My Name is GRISHAEV

GRYCHAJEW

HRYSCHAEV

GRYSEHAJEW

GRISCHAIL

GRISHAJEV

GRYSHAJEVA

GRYSHAJEV

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.

As many variations for the spellings of first names Grigori, Alexandra (my maternal grandmother) and Luba (my mother) exist on those German records.

The English spellings they choose were very important in creating a permanent identity once they arrived in the United States in 1950.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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^th century texts, I’d alienated myself from my own mother.

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. 

The Binds of Birthplace and Social Aspiration

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Somehow I was, by my physical imperfections, cursed by my Eastern European heritage while my mother had transcended the ideal of American beauty.

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.

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.

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.