoawoahoooo! Ooooowhoawoahoooo!”</div>
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<br /></div>
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My grandfather – my beloved Degushka -- the strong, stubborn,
handsome, well-coiffed, impeccably attired, intimidating and
often-argumentative man who I admired and idolized despite his prominent
character flaws, was bellowing. </div>
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<br /></div>
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The chaotic chorus of “Ooooowhoawoahoooo!” was thunderous
yet muffled. I called for him. In quickfire Russian, he warned me to hide, too.
“They are coming! They have killed my sister and my mother! They will kill us
all!” </div>
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<br /></div>
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Terrifying, but not delusional. His mother
and sister were brutally murdered some seven decades ago in Belarus. Though on
a quiet street in a Western Massachusetts suburb in the mid-1980s it would have
struck any other passer-by as the ranting of madman, even though nobody else
understood what he was saying.</div>
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<br /></div>
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As a tween and young teen, I volleyed between my parents’
house, about a mile-and-a-half away, and my grandparents' house. I forget why I was headed there, that day at that time. It was an otherwise mundane day that had gone -- by any middle-class suburban
American standard existing at the time -- mad.</div>
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Deugshka was hiding under his car parked in the driveway, supine, legs straight,
right arm crossed over left as if he were preparing to accept communion or
his body readied for funeral and burial in the Russian Orthodox Church. </div>
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<br /></div>
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It was one of those moments. When I first learned the term posttraumatic
stress disorder (PTSD) on the TV news, it referred to soldiers in the Vietnam
War. As I came to understand it, I realized my grandfather was having a
flashback, another term that had taken on a very different meaning in my social
education. It wasn’t the first time I’d witnessed something like this, and certainly
not the last. But feeling exposed on the driveway, even though nobody reacted,
made me self-conscious. Already I was an outsider in this world of
WASPs and other people who had no connection to the generation of their family
that first arrived in America. Now this.</div>
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<br /></div>
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I was frustrated, scared and worst of all helpless. What
could I possibly do? Get the keys and attempt to slowly roll back the car,
hoping he didn’t budge? Attempt to drag him out? None of this was feasible. The
episode, like all others, passed, but the impact was forever imprinted.</div>
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<br /></div>
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In the last years of her life, my Babushka, my mother’s
mother, entered trancelike states where she would moan in a somber, steady
stream of cries of and gasps for breath. The sound was similar to her husband’s
“Ooooowhoawoahoooo!” but heavier and more sorrowful. In a PTSD flashback, she
was mourning the deaths of her three young sons and countless close relatives
and friends who died during my mother’s early childhood.</div>
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<br /></div>
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In all the years my maternal grandparents underwent tests
for various medical conditions, not a single doctor ever mentioned PTSD. </div>
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With my mother, there also is no talk of PTSD, no mention of
survivor's guilt or survivor's syndrome, which clearly is the root of her
anxiety and stress related to what might otherwise be considered normal
circumstances or situations. My mother feels guilty for surviving when her
three brothers and peers perished. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association, removed survivor
guilt as a specific diagnosis and redefined it as a significant symptom of PTSD.
Regardless, my mother clearly suffers from both yet has never been treated for
either.</div>
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<br /></div>
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So much of what is relived in these PTSD flashbacks
manifests in concert with Russian Orthodox rituals and traditions and/or
superstitions surrounding the complex mourning process.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Both the deliberate practices and the flashbacks play out
like a dark fairytale. As a child I felt that the mourning in these PTSD
episodes was a call back for the dead, as if somehow reliving the traumatic
experience might reverse the outcome of the tragedy that claimed their lives.</div>
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<br /></div>
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In Russian folk tradition, death can be reversible and is related
to sleep, a state in which one can experience the "other world" and return to
tell about it. A couple of years after finding my Degushka bellowing under his
car, I witnessed what my grandmother described as “crossing over” after a
near-death experience. She called my parents’ house in the days of landlines,
her voice muted and fading. I knew something was wrong. “Come quickly,” she
said calmly. I stormed into the patio and ran into the house. The door was
unlocked. She was nowhere. I rushed to the basement, where another time I found
her laying in a pool of blood after she cracked her head in a tumble down the
stairs. She was nowhere. I panicked. I ran back into the patio. She was laying
on a sofa, still but faintly breathing, I think. In shock, I sat there, holding
her hand. She awoke, describing how she’d walked through a green meadow and saw
her mother, siblings, sons and others who told her “It’s not your time yet,
Alexandra Dmitrieva.”</div>
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<br /></div>
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Russian folk tradition considers it a “good” death or “their
own” when someone dies in old age surrounded by family, and a “bad” death or “not
their own” when they die early, generally from murder, suicide, sickness or in
war. My mother and her parents lost nearly every loved one to “bad” death
during her early childhood at the hands of Stalin, The Nazis and the Belarusian Partisans. In Russian folklore, the soul is depicted as small
and childlike, and sometimes as having wings and flying. It’s unsurprising that
mother claims to have seen angels singing above her brother’s body during his
funeral. </div>
</div>
Natasha Guralhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12459751717821434299noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805287087023775543.post-7547910562499869892014-03-25T16:18:00.001-04:002014-03-25T16:24:29.800-04:00Flashback: The Trauma of Survival<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
"Miss Goo-rell?" the nurse called, tapping me on
the shoulder as I circled the cramped family waiting room at Baystate Medical
Center, focused on the surge of pain from tearing deep into my cuticle creating
a little pool of blood, a practice I'd honed for coping with hospital-wait
anxiety.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I jumped to face her. "It's Gur ..." I stopped
myself from needlessly correcting her pronunciation.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"Yes, I'm Natasha Gural. Luba (LYU-bah) Gural’s
daughter. Is my mother …”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The nurse looked at me strangely and carefully, as if my
face had been replaced by a Magritte apple. This constant discomfort I feel in
my birth city, where I over-analyze every action of people who choose to expend
as little mental energy as possible to get by, particularly at this hospital,
is compounded by fear of what she will say next.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Your mother is fine, medically speaking. The procedure went
well and she is awake,” despite what sounded like good news, her troubled
expression intensified.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“OK … So can I see her?”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Well, normally we do not let anyone into the recovery room
immediately post-op, but she is calling for you. We don’t know what she is
saying, but we think she is calling for you.”</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“OK! She’s OK?”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Yes, medically. But she is awake, and I suppose alert, but
she seems to be in some kind of shock and she seems to be calling for you. We
cannot understand how or why she is awake. She should be sleeping for hours …”</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
My mother’s hyper-sensitivity to sedatives and narcotics is
bested only by her ability to remain awake on any dose, even as she experiences
every other known side effect. I suspect it’s a defense mechanism.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I follow the nurse through giant doors clearly marked to
fend off non-staff. I hear my mother. It sounds like a little girl, a voice I’d
never heard, but one I’d imagined.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Natashenka! Natashenka! Natashenka!” she half-cried-half-screamed
as she alternated between English and Russian, both in that haunting childlike
voice.</div>
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<br /></div>
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“I’m here, Mom,” I said, holding her hand.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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“They are trying to kill me,” she said in what must have
been an attempt at a whisper. “You have to get me out of here. Look: All the
other people are dead! They are laying here dead!”</div>
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<br /></div>
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Every other patient was sound asleep on a cot, some young,
some old, all attached to monitors and stuck with needles. All were expected to
survive after a few hours following their operations, or else they’d have been
whisked downstairs to ICU. But to my mother, the pale, motionless faces were
corpses, on their last earthly journey from gurney to grave. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
To the typical Baystate employee, my mother’s behavior was
irrational, beyond their comprehension and control. That’s why they called in
the expert: her daughter, the only one who might be able to perform where
Valium conked out. Save for the odd orderly who experienced combat, nobody
passing through those daunting doors could possibly understand how terror
triumphed over IV-induced catatonia.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Though I had no means of calming her, I could at least
empathize. Was I better off pretending she was correct and promising that I was
going to get her out before they killed her, or should I try to draw her back
to the start of the 21<sup>st</sup> century in the United States?</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I knew exactly what she meant about the dead bodies destined
for a mass grave. As a young child, I had recurring nightmares of a death camp
where I, too, lay in limbo as others had already gone cold and rigid. In my
dream, I made every effort to appear dead as guards in long, tailored coats and
peaked caps, circled around my intended deathbed. My horrific visions originated
from the stories my mother’s parents and other Great Purge and World War II
civilian survivors shared in sharp detail, supplemented by my fascination with
the dark side of my family’s history. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
My nightmares were born from my mother’s real-life
experience. I could only imagine how horrifying it was for her to relive that
trauma, held captive in a cold, soulless depository of patients who were
expected to lay lifelessly for a few hours offering the staff a respite from
any interaction aside from gossiping about doctors, barking fried food orders to
subordinates and creating a patient-less world through insufferable banal
banter. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The nurse came by a few times, mainly to grumble that it’d
be best if I could get my mother to sleep. “It’s the best thing you can do for
her.” The countless shortcomings of the U.S. medical system are second only to
its complete failure to recognize and identify the psychological needs of
patients who were asked to fill out dozens of pages of paperwork, none inquiring
into the unique background of a human being. There I was, the de-facto shrink-crisis
manager-untrained Girl Friday left to deal with what the system isn’t willing
to address.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If I sound bitter or resentful, it’s because I am. This is
the same hospital where I was called upon to fill in where staff had failed,
most notably when as a young teenager I was whisked from an ambulance that
picked me up at school into an operating room and ICU with my mother’s father,
translating orders on how he breathe during a lucid trauma procedure following
as car crash “it’s a miracle he survived.” That nurse tapped me on the shoulder
in the same room where I learned my father was dying from undiagnosed-despite-all-the-right-tests
Stage IV colon cancer metastasized to the liver. This is the same hospital my
grandfather once escaped before discharge. The same hospital where both
my mother’s parents spent the cruelest of their dying days. I knew every
hallway, every exit and every supply closet (since staff often don’t bother
with the basic needs of patients who can no longer speak).<br />
<br />
No wonder I was
treated as unpaid personnel. Besides being called upon to assist with my own
family member’s care, I’d once served as a translator in a language I barely
claim proficiency when the emergency room supervisor said she couldn’t find a
German translator for a Polish man who had apparently broken his leg. Before I
came along, they’d suspected he’d suffered a heart attack.</div>
</div>
Natasha Guralhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12459751717821434299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805287087023775543.post-11444340586606162792014-02-25T15:58:00.001-05:002014-02-25T15:58:17.399-05:00Come and See the Magic and the Horror of Vitebsk Oblast<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Marc Chagall called Vitebsk "my second Paris." For
him the city neighboring his birth village Liozna is captured in memory that eludes
the devastation of the Great Purge and World War II, as he spent those years in
France and America. In a large series of works that the artist began after
his return to his hometown in June 1914, Vitebsk is depicted as a fantastical
dreamlike place.
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The magical city of Chagall is radically different from
where my mother was born and spent her first four or so years. Both my mother
and Chagall were born in small villages outside of the city and bordering
Russia, though she never visited the region’s capital.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7q-2A_sAifL5W1hkFhzZo17SpCLzXoY8VzHE2KbjFqzcbfWwzK9EtLsfkfUrx1TM1xihx9imIbBBj6abToKUH7VaQRSkSe5_YwSH_f0QK-fycaSfJgzz9UD9w_4d7H0zIqKC5L6NSbFo/s1600/chagall_over_vitebsk.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7q-2A_sAifL5W1hkFhzZo17SpCLzXoY8VzHE2KbjFqzcbfWwzK9EtLsfkfUrx1TM1xihx9imIbBBj6abToKUH7VaQRSkSe5_YwSH_f0QK-fycaSfJgzz9UD9w_4d7H0zIqKC5L6NSbFo/s1600/chagall_over_vitebsk.jpg" height="253" width="320" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRFH_oTI5M291SKqdefAn-l1gFtqJFX1Qpkq3GE8bsI5mxDeNfpuXC_AjYtwbHNmZ32jDvV4BiJBeO2e95WncSicn2S67wAyiISBs1RKON7YgIyQJ-zVU8pOESZPC646Cyyt7RIIVV9qc/s1600/Come+and+See+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRFH_oTI5M291SKqdefAn-l1gFtqJFX1Qpkq3GE8bsI5mxDeNfpuXC_AjYtwbHNmZ32jDvV4BiJBeO2e95WncSicn2S67wAyiISBs1RKON7YgIyQJ-zVU8pOESZPC646Cyyt7RIIVV9qc/s1600/Come+and+See+1.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a> </div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><b>Images: Chagall's <i>Over Vitebsk </i>(at MoMA, acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest); still from <i>Come and See</i></b>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The childlike innocence of Chagall’s work is at odds with my
imagined representation of the region of my mother’s tragic early childhood. My
mother narrowly escaped one of more than 600 Belarusian villages burned to the
ground. The only reference I have that even begins to depict what my mother saw
is from the 1985 film <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Come and See.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">In 1943, two Belarusian boys dig in a sand field in search
of abandoned rifles. Young Flyora finds an SVT-40 rifle and the next day he
joins partisans who come and take him from his house against his distraught mother’s
wishes. Though members of my mother’s family and close friends were murdered
and tortured by partisans, the critically acclaimed film’s central character
offers insight into how innocence is quickly stolen, if not from a very
different perspective. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">A fan of gory horror films, I find few movies difficult to
watch. I assumed this one was particularly painful since it depicts the
real-life horror my mother experienced of watching a village and its inhabitants
burned to the ground in a terrifying mass murder campaign. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">“I understood that this would be a very brutal film and that
it was unlikely that people would be able to watch it. I told this to my
screenplay coauthor, the writer Ales Adamovich. But he replied: ‘Let them not
watch it, then. This is something we must leave after us. As evidence of war,
and as a plea for peace,’” said director Elem Klimov. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Klimov said ambulances had to be called to remove viewers
from theaters in the Soviet Union and at foreign screenings. During a
discussion after one viewing, an elderly German man acknowledged: "I was a
soldier of the Wehrmacht; moreover, an officer of the Wehrmacht. I traveled
through all of Poland and Belarus, finally reaching Ukraine. I will testify:
everything that is told in this film is the truth. And the most frightening and
shameful thing for me is that this film will be seen by my children and
grandchildren.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Klimov, who died in 2003, never made any films after <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Come and See.</i> "I lost interest in
making films,” he said in 2001. “Everything that was possible I felt I had
already done."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Adamovich fought with the Belarussian partisans as a
teenager, and Klimov was moved by a book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I
Am from the Burning Village, </i>comprised of first-hand accounts of survivors
like my mother. Innocent victims – especially young children -- are victims,
despite their ethnic background or political inclination. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Klimov also watched footage of survivors recalling their
experiences. “I will never forget the face and eyes of one peasant, and his
quiet recollection about how his whole village had been herded into a church,
and how just before they were about to be burned, an officer of the Sonderkommando
gave them the offer: ‘Whoever has no children can leave.’ And he couldn't take
it, he left, and left behind his wife and little kids... or about how another
village was burned: the adults were all herded into a barn, but the children
were left behind. And later, the drunk men surrounded them with sheepdogs and
let the dogs tear the children to pieces.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">These second-hand accounts are like those of my mother, who
tearfully recalls how so many loved ones were brutally killed. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">“My aunt, at that time, was in school in Russia where they
had to learn German. The German soldiers took her and another 16-year old, and
they were asking who is living in this house and this house, and they had a
list of people who they were told to burn down the houses. She was 16, so of
course, she's going to say whose house it was. She was lucky because her father
was also a Partisan, and of course he wasn't there at that time, but he was in
their party. And my father was against the Bolsheviks and everything else, and
he was in a German zone. And so when the Partisans came after them they told
him whose house it was, they came to get my aunt, they wanted just her. My grandmother,
she ran after her daughter. And then they would go and take them a few miles
away from there, but they had to cross some kind of a river, and they were
going to be interrogated there by the Partisans, where their headquarters were.
But what happened, it became close to nighttime, and they had to get out of
that region because I guess that's when the Germans were coming or something,
so the Partisans said that we know what's going to happen with them, so they
didn’t want to waste the bullets, I guess. And so they used the other part of
the gun (rifle), the wooden part, and they beat their heads open. That's how
they were killed, and when my father saw that, it really affected his mental
state for the rest of his life. And so – [sobbing] then we had to just, I
guess, put them in ground and we had to leave there because the fighting
between the Germans and Russians would start.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Most people truly begin to understand mortality and the
human condition when their first parent or close relative dies. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">For my mother, losing a peer was perhaps the most shattering
glimpse into the frailty of life.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">“I saw when the fighting was going on between the Germans
and Russians -- I'm not sure if it was Partisans or the or the, Russian Army. I
don’t know, I never asked my parents what army it was. But I know at that point
I just saw the Germans afterwards because they're the ones that took us as
prisoners after, so I really didn’t see any Russian soldiers after that. And
there was a wagon full of stuff and we were walking on one side, and this other
girl, about my age, was walking on the other side, and the grenade was thrown,
and she was very close to me, and she got killed, and I didn’t. And of course
there were other people that were killed but I remember her because she was a
friend of mine, you know? And that was very, very tragic.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">While Belarus remains a deeply troubled nation, widely
regarded as Europe's last dictatorship, modern-day Vitebsk Oblast is a thriving
tourist destination known as Belaruskaye Paazerye, or land of the lakes, replete
with rare plants and wildlife. The wasteland of my mother’s infancy now boasts
an excellent infrastructure connecting it with commerce in bordering Russia, Ukraine,
Poland, Lithuania and Latvia. Despite the political and social turmoil helmed in
Minsk by (Vitebsk Oblast native) President Alexander Lukashenko, modern-day
Vitebsk Oblast is closer to Chagall’s memory than my mother’s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The region’s two major theaters, philharmonic
society, 28 museums and the international Slavyanskiy Bazaar arts festival make
it a cultural destination. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">My mother’s only travel was to concentration, labor and
displaced persons camps in Poland and Germany, while Chagall spent the bulk of
his career in Russia, France and the U.S. Still the fragmented images of
Vitebsk, “the soil that nourished the roots of my art,” in Chagall’s work
disguise, but do not erase, the darkest multiple personalities of a homeland
that always has been rife with strife. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Alexander Pushkin, who passed twice through Belarus: in May
1820, leaving for the southern exile; and in August 1824 on his way to exile
from Odessa to the village of Mikhailovskoye, died before finishing a novel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dubrovsky, </i>inspired by a friend, a nobleman
of Vitebsk Oblast. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Pushkin’s influence is found throughout Vitebsk, home to at
least two monuments, a street, a public garden and a bridge named after the
Russian poet. No doubt he contemplated the region’s conflicted character.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">"The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten
thousand truths." (Pushkin, as quoted by Anton Chekhov in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gooseberries.</i>)</span></div>
</div>
Natasha Guralhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12459751717821434299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805287087023775543.post-7531052864309417782014-01-30T11:58:00.003-05:002014-01-30T14:56:45.922-05:00A Moving Image That Captures A Defining Moment Lost In Time<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I’m nostalgic for movies like <i>The Mummy. </i>Not the 1999 box office blockbuster starring Brendan
Fraser and Rachel Weisz. And not the seminal 1932 horror film starring Boris
Karloff that did well in British theaters. I enjoy CGI when done well and
especially on the big screen, and Karloff’s portrayal of an ancient Egyptian
priest called Imhotep remains forever iconic. But it’s the 1959 version of <i>The Mummy</i>, co-starring Peter Cushing as
an archaeologist and Christopher Lee as Kharis, that I saw first and stands as
one of the seminal films of my early childhood. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">My father introduced me to the occult (via books on amulets
and talisman and not some ritual practice) as well as the early gods of horror
like Bela Lugosi, Karloff, Lee and Cushing. We didn’t have cable TV growing up and
my childhood friends weren’t (yet) into B horror, so I’d sneak what I could on
PBS, which aired British horror films by Hammer Film Productions. I remember
sitting cross-legged on the carpet with my nose close to the TV so I could hear
with minimal volume and my right hand on the dial ready to switch it off if I
was caught.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I imagined myself as Cushing’s John Banning, searching for
the tomb of Princess Ananka, the high priestess of the god Karnak. My father
also sparked my youthful obsession with all things ancient Egypt. Meantime, I
was attending Russian Orthodox liturgies, not only on Sundays, but also on
various holy days, with my mother and her parents, who frequently hosted
hierarchs and other priests at my childhood homes. To me the two worlds clashed
and co-existed, what with all the imagery and relics, though I understood that
in the eyes of the church these two worlds were at odds – one pure, one cursed.
It made perfect sense to me that Egypt’s Coptic Christians venerated the same
icons and used the same calendar as the Russian Orthodox. As a child I was
fascinated by the pagan roots of both cultures and how they were intertwined
and intrinsically linked to the myths and legends that inspired the stories in
the Hammer movies. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">My mother's first </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">movie memory, the one “that stuck with me
more than anything,” she says, depicted the coronation of a tsar filmed during
the liturgy on the feast day of The Elevation of the Venerable and
Life-Creating Cross of the Lord. </span></span></div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEju0LwIyxN1W7nnZz-qh4enIMdFIW75ecONMMjTpNd_N1UtE2W70QO6NZ9cCVDYyznLqZxadrsO607LEOD-g8NiCnQf_6HUQnc6EXM1Q2MhfvYFwtuMAyjUrT1mNxQJ8mK2sSDqhf2s7jM/s1600/800px-Coronation_of_Tsar_Alexander_III__Empress_Mariia_Feodorovna_-1883.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEju0LwIyxN1W7nnZz-qh4enIMdFIW75ecONMMjTpNd_N1UtE2W70QO6NZ9cCVDYyznLqZxadrsO607LEOD-g8NiCnQf_6HUQnc6EXM1Q2MhfvYFwtuMAyjUrT1mNxQJ8mK2sSDqhf2s7jM/s1600/800px-Coronation_of_Tsar_Alexander_III__Empress_Mariia_Feodorovna_-1883.jpg" height="218" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">This was the second of two films she saw during her early
childhood at Lyssenko Displaced Persons Camp in Hanover, Germany, which she
describes at the best time of her life. “The only place I remember going was to
church, and to a carnival and twice to a movie.” It’s important to note my
mother has seen no more than a dozen films in a movie theater during her
lifetime, save for free days at the local theater when my sister and I were
children. I remember we went to the mall to see the original <i>Arthur</i>, featuring Dudley Moore as a
dopey drunkard, because it was free. I was about 10 at the time, and my sister
about 6. Our father took my sister and I to see<i> Ghostbusters</i> at the theater when it came out, paying full price. That
was a major event for us, but just a typical weekend activity for most of our
peers. The few movies I saw in first release before age 13 were mostly at
birthday party celebrations or treats from friends’ parents.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The first film my mother saw was <i>Kamennyy Tsvetok (Stone Flower), </i>which was a seminal new release at
the time. The 1946 Soviet fantasy film was directed by the pioneering Aleksandr
Ptushko, regarded by some as the Soviet Walt Disney, and compared to other
legends including Italy’s legendary Mario Bava. The color film, shot on
Agfacolor negative film in the Soviet Union, was seized in Germany and entered
into the 1946 Cannes Film Festival.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">My mother’s viewing of this <i>Stone Flower</i> as a child is a historic event, by all accounts except
her own. “I don't remember anything about that movie,” she quips. It was based
on a fairy tale by Pavel Bazhov, which also inspired Prokofiev’s ballet <i>The Tale of the Stone Flower. </i>Bazhov’s
widely read and influential <i>The Malachite
Casket</i> collection of stories told to a young boy by a watchman, who lived
in the Ural Mountains, was so popular it was translated into English in 1944.
The dark tales of struggle and social relations echo many of my mother’s pains,
if not from a very different perspective. She claims to have never read them.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">That my mother was able to erase from her memory this
groundbreaking film, the first one she saw, seems impossible to my western born
psyche.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Her emotional needs drew her to the film about a tsar’s
coronation, which she recalls as “the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.” A
passion for faith that transcends any other life experience was born from this
childhood viewing and has cemented itself in her mind as the ultimate
ideal. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">There exists rare vintage film footage of the Coronation of
Tsar Nicholas II from 1896, the first film ever made in Russia and directed by Camille
Cerf, who worked with the Lumière brothers of France, the world’s first
filmmakers. But my mother insists what she saw was the coronation of either
Alexander I or II, though I find no record of any such film. My mother says she
is certain that the coronation was filmed on Sept. 26 by the Julian Calendar,
during the liturgy one the eve of celebrating The Elevation of the Venerable
and Life-Creating Cross of the Lord. She says she saw tis film a second time,
at Holy Trinity Monastery in rural upstate New York, where her parents and my
father are buried. She recalls (and repeats) with a fervor reserved exclusively
for the Russian Orthodox liturgy how the choir sings as the cross is elevated.
This singular memory trumps any and all other remembrances.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">“It was during the big holy day which is celebrated on
September 27th, so I guess it was on the eve of it. Because I remember the
service, how it was, the church it was decorated and it was so beautiful, and
because it was the bishop and the service was very, very wonderful. The only
time I had been (to the service) was two or three times in Jordanville, New
York.”</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Extolling the beauty of liturgy in that film, my mother
notes, “I didn’t know anything about any tsars at that time, because we weren’t
taught that.”</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The hunger for a solid ethnic identity is clearly a result
of being born on a disputed borderland and being herded as a very young girl from
Belarus to Poland to Germany as a prisoner, watching relatives and friends die
along the way. This film was her first glimpse into what defines her
Russianness: Orthodoxy.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The other early memories from Lyssenko are happy ones, again
this was the “happiest time of my life,” she says, though none rival her
emotional bond with the liturgy.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Her memory of carnival is marred by an injury that has stuck
with her.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">“I was in a merry-go-round I guess, and I didn’t get off of
it on time and it started to go and I fell and I still have some pebbles in my
right knee. I had a lot of them but most of them disappeared. It was all bloody
and everything, but I went with some teenagers who told me not to tell my
mother because they would be in trouble because they were supposed to be
looking after me. And I got caught, and the only thing I remember going on
there was the merry-go-round. And I think there was some kind of thing that we
could win something, but I don’t remember if I did win anything, I don’t
remember. I didn’t have money at that time, and I think those older boys and girls probably paid for me,” she says, laughter emerging.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Compared with the first four or so years spent dodging
bullets and land mines and being taken prisoner by numerous forces, my mother’s
time at Lyssenko was relatively normal.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">“My father was the plumber for the building that we were in,
and I guess for other buildings at the camp. I don’t think my mother had a job.
I'm not sure. And my father also was at that time going to mechanic school, and
I went to the Ukrainian school, and I think life was just good at that time.
Very good.”</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">While memories of <i>Stone
Flower</i> and other non-religious experiences are essentially lost, my mother
does recall some logistic details of the building at Lyssenko with the same
precision, if not passion, of that liturgy.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">“It was tall and big and just like a big box. Our block was
number four. And we were in number 4A. …. And my friend, Olga, who lives in
Connecticut now, lived on the same floor as we did, but a few rooms away.”</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">To this day, every life experience is held to the standard
of my mother’s first memories at Lyssenko. Nothing can compare with those first
tastes that bit into a forced starvation – an early childhood life previously
devoid of any spiritual, cultural or social exposure. To this day, she rarely
is satisfied by any restaurant or secular activity, and generally shuns them. Essentially why bother? It can only lead to disappointment.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">“Hanover looked nice as far as I remember, I didn’t go to
too many places,” my mother says. “I went to a restaurant once.”</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">“Oh, the fish was delicious in there. I had fish, and I had
German potato salad and beets and that was delicious. That was the only time
I'd eaten in a restaurant.”</span></span></div>
Natasha Guralhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12459751717821434299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805287087023775543.post-25866427642511344822014-01-25T00:11:00.000-05:002014-01-25T12:19:15.071-05:00‘The Chaos Of Antiquity’ Forever Haunts a Disputed Borderland<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The written or recorded history of Belarus gets stranger
with modern interpretation, especially with the nationalistic pride that
marginalizes its inhabitants. My mother and her parents have never identified
as Belarusian, they consider themselves ethnic Russians who were born in
Belarus. They all were born and lived so close to the Russian border that my
maternal grandmother carried my infant mother into Russia to baptize her.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Belarus literally translates as White Rus, and had for years
been called White Russia, a name considered derisive by Belarusian
nationalists, but still widely used in many languages and countries. Rus is not
short for Russia. Kievan Rus was a powerful East Slavic state dominated by the
city of Kiev, which is the modern day capital of Ukraine. Rus dates back to the
9th century and is traditionally viewed as the beginning of Russia and the ancestor
of Belarus and Ukraine, though this theory is often disputed. Kiev is regarded
as the original Holy Russian Empire, because Vladimir the Great, the pagan
Slavic ruler of Kievan Rus, in 988 converted the state to Orthodox
Christianity.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Some cite Slavic lore that claims Vladimir chose Orthodox
Christianity over the teaching of Muslim missionaries because his people liked
to drink wine, a practice prohibited by the Muslim faith. His motive was
unlikely a spiritual one, at any level. Vladimir married the Byzantine
emperor’s wife and viewed the establishment of a church as essential to
development of a powerful state. Kiev traded fur, animal hides, burlap, hemp
and hops in exchange for Byzantine wine, silk, steel blades, religious art and
horses. Byzantine imperial ideals clearly influenced Russian political life. Kievan
Rus was effectively eliminated in 1237, when Batu Khan, a grandson of Genghis
Khan, invaded and over three years the Mongols (or Tatars) destroyed all of the
major cities of Kievan Rus except Novgorod and Pskov. The regional princes were
not deposed, but were beholden to the Tatar state, which became known as the
Empire of the Golden Horde. Both the Swedes (in 1240) and the Livonian Brothers
of the Sword, a regional branch of the Teutonic Knights, (in 1242), pounced but
failed to defeat “Russia” or Rus.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">At the time of the Tatar invasion, modern-day Moscow was an
insignificant trading outpost, but its remote, forested location buffered it
from attack and occupation, and its rivers provided access to the Baltic and
Black seas and to the Caucasus region. It was the rule of ambitious princes
that gave rise to the state of Muscovy: Daniil Aleksandrovich secured the
principality for his branch of the Rurik Dynasty, which was founded by
Varangian (Viking) prince Rurik and ruled Kievan Rus after 862. His son, Ivan
I, was given the title "Grand Prince of Vladimir" from his Mongol
overlords, and he cooperated closely with the Mongols to gain control over
Muscovy's chief rival, the northern city of Tver. In 1327 the Orthodox
metropolitan transferred his residency from Kiev to Moscow, shifting spiritual
power from Kievan Rus to Moscow, even as the Tatars presided over the political
state until 1480. While Eurasianism is still emerging in the study of Russian
history, the Asian influence and identity have been dominant since the rise of
the tsars. A third of Russian nobles had Tatar names and Ivan the Terrible
descended, on his mother’s side, from Genghis Khan.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Rather than delve deeper into this part of history, I want
only to suggest that while the Vikings may have their roots in my mother’s
birthplace -- archaeologists in September 2012 found Viking artifacts from the 10<sup>th</sup>
and 11<sup>th</sup> centuries in Vitebsk Oblast – her national identity may be
built on Tatar ideology and bloodlines. This makes the term “White Russia” that
much more contested. My maternal grandmother had blue eyes and translucent
light skin that had to be shielded from direct sunlight. My maternal
grandfather had dark eyes and hair and an olive complexion. My mother has blue
eyes and an olive complexion that tans quickly and never burns. My mother knows
very little about her father’s parents, other than they were born “somewhere in
Russia.” However, a Tatar heritage might explain why my maternal grandfather
left the Soviet Army, why so many members of his family were brutally killed by
the Belarusians, why he, his wife and children were targets of the Belarusian
Partisans, as well as Stalin and the Nazis. It would also explain his loyalty
to the Holy Russian Empire, even its seat in Moscow.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In “The History of Peter the Great, Emperor of Russia,”
Voltaire states: “It is not my business in this place to inquire, why the
countries from Smolensk, to the other side of Moscow, were called White Russia,
or why (German geographer Johann) Hubner gives it the name of Black, nor for
what reason the government of Kiev should be named Red Russia.” </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
It's important to note that Voltaire wanted to
"make myself Russian," and created an alter-ego using the persona of
a Russian diplomat, Ivan Alethof, as the “author” of his 1760 poem "The
Russian in Paris.”</span></span><style>
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<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">“It is very likely that Madies the Scythian, who made an
irruption into Asia, near seven hundred years before our vulgar era, might have
carried his arms into these regions, as Gengis-Khan (sic) and Tamerlane did
afterwards, and as probably others had done long before Madies. Every part of
antiquity is not deserving of our inquiries; that of the Chinese, the Indians,
the Persians, and the Egyptians, is ascertained from illustrious and interesting
monuments; but these monuments suppose others of a far more ancient date, since
it required many ages to teach men the art of transmitting their thoughts by
permanent signs, and no less time was required to form a regular language; and
yet we have no such monuments even in this polite part of Europe. The art of
writing was a long time unknown to all the North: the patriarch Constantine,
who wrote the history of Kiev in the Russian language, acknowledges, that the
use of writing was not known in these countries in the fifth century.”</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">“Let others examine whether the Huns, the Slavs, and the
Tartars, formerly led their wandering and famished tribes towards the source of
the Boristhenes (the antiquated term for the Dniepr River and its eponymous
river god); my design is to show what czar Peter created, and not to engage in
a useless attempt, to clear up the chaos of antiquity. We should always keep in
mind, that no family upon earth knows its first founder, and consequently, that
no nation knows its first origin.”</span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMBIHTI5wNHQ5RydchO5_a1x0-9IeVY9bvTtyIvORCVhxpJH2XZe7C30QgLLOOu37SpUNom068wEySaRN1ss3CN_IfvMRcCtWWm88b_EBVQFeJnUUEaEwJVKFHo_V8eZ65V3W709ra64A/s1600/summer-archaeology-field-school-2013-asaviec.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMBIHTI5wNHQ5RydchO5_a1x0-9IeVY9bvTtyIvORCVhxpJH2XZe7C30QgLLOOu37SpUNom068wEySaRN1ss3CN_IfvMRcCtWWm88b_EBVQFeJnUUEaEwJVKFHo_V8eZ65V3W709ra64A/s1600/summer-archaeology-field-school-2013-asaviec.png" height="182" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Many have, since Voltaire’s account from 1857, made
exhaustive efforts “to clear up the chaos of antiquity,” generally to rewrite a
history that lends to rabid nationalism. But as new genetic data emerges this
misguided pride is called into question.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Belarusians together with Ukrainians and Russians represent
the East Slavic linguistic group, largest both in numbers and territory,
inhabiting East Europe alongside Baltic-, Finno-Permic- and Turkic-speaking
people. There have been until very recently only few genetic studies performed
on this population.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">A June 2013 research article, “Uniparental Genetic Heritage
of Belarusians: Encounter of Rare Middle Eastern Matrilineages with a Central European
Mitochondrial DNA Pool,” published in PLOS ONE, found that 80% of the paternal
Belarusian gene pool is composed of R1a, I2a and N1c Y-chromosome haplogroups,
a profile very similar to Ukrainians and Russians.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The Y-chromosome reflects movements of people in
central-east Europe, as early as the start of the Holocene (beginning at the
end of the last Ice Age about 11,000 years ago and characterized by the
development of human civilization.) The
matrilineal legacy of Belarusians retains two rare mitochondrial DNA
haplogroups, N1a3 and N3, both of Middle Eastern origin.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">As Eurasian studies begin to displace Slavic studies at
major universities and more DNA analysis becomes available to scholars, the
ethnic identity of Belarusians, or at least the people born there, may help us correct
the complicated history of a population that has withstood a perpetual warpath.
My own desire to understand why so many members of my mother’s family have been
brutalized and killed drives my interest in the science as well as the social
history and historical sociology that has yet to gain any wide spread
recognition. My own scholarly experience has been colored by either national identity
(no matter how subtle) of my professors, as well as myriad incarnations of Slavophilism
adopted often by non-Slavs. Much of what I was taught is at odds with what I
see when I look at photographs of my mother’s father and grandfather.</span></span></div>
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Natasha Guralhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12459751717821434299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805287087023775543.post-37953478998009045322014-01-09T22:09:00.002-05:002014-01-09T22:15:30.530-05:00Leaving Lyssenko: Displaced Memories<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The years my mother spent at Lyssenko Displaced Persons Camp
in Hanover, Germany, were “very good.” The young girl who’d spent her first
half decade herded from labor camp to prison camp to concentration camp had
finally found a “home.” Those formative years at Lyssenko were not rife with
killings and rapes and bombs and grenades and constant fear of which enemy
would strike next and at what gate.</span></span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The notion of leaving a displaced persons for a new life in
a faraway land sounds like a dream for most people. To my mother it was an end
to the first era of her life that didn’t involve constant suffering and
instability. And it meant saying goodbye to people she came to know as family
in the wake of losing so many blood relatives. It was horrifying. It meant recalling
all the previous tragedies and again losing friends by separation.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">“And then people started to immigrate to different
countries, and they started to place us. Two of my father's friends went to
England. And they had lost their families, too, during the war. Whether they
were killed or what happened to them, I don’t know. They sent us pictures from
England. They were handsome men and when they got to England, they had sent us
rubber boots, which were beautiful, and chocolate candy. I can't find any here
like that. It was like a candy bar, but it had crispy part inside of it. That
was delicious.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I’d brought home, from my first trip to England in 1991, what
I thought my mother had described but she insisted it wasn’t the same. That
time in her early childhood offered her very first taste of joy and nothing
since could be sweetening to comparison. It was as if anything from those years
was magical, almost otherworldly, and could never be duplicated again. I can
only imagine the shifting emotion from a life of desolation and destruction to
one that offered her very first creature comforts. They were so simple, yet
perfect, those articles of clothing or pieces of chocolate. I think my mother
begrudges herself any of life’s comforts, partly because of the guilt, but also
because she can never again feel such immense satisfaction that comes with the
very first experience.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">For my mother, all of these places are defined by whatever
iconic item she received in a care package or the descriptions in letters written
by those who had relocated. She has never left the United States, save for
Canada and the Caribbean, since childhood, and to her those places where other
families from Lyssenko ended up remain frozen in memory and unchanging by time.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">It makes sense that she would hold on to any image or idea
from those years, as they were her first happy memories. All my wanderlust is
lost on her, and I feel like a criminal, stealing her childhood snapshots of
places she’d never visited by informing her of sweeping social change.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">“A lot of our best friends, my best friends, my mother's
best friends, went to Australia, some went to Brazil, some went to Argentina. But
my father wanted to go to America, because from what he knew from the history lessons
in school, it was the best country to go to. And because I was the only child,
it was easier for us to choose to go to a different country, and my parents
were still young and healthy, so we didn’t have problems. But America was the
hardest country to get to because we were in British zone, but we used to get
coffee, and we used to (barter and) trade it with the Germans because they
didn’t have the good coffee. It was chicory, but they liked it, so we never had
drank it ourselves. We always used to trade it for clothes or something. At
that time, it was very, very good for us, because we could get beautiful
clothes for the coffee, and again berries, we used to go pick berries and trade
those. And I sang and we had a church, and I sang in a church choir. We had
Christmas parties. It was wonderful. We used to go Christmas caroling. It was a
wonderful life, you know.”</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2bgb1Ru1psDjcxBSsUjFgmsl-6z3wnHdaaf3InmkIqzXOVaj0rH34M6zN7BzeIoVZvDzFaYSvAXmdjnrev_mYA0Y54q42UB0tDnRb733VXVHw4DTyvARBB7DtXudYzG5cfguTJGMHzlc/s1600/LyssenkoSmile.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2bgb1Ru1psDjcxBSsUjFgmsl-6z3wnHdaaf3InmkIqzXOVaj0rH34M6zN7BzeIoVZvDzFaYSvAXmdjnrev_mYA0Y54q42UB0tDnRb733VXVHw4DTyvARBB7DtXudYzG5cfguTJGMHzlc/s1600/LyssenkoSmile.JPG" height="300" width="400" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">My mother’s explanation that her parents were selected to
come to the U.S. because of their savvy in trading with the Germans in the
British zone is lost in her happy memories. She clings to those early years,
which are forever idyllic for their simple pleasures. There is an innocence
that overrides any ignorance that may stem from an unwillingness to acknowledge
how culture has changed with time.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">My mother and her parents ended up in New Hampshire, not far
from Dartmouth, but still in a community that hadn’t been opened to the wider
world. Stevens High School in Claremont, New Hampshire, didn’t offer English as
Second Language and there was no public assistance available to her family.
They had to toil to pay back every penny to the farmer who had sponsored their
trip here via Church World Services. They lived without hot water for years,
working at multiple manual labor and service jobs around the clock for a pittance
of a wage, and saving to have fewer comforts and concessions than those that
were available at Lyssenko or through bartering with the Germans. They traveled
frequently throughout the Northeast to visit with friends from Lyssenko and to maintain
a dispersed community in the absence of the ghettos that allow most immigrants
to retain their culture.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">“Some of my friends did come to America. One of them lives
in Connecticut now. And the others, mostly all of them, live in New Jersey. I
went to eleven weddings and I was a bridesmaid. [laughter] But the camp was
actually the happiest part of my life at that time, because we didn’t have any
cares. And we had food. We had clothes. It didn’t bother us that we slept on
cots in just a corner of a room. We were all just happy. People used to go
fishing, and they would get fish and we would have parties and stuff like that.
My mother's best friend, the ones that went to Australia afterwards, her
husband somehow had good luck of catching a lot of fish. One time when it was
my birthday, he says ‘this is going be for Luba's birthday’ and he caught so
much fish and since we didn’t have a big stove with hot plates, a lot of women,
like five or six, were frying that fish. They had a big, big party for me at
that time.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">My mother believes it was her 10<sup>th</sup> birthday, but
the date isn’t a detail that matters.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">“That was the best birthday party I ever had and it was the
first one I ever remember. And that was very good. There were a lot of people
at the table. I don’t know, maybe twenty, maybe thirty, I don’t know. A lot of
people. And of course, there was vodka but we kids didn’t drink. [laughter] We
didn’t have to.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">It is unsurprising that mother’s happy memories are vivid
and retold in great detail. She is not one to repress any memory and the
abundance of traumatic ones had to be offset somehow, if only to cope.</span></span></div>
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<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In the epilogue of <i>The
Brothers Karamazov</i> Book XII, Chapter 14, <span class="st">Alyosha
offers life-affirming hope for the next generation when speaking to a group of
schoolboys at the funeral of their peer Ilyusha. Memory Eternal (transliterated
from Old Church Slavonic as Vechnaya Pamyat) a chant sung at the end of Eastern
Orthodox funerals and memorial services is heard in the background. Alyosha
epitomizes the ideal human being (or, as my father would have said, a human
becoming as humanism is a lifelong pursuit) in a Dostoyevskian universe rife
with the conflicts and constraints of faith. Identified at the start of the
novel by the narrator as its hero, Alyosha is an exemplar by being open-minded
and forgiving. The character is named for Dostoevsky's son who died of an
epileptic fit at age 3.</span> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">"You must know that there is nothing higher and
stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good
memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home. People talk to you a great deal about your
education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps
the best education. If a man carries
many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and
if one has only one good memory left in one's heart, even that may sometime be
the means of saving us. "</span></span></div>
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Natasha Guralhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12459751717821434299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805287087023775543.post-5788843118704397352013-12-14T18:33:00.000-05:002013-12-14T18:36:21.262-05:00Of Guilt and Self Punishment<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></span><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">A testament to how little is written or discussed of the
lifelong emotional impact of watching other people die, even a voracious lay
consumer of psychological and medical research and studies as myself hadn’t
heard the word “survivor’s guilt” used in the context of my mother’s early
childhood until seven years ago. Not a single doctor treating my mother has
ever expressed it, and the countless doctors who treated my maternal
grandparents for a variety of ailments never made any connection. None have
ever seemed to comprehend how and why she’s still so traumatized and often
acts, by the standards of practitioners of Western medicine, erratically,
irrationally or with extreme sensitivity and volatility. As a teenager, my
husband watched as someone very dear to him killed herself. This, to me, is an
unimaginable horror – the stuff of nightmares, the kind I’ve had. It’s
especially challenging for me to articulate empathy in any profound way that
would make my mother understand how passionately I strive to recognize the emotions
she experiences. Sharing such emotions isn’t easy and it may not be healthy.
Those nightmares were chronic in my early childhood and pre-adolescence, and
only began to taper in frequency in my mid-teens. Many would be of what I
imaged as concentration camps or people hovering over mass graves as their
loved ones were piled into pits like compost. Naturally all these images were
based on what my mother and her parents had endured.</span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW4F6WTpnYYY3USMzqkFGUr5l1yUl7xhZlluWHgGBDYNwFKEJ9N_qNu2xzRlWDXUXUuwDKas7B6XG-uVVMI2sy_2NiFOu5grxj7RhFEBs0aZDrSjoCAceUBOz5DnVJTlztvc5aKPzjNPs/s1600/MomDegushkaGermany1947.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW4F6WTpnYYY3USMzqkFGUr5l1yUl7xhZlluWHgGBDYNwFKEJ9N_qNu2xzRlWDXUXUuwDKas7B6XG-uVVMI2sy_2NiFOu5grxj7RhFEBs0aZDrSjoCAceUBOz5DnVJTlztvc5aKPzjNPs/s320/MomDegushkaGermany1947.JPG" width="240" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTTwiUh0JN-N_ybpnvLZDuRRrI2r0hv9QecbHIkqKB9yCsSI_tYHbjiFXJh1PhWiqIGukKYk_JqJvNMqmyvsPnSiazuxV6EpU44spClnJ-xUFzUy6wGRq0uuLWogwlt6QRzZcbL_4wj4A/s1600/MomBabushkaGermany1947..JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTTwiUh0JN-N_ybpnvLZDuRRrI2r0hv9QecbHIkqKB9yCsSI_tYHbjiFXJh1PhWiqIGukKYk_JqJvNMqmyvsPnSiazuxV6EpU44spClnJ-xUFzUy6wGRq0uuLWogwlt6QRzZcbL_4wj4A/s320/MomBabushkaGermany1947..JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<i><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">My mother with her mother, 1949. My mother with her</span></span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">father, 1947. Both photos taken in Hanover, Germany. No photos exist of my mother before the displaced persons camp in Hanover.</span></span></i><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Sigmund Freud referred to survivor’s guilt following his
father’s death, in a letter to his friend, otolaryngologist (ear, nose, and
throat doctor) Wilhelm Fliess, referring to “that tendency toward self-reproach
which death invariably leaves among the survivors.</span></span><br />
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<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Simply put, it’s the feeling that you have harmed others,
especially loved ones, just because you were spared death when they died. The
term "survivor syndrome" was coined in 1961 by psychoanalyst W.G. Niederland,
who in the 1950s began studying concentration camp survivors.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Among survivors of World War II concentration camps, guilt
is sometimes manifested in strange yet subtle forms, such as behaving as if
they themselves are dead, inhibiting themselves from success or engaging in
self-destructive acts in response to survivor’s guilt in regard to a dead
parent or sibling, A H Modell revealed in a seminal article published in 1971
in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis. I recall one instance when my
grandfather lied down under his car, acting as if he were dead. I was a young
teen. I was horrified. I knew it had something to do with his experiences, and
I felt guilty for lacking the psychological study to identify his condition. (I
have an unsupported theory that survivor’s guilt is passed down to the next
generation more so than other forms of guilt.)</span></span></div>
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<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">“Survivor's guilt constitutes the failure of the
psychological immune system to grapple with tragedy of great magnitude. Like an
infection that overwhelms the body's immune system, survivor's guilt overwhelms
the psychological immune system. Instead of exaggerating the difference between
oneself and a victim, the similarity is what strikes people as most obvious. ‘That
poor guy was no different from me; it could just as well have been me instead
of him.’ With survivor's guilt, the
differences between oneself and another person shrink, and so too do the
differences between what actually happened and what could have happened. As
with a bad infection, the best recourse is medical treatment,” writes Neal
Roese, Ph.D., in his 2005 book, “If Only: How to Turn Regret Into Opportunity.”</span></span></div>
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<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I find this fascinating, as I've often wondered if there was
any correlation between people of my mother’s (and grandparents’) immigration
and a proliferation of autoimmune diseases. I rarely share this premise, as
finding Western medical professionals who even discuss something that’s not
published in a study they read or wrote is generally impossible. In any case, I
know more than most people outside of endocrinology about autoimmune diseases
as it took decades for me to find a doctor to properly diagnose mine. I'd been
confident for years that I had some form of autoimmune hypothyroidism, as my
maternal grandfather suffered from hypothyroidism and my mother had a
thyroidectomy. My grandfather wasn’t diagnosed until it was too late, when he
was hospitalized for what may have been delayed symptoms of a nearly fatal car
crash that he “miraculously” survived, doctors and first responders told me at
the time. (At 15, I was in the ambulance and in the operating room with him.)
My mother’s hypothyroidism also went undiagnosed and untreated for decades. Doctors
blamed my symptoms on anything else, even my own behavior, and refused to send
out blood work for a quick, simple and cheap test of free levels of
triiodothyronine (T3) and thyroxine (T4), which together regulate your body’s
temperature, metabolism and heart rate, because my "TSH (or thyroid
stimulating hormone) is fine." Finally, I found a doctor who’d written an
article on a study that articulated exactly what I’d been telling other
doctors, and he immediately diagnosed me with Hashimoto's thyroiditis, a
genetic disease. My mother’s mother had rheumatoid arthritis, and my sister is
afflicted with RA, along with Lupus and Raynaud's phenomenon (RP) – all
autoimmune diseases. So many people I
knew growing up from the same immigration also suffered from various autoimmune
diseases, while diabetes and heart disease was extremely rare in this
community. These people grew their own vegetables and fruits, fished and only
bought meat if they knew how the animal was slaughtered. This was in the third-largest
city in Massachusetts and fourth-largest in New England. My grandparents kept hens
in a perch of shelves that my grandfather build into a one-car garage, grew
dozens of vegetable varieties and berries, and even kept and slaughtered their
own pigs. I often went fishing (at a nearby lake) and mushroom picking (at a
nearby forest) with my grandfather. I picked berries from the small yard and
helped collect eggs from the hens. My grandfather volunteered as a beekeeper at
the monastery where he’s now buried on his vacations from factory work and brought
home the equipment to keep hives in the yard.</span></span></div>
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<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">My unexamined autoimmne hypothesis aside, there’s been even
less done to psychologically diagnose these people and treat their obvious
survivor’s guilt and often posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This is an
unforgivable failure of our mental health system and our society at large.
America has welcomed the “wretched refuse of your teeming shore” but it has
done nothing to help those huddled masses heal from the incomparable suffering
of surviving war after war. PTSD and survivor’s guilt is so rarely used in
conversations about anyone but U.S. military veterans. Unarmed civilians suffer
far more than soldiers. PTSD and survivor’s guilt are often confused, even by
trained specialists, but they are very different phenomena. While PTSD is
psychopathological phenomenon, survivor’s guilt is more of an expression of a
normal concern for other human beings, both as individuals and as a society.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">My intention is never to undermine the struggle of soldiers.
My father was a decorated veteran who served in the South Pacific and in Korea,
and is immortalized in The New Orleans D-Day Museum. Many men in my family have
served in numerous wars and conflicts. But when they volunteer or they’re
drafted or recruited, soldiers are warned of the trauma to come, even if they
cannot effectively prepare for it. Even the most distressed societies make an
effort, and often a promise, to protect civilians, yet no adult or child ever is
warned of the sudden terror that leads to destruction of what was a civil
society. My mother also was robbed of a childhood, adding another level of
stress to her guilt.</span></span></div>
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<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">“The various effects that adults who were child survivors
experience can be attributed to many aspects of their traumatic exposure.
Children and adults were treated differently in the camps and consequently
their emotional reactions were different. Children were likely too traumatized
during the war to experience ‘true’ childhood,” writes Fara Kaplan in
“Holocaust Survivors and Their Children: A Search for Positive Effects”
published by The American Academy of Experts in Traumatic Stress. “Also,
because the child's identity had been in a state of development, their
experiences may have remained buried in their memory (i.e., unconscious). This
may have impeded their ability to empathize with others and likely negatively
affected their adjustment to their own offspring.”</span></span></div>
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<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">For my mother, the survivor’s guilt from early childhood is
compounded by the losses of her parents and my father, all of whom she cared
for at home until their deaths from very serious illnesses. The Russians (and
Eastern Slavs) I knew growing up did not sentence their sick and old to death
in nursing homes. “How can I do that to my parents when they didn’t let me
die?” my mother has said, or stated, many times. Of course, she was equally
compelled to care for her dying husband. My grandfather’s illness was, mercifully,
short-lived: he died about a year after he became bed-ridden, his wife and his daughter
as his constant bedside companions. After he died, my grandmother was bedridden
for nearly nine years, her (long undiagnosed) brain atrophy prohibiting her
from speaking. She would, however, sometimes cry in a chanting tone that
clearly signified the mourning of her loved ones, especially her infant
sons. My father was diagnosed with Stage
IV colon cancer, metastasized to the liver, shortly after my grandmother died.
I’ll spare the details of what such care involves, as I know most Americans
lack the palate for visceral reality. But my mother completely gave up her life
from 1987 until 2002. She hasn’t recovered from that trauma enough to indulge
in what are very basic creature comforts for the average American, such as
treating herself to a movie or a vacation – ever.</span></span></div>
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<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In a 1972 article in Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Stephen M.
Sonnenberg, M.D., cites a case study involving a patient who felt guilty that
her husband had died during surgery she authorized, after caring for him during
a nine-month illness. “She also expressed feelings of guilt concerning the
murder of her parents and younger sisters by the Nazis,” notes Sonnenberg.</span></span></div>
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<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">“With (her husband’s) death, she not only felt guilt
concerning him but she lost the opportunity to expiate her long-standing guilt
by being a good nurse. In her unconscious, it was as if she had willed the
suffering of her past loved ones in an effort to be close to them. Thus, guilt
over past events became overwhelming. It would seem that this patient was a
guilt-laden woman who lost a guilt-expiating object and at the same time underwent an experience that
confirmed her past and present guilt. Signing for 'experimental' surgery was
perhaps the final burden, and her obsession over it became clear in her
treatment. While she insisted that her husband's good health had been her goal,
she also felt that she was a 'murderer.’ Depression was present when anger at
the lost object was conscious and when identification with the lost object did
not exist. It was the strength of her guilt that made her feel so hopeless and
depressed.”</span></span></div>
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<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Shulamith Kreitler, Frida Barak, Yasmin Alkalay and Nava Siegelman-Daniel
conducted study of 195 family members of cancer patients who had been involved
in the care of the patients and had a continuous relationship with them, which
found that that survivor’s guilt is prevalent among the caretakers of cancer
patients.</span></span></div>
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<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">“It is distinct from the experiences of guilt and of
remorse,” they wrote in paper “Survivor’s Guilt in Caretakers of Cancer” based
on the study. “Survivor’s guilt is an affective response rooted in deeper
layers of the personality. Most importantly, the observations about the correlates
of survivor’s guilt six months following the patient’s death support the theses
that survivor’s guilt exerts a pro-social impact on the person’s behavior and
that it helps maintain the presence of the deceased in the life space of the
survivor. Both of these effects led the deceased a kind of metaphorical
immortality, thus helping the survivor preserve his or her own sense of
immortality and the sense of continued contact with the deceased. In these
respects survivor’s guilt contributes to overcoming death, at least on the
psychological level.”</span></span></div>
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<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">This desire to commune with the dead also plays into my
mother’s religious beliefs and practices. Russian Orthodox Christians do not
close the casket until it is taken from the church to the cemetery. My grandmother’s
body was returned to my parent’s home where she died after being taken to the
funeral home. A wake was held at home, with many non-Orthodox Christians in
attendance, and kept my grandmother there until being transported 166 miles
away to the monastery church. (I drove my mother’s car, following the hearse,
which was nearing speeds of 100 mph. It was exhilarating.) Psalms are read over
the body continuously and throughout the night until the funeral begins. In the
words of the fathers of the seventh ecumenical council: “God re-created man in
immortality, thus bestowing upon him a gift which could no longer be taken away
from him.”</span></span></div>
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<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Nietzsche said Dostoevsky was “the only person who has ever
taught me anything about psychology.” In Dostoevsky’s work, guilt and sin are
existential conditions of man, and each of us is somehow guilty of everyone’s
sins. Nietzsche began reading the work of Dostoevsky, who died in 1881, in
1887, finding inspiration in a fellow challenger of the fundamental world view
of the Enlightenment. Religious belief is what divides the two. Dostoevsky
ultimately believes in salvation and therefore an afterlife, a view Nietzsche
boldly rejects. But they share a very similar perspective on guilt.</span></span></div>
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<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The confession of Raskolnikov, which leads the protagonist
in Dostoevsky’s <i>Crime and Punishment</i>
to prison, clearly had a profound impact on Nietzsche’s philosophy.</span></span></div>
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<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">"Throughout most of human history, punishment has not
been meted out because the miscreant was held responsible for his act, therefore
it was not assumed that the guilty party alone should be punished: but rather,
as parents still punish their children, it was out of anger over some wrong
that had been suffered, directed at the perpetrator, but this anger was held in
check and modified by the idea that every injury has its equivalent which can
be paid in compensation, if only through the pain of the person who injures.
And where did this primeval, deeply-rooted and perhaps now ineradicable idea
gain its power, this idea of an equivalence between injury and pain? I have
already let it out: in the contractual relationship between creditor and
debtor, which is as old as the very conception of ‘legal subject’ and itself
refers back to the basic forms of buying, selling, bartering, trade, and
traffic." _ Nietzsche, <i>On the
Genealogy of Morals </i>(1887).</span></span></div>
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<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">It’s impossible for me to imagine a guilt more “primeval,
deeply-rooted” than survivor’s guilt. </span></span></div>
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Natasha Guralhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12459751717821434299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805287087023775543.post-88111175042669196372013-12-09T20:48:00.004-05:002013-12-09T21:15:12.725-05:00On Being (Bela)Rus(s)ian<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I’ve been struggling to figure out the story behind the
photos I posted of my grandfather and his father holding numbers. Online research
is useless, and none of the dozens of professors and other experts of Slavic
studies and history I reached out to have any clue. The replies, at least have
been cordial, save for one from a non-academic that raised an irrelevant point
that plays into something I’ve been meaning to write about.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">“Those men on them (the photos) do not look like Belarusian
types very much,” said the would-be source, a journalist who covers Belarus and
other countries for a global news organization. </span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0iF8tuj9eW_CjNE-TlZDq6sRiyaW7yCHIXsgSsVHYErRFfKos0XGKGMFOKF4nkcPrIov4aUTUn43KvlRrZEod8BtgAh2M179Rtn4Hi9EaIJd82iQsiYlS9Kg2LXEHYlvPVb5-8dyW-h4/s1600/degushkaprisoner.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0iF8tuj9eW_CjNE-TlZDq6sRiyaW7yCHIXsgSsVHYErRFfKos0XGKGMFOKF4nkcPrIov4aUTUn43KvlRrZEod8BtgAh2M179Rtn4Hi9EaIJd82iQsiYlS9Kg2LXEHYlvPVb5-8dyW-h4/s1600/degushkaprisoner.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgriWZXohhdCaVMWW-R2ANs4ay-oMkhbpWsxrKX9iL_lo6bsoHQibyzh-KaSkdC_jHnARsxn24abj518eNlbuHBE3liXsVzMxSBlon3IUhzEUpGWy71Zk4YBFLz6Yek3ZX6liWGpWH0lNg/s1600/ustinprisoner.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgriWZXohhdCaVMWW-R2ANs4ay-oMkhbpWsxrKX9iL_lo6bsoHQibyzh-KaSkdC_jHnARsxn24abj518eNlbuHBE3liXsVzMxSBlon3IUhzEUpGWy71Zk4YBFLz6Yek3ZX6liWGpWH0lNg/s1600/ustinprisoner.JPG" width="240" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">His reply, for a number of reasons, offended me. As I
attempt to let go of my toxic emotional response, I recall so many random and
unrelated comments that have rattled my own cultural identity.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Just four days before receiving this journalist’s email, my
son Michael Alexander, who is half Italian-American, and I were at a Japanese
restaurant in Dumbo where we have lunch every Monday after school and before
his art class. It was packed that day,
so we sat at the sushi bar. As Michael Alexander grabbed and devoured a piece
of white tuna from my plate, the sushi chef smiled and said: “Russian boys are
good and strong because they like fish.” He looked shocked when I told him we
both were born in the U.S., insisting that “you both look very Russian.” His
observation was meant as a compliment, applauding me for “teaching him right,
even in America.”</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Dozens of times I’ve been approached by people, usually
blonde women around my mother’s age, who speak to me in Russian, asking for
subway or walking directions. They’re all surprised when I tell them, in
Russian, that I was born here. When I first moved to New York and was apartment
hunting, the longtime Ukrainian landlords in the East Village called me only
Natali, the Ukrainian diminutive for Natalia. (Natasha is my legal name, but I
was baptized Natalia.) They’d assure me “you don’t look Russian at all. You
look only Ukrainian.” Meantime, the well-heeled Russian-born brokers wanted me
to move to the Upper East Side, insisting that’s “where all the Russians are.
Don’t worry, you do not look Ukrainian or Polish at all, just Russian.” I won’t
even get into what all of them say when I mention my mother was born in
Belarus.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I joke that I was born to hate myself, the embodiment of
Slavic ethnic strife. My father was born in the U.S. to a Polish mother and a
Ukrainian father.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Few non-Slavs even knew what a Belarusian or a Ukrainian was
throughout my early childhood. I recall few things from what I considered to be
a lousy “world cultures” class in 7<sup>th</sup> or 8<sup>th</sup> grade at a
private girls’ school in 1980s Massachusetts. I hold a grudge to this day and
blame the teacher for perpetuating myths about cultures he apparently hadn’t
studied beyond the simplistic and poorly written textbook we used. “All Russians
look like this,” he told the class pointing to a photograph of a young girl
with dark hair and dark eyes. I stayed after class to tell him that there isn’t
an archetypal look that <i>is</i> Russian,
since the world’s biggest country is home to some 160 cultures and very few, if
any, inhabitants can trace their heritage to just one. He laughed and patted me
on the back, but said nothing other than “you’d better not be late for your
next class.” I’d risked a “red dot” for being late for my next class, but the
other teacher wasn’t the petty type who made such threats and enforced
Soviet-inspired punishment. My grade in his class slipped slowly after that,
even if my test scores never dropped.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Naturally there is more to being Russian or Belarusian or
Ukrainian or Polish, or a mix of those and likely other ethnicities, than
appearance. Escalating national and ethnic tensions are making headlines now,
after protesters in Ukraine's capital Kiev knocked down a statue of Vladimir
Lenin on Sunday. But Belarus is an even stranger place with far more strife and
instability that’s fueled by corruption and its repeated role in war after
lengthy and gory war. </span></span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">My grandfather may have interpreted the journalist’s comment
that “Those men … do not look like
Belarusian types very much” very differently as he identified himself as a
Russian, not a Belarusian. As I’ve mentioned, he, my grandmother and my mother
all were born in Belarus, just over the Russian border. That they were
persecuted and that many family members and close friends were killed by Belarusian
nationalists, is clearly part of the staunch Russian pride.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">It is challenging for me when people attempt to claim me as
their own, based on ethnicity as well as religion and cultural heritage. Living
in New York, I hear “you’re Jewish like me, right?” as much as “you look
Russian, “ or “you look Ukrainian” or “you look “Polish.”</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I grapple with what all this means, as it pertains to my
mother’s history.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Even a cursory scan of the history of Belarus should quickly
dismiss any claim to a pure ethnic identity or “look.”</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Stone Age settlements have been discovered in the Gomel
region, with sites from the Palaeolithic period unearthed in the village of
Yurovichi (Kalinkovichi area) dating back some 26,000 years. Bronze Age artifacts
have been found throughout Belarus and at the start of the Iron Age there were
three main settlements in Belarus around the basins of the Dneiper, Dvina and
Pripyat rivers.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Colonization by the Slavs began in the early centuries AD,
eventually replacing the Baltic culture. East Slavs formed the first political
associations, or unions of tribes, in the 6<sup>th</sup> and 9<sup>th</sup>
centuries. The first records from the Polotsk Duchy in what is now modern
Vitebsk Oblast and the northern part of the Minsk Oblast date back to the 9<sup>th</sup>
century. Polotsk dominated until the 13th century when the Grand Duchy of
Lithuania, Rus and Samogotia – which spanned modern Belarus, Lithuania, the
Kiev, Chernigov and Volyn areas of the Ukraine and western Russia from the
Baltics to the Black Sea – rose to power in the 13th century and only began to
crumble after multiple wars in the 16th century.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In 1569 the Grand Duchy and the Kingdom of Poland signed the
Union of Lublin to create Rzeczpospolita (the traditional Polish State). This
ushered in a period of turmoil, which included a war with Russia (1654-1667)
and the North War with Sweden and Russia (1700-1721). Battered by its rivals,
Rzeczpospolita eventually lost and in 1772 the western provinces of Belarus were
annexed to the Russian Empire. In 1795 Rzeczpospolita was divided between
Russia, Austria and Prussia.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Under the first Russification efforts, what was Belarus
became a place of ongoing conflict and confusion with revolt under Tadeusz
Kostushko’s leadership (1794), the Napoleonic invasion of Russia (1812), the
Polish Revolt (1830–1831) and the Great Rebellion, headed by Kastus Kalinovski
(1863-1864). During this period, Belarusian students in Saint Petersburg began
organizing what set the foundation for the first Belarusian national political
party formed in 1903. The Stolypin agrarian reforms, a series of changes to
Imperial Russia's agricultural sector launched in 1906, resulted in mass
displacement of the peasant classes until 1914, including 33,000 people who
were moved from Belarusian territory to Siberia.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">During World War I, German and Russian forces fought bloody
battles on Belarusian territory, until March 3, 1918, with the signing of the
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Then came the Russian Revolution and the Belarusian
People’s Republic declared independence in March 1918, which lasted until the
German withdrawal at the end of the year. The Belarusian Soviet Socialist
Republic was created Jan. 1, 1919.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">After the Russo-Polish War (1919-1921), the Riga Peace
Treaty resulted in the partitioning of Belarus between the Belarusian Soviet
Socialist Republic and Poland. All of Belarus was under the New Economic Policy
(NEP), implemented by the government of the Soviet Union from 1921 to 1928 and representing
a temporary retreat from its previous policy of extreme centralization and
doctrinaire socialism. Meantime, the Polish part of Belarus was subjected to
Polonization from 1921-1930s. In 1922, the Belarusian SSR became a part of the
Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">It only got worse ahead of my mother’s birth. Soviet
economic policy and the introduction of collective farming caused famine in
Belarus from 1932-1933. During the Great Purge (1936-1940) more than 86,000
Belarusians suffered political oppression and more than 28,000 were sentenced
to death. (My mother was born in 1936 or 1938.)</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The Red Army moved into West Belarus on Sept. 17, 1939, two
weeks after World War II started. In June 1941, the Great Patriotic War began
and by September Belarus was fully occupied by the German army. By the end of
1941, the Belarusian Partisans surfaced and ballooned into the biggest movement
in Europe before 1944.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Little has changed, at least in terms of attitude and
perception.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">A new analytical paper <a href="http://belarusdigest.com/papers/belarusianidentity.pdf#http://belarusdigest.com/papers/belarusianidentity.pdf">"Belarusian
Identity: The Impact of Lukashenka's Rule"</a> released today by the
Centre for Transition Studies suggests that President Alexander Lukashenko rejected
the ethno-national model of state suggested by his predecessors in the early
1990s and restored a Soviet style “statist nation” run by a centralized
bureaucracy. After being elected in 1994, Lukashenko launched a policy of
Russification, selecting Russia as a strategic priority for foreign relations
in a supposed effort to recover from the economic crisis. A year later he initiated
a referendum to introduce Russian as a second official language in Belarus,
with the vast majority, or 83.3%, of voters supporting the initiative. The
Constitution of Belarus declares the equal status of both languages, but Russian
dominates all facets of life and public organizations and officials generally speak
Russian.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Since the early noughts, all major Belarus-based media
broadcasts are aired in Russian, and there are no all-Belarusian language
universities. The study data shows the even as more residents identify themselves
as Belarusians, the use of the Belarusian language has eroded, and a Russian-speaking
Belarusian nation has emerged. When asked “What unites you with other people of
your nationality?” Belarusians refer more to territory and state, than to
culture and language. The majority consider the origin of Belarusian statehood
in mediaeval Polack and Turaŭ princedoms and the Great Duchy of Lithuania, not
in the Belarusian SSR. Still the same people have embraced symbols, such as
national holidays and the red-green flag, introduced by Lukashenko’s regime.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">“The Belarusian nation, unlike most European nations, did
not emerge along ethno-national lines, with an indigenous language, culture or
a solid nationalist historical narrative. Rather, it consolidated as a result
of a Communist experiment which lasted for 70 years. It experienced many of the
major disasters of the 20th century, including both the Stalinist terror and
the horrors of World War II. This turbulent path has impacted Belarusians
profoundly and, after 20 years of independence, the Belarusian nation is still
trying to find its way,” wrote the paper’s author, Vadzim Smok, a researcher at
the Institute of Political Studies 'Political Sphere' based in Minsk and
Vilnius.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Smok looks to people like my cousin Tanya, who just began
teaching after graduating from Minsk State Linguistic University (MSLU) to
effect dramatic social change.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">“Younger generations will play a crucial role in the future
development of the Belarusian nation. They communicate by the Internet, which
remains a free and open space for communication and exchange of ideas in
Belarus. They did not undergo Soviet indoctrination or experience its
relentless propaganda and tend to prefer to work in the private sector, meaning
they are less and less tied to the state. These people look much more free and
democratically minded then their parents, and quite soon they will rule the
country,” Smok concluded.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">For now, I’m still entangled in what my mother’s birthplace
means for my family’s identity. Do I have a Belarusian “look”? Do I care?
Apparently I do.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">My Marvel Avengers’ obsessed (his father’s student) son, the
one who was mistaken for a “boy from Russia,” had wanted to be Spider-Man this
past Halloween but I insisted he also try on a Thor costume. The saleswomen
swooned, with two singing in unison “He IS Thor!” Perhaps that means that <i>he</i> has the “Bealrusian look,” which
could be more Old Norse than anything else. In 2010, archaeologists found the
remains of an ancient Viking (or what East Slavs call Varangian) settlement in
Vitebsk Oblast, where my mother and her parents were born. </span></span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRRcu4VSEs9LF1DC8xS8qAuQi-unqjS8SamPnIJGTFlJ4Ug-SsHXYRtit9LxDQmnHjXcVPymaQ74tTUlXKt7cUup6bf641ClhecdHbZafTWHQaC3JuRbZCX4rt3iVWkwq2zoWQAsqa2IY/s1600/Gural-Maiello+Family-31.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRRcu4VSEs9LF1DC8xS8qAuQi-unqjS8SamPnIJGTFlJ4Ug-SsHXYRtit9LxDQmnHjXcVPymaQ74tTUlXKt7cUup6bf641ClhecdHbZafTWHQaC3JuRbZCX4rt3iVWkwq2zoWQAsqa2IY/s1600/Gural-Maiello+Family-31.jpg" width="186" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span>(Photo credit: <a href="http://www.david-stewart.net/" target="_blank">Dave Stewart Photogrpahy</a>)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Said Marc Chagall, the Vitebsk-born artist with an extremely
complicated ethno-cultural identity, “The soil that nourished the roots of my
art was Vitebsk." </span></span></div>
</div>
Natasha Guralhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12459751717821434299noreply@blogger.com0