Discovering Joy In Memory Eternal

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^th 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. 

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.

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!”

 (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.)

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

“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

On the Path to Humanbecoming

“You’re just like your father,” my mother would say, hundreds, if not thousands, of times, often as a back-handed compliment.

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 father, 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.

My father 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.

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.

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.

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.

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  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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

“What about my daughter?” my mom asked him.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

Related Reading

A Letter from Your Dziadek/Dido in Search of the Empyrean

Lament, Regret, and the Eeriness of 14: In Loving Memory of Brother 
Mike
An Unlikely Soldier: In Memory of Michael William “Brother Mike” Gural

On Being (Bela)Rus(s)ian

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.

“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. 

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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^th or 8^th 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 is 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.

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.

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.

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.”

I grapple with what all this means, as it pertains to my mother’s history.

Even a cursory scan of the history of Belarus should quickly dismiss any claim to a pure ethnic identity or “look.”

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.

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^th and 9^th 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^th 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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.)

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.

Little has changed, at least in terms of attitude and perception.

A new analytical paper "Belarusian Identity: The Impact of Lukashenka's Rule" 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.

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.

“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.

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.

“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.

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.

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 he 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. 

                                                   (Photo credit: Dave Stewart Photogrpahy)

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."

A Brief Period in Lublin Has A Lasting Impact

My mother has lived in the same split-level ranch atop a steep hill on a quiet cul-de-sac that empties into a town nature preserve which was an active apple and peach orchard throughout my childhood. She has many excuses for not moving out after my father died in 2002, all while acknowledging that it is a burden to clean a three-bedroom house (where she lives alone) and to maintain a large lawn with many trees. My mother is not the type to hire a housekeeper, ever. (Her mother worked as a housekeeper for many years, including when I was an infant and I went to work with my babushka while my mother studied.) As stubborn and strong-willed as they come, my mother also is reluctant to hire anyone to clean the gutters, rake the leaves, mow the lawn, shovel the snow, trim the shrubbery, clean the garage, haul large objects to and from the basement or perform myriad strange cleanup tasks that arise from the wave of unusual weather events, including tornadoes that touched down in 2011, that have hit Western Massachusetts in recent years.

My Western mind insists she’d be better off in a nice condo with other self-sufficient retirees where she could trade manual labor for activities that don’t require a hard hat. But my Eastern soul sympathizes and understands that for my mother moving comes with a lot of baggage that you can’t hire someone else to haul. (Save for a really great therapist.)

By the time she was four years old, my mother had moved to three neighboring, yet warring, countries: Belarus, Poland and Germany.

Now the ninth largest city in Poland and regarded as a European cultural capital, Lublin was a very different place when my mother and her parents were forced to relocate there.

Majdanek, a concentration and forced labor camp, and briefly a death camp, located about three miles outside the city, opened in September 1941, initially for Soviet prisoners of war. It is estimated that 360,000 people, including 120,000 Jews, died or were murdered at Majdanek. The inmates represented 54 nationalities from 28 different countries, including the Soviet prisoners of war and Jews from Poland, Germany, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, France, Hungary, Belgium and Greece, as well as non-Jews from Belarus, Ukraine and across Poland, who were taken to the camp as political prisoners and slave laborers. 

“I remember the house, the room, that we lived in,” she recalls. “It didn’t have a floor. It was a dirt floor. That much I remember. And the people whose house we were living in, that woman had a baby and they had a christening and they had food there, and drinks, and so I came up to the table and I took what I thought was a glass of water, but it was actually vodka! Homemade vodka!” 

Laughing, my mother says she was “Four, something like that, four and a half. I don’t know, maybe even five. I don’t really remember how old I was. But I do remember we were living there, and one of my aunts (my mother’s sister, Marta) was living in another house close by, but we could see it out the windows.”

“It was really a big chaos. The Germans would come and try to kill us, and the Partisans, I guess, would try to kill us. They used to take usually men. Men would be hiding and I just remember –- sort of remember -- how they would take someone and there'll be like two soldiers on each side and one walking with a gun after them. And it was just very, very terrible. But then one time, when they were taking us further and further, towards Germany, we had to sleep outside. I only had one set of clothes, which I wore all the time, I slept in it … It was like a jumper, I guess, and some kind of a shirt or blouse underneath and I guess I did have a coat. I must've had a coat because it was cold at times. We lived that way for a long time, and I got lost one time from my mother and father.”

The passing of time for this brief but life-altering period in my mother’s early childhood was measured only by changes in weather and the deaths of her brothers and other friends and loved ones. 

“We at that time somehow had a cow, and I was holding onto the cow and they pushed me away, and this must've been after the spring, after my brother died … There was grass on the ground and the cow was eating the grass, and then after looking and looking for my mother, I didn’t find her, and I just laid down in the grass crying, but I was still holding onto the leash of the cow, and then my mother found me. But then after, shortly after that, the Germans took the cow away from us, too. They took everything. Whatever we had, we didn’t have anything anymore.” 

The next thing my mother recalls is boarding a freight train when she was about five years old.

Lublin changed rapidly and dramatically when the city was taken by the Soviet Army on July 24,1944, and it became the temporary capital of a Soviet-controlled communist puppet government, the Polish Committee of National Liberation. The Polish capital was moved to Warsaw in January 1945. After the war, Lublin’s population quickly grew and it became a major scientific and research base and home to large automobile factory. After the war, Jewish Holocaust survivors in hiding or in Soviet territory had re-established a small community for a short time but most quickly left Poland for Israel and the West. Survivors like my mother and her parents were herded to a displaced persons camp in Germany.