Dyadya Misha and the Holy Archangel Michael

 “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.”

“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.”

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.  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.

Did Lubachka see angels?

Maybe.

Maybe it was the hunger or the dehydration causing hallucinations.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Did angels appear when Mishinka’s frail body was tossed into a mass grave?

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.

The most traumatic memory isn’t the moment of Mishinka’s death, it’s a moment of regret.

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.

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

Everything, in this instance, means enough clothing to cover a full body or enough food to keep children alive.

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.

“When my little brother Michael died, that's when my grandmother, my father's mother, and his sister were very brutally killed.”

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.”

Lubachka can’t recollect how or why they’d returned to the border of Smolensk.

“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.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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.

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.

I was tired. I had barely slept for days. I rarely sleep enough. Those voices keep me awake.

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.

A “Vetuchu” Perspective on Veteran’s Day

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

From my favorite Vonnegut novel, Slaughterhouse-Five: “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.’"

I risk enraging some who haven’t read Cat's Cradle, 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.”

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.

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."

The Great Date Debate and What’s in a Name?

My mother was born in somewhere in Vitebsk Oblast in Belarus. A birth certificate later issued in Germany lists Lagi, the village where her father was born, as her place of birth. But my mother says she was born in another nearby village where her maternal grandmother lived at the time. (I’ll get into the geographic significance later.) To the best of her recollection, she 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.

The notion of a birthday being a movable feast would be social sacrilege to the typical American today. As a first-generation American who was raised Russian Orthodox, I’ve long been bewildered by the American obsession with one’s own birthday after age 10 or so. That some people promote their “birthday week” on social media, inviting all their Facebook “friends” to attend multiple celebrations in their honor is at odds with how I was taught to treat that day. It wasn’t until I moved to New York that I encountered the very common practice of inviting out other people with the expectation that “friends” will pay not only for their own food, drink and entertainment, but also pick up the tab for the person celebrating a birthday. I’d known only the social custom of treating the people you invite out as guests, regardless of the occasion. This behavior has now extended even into business relationships. A recent interaction with a wealthy (“I’m more mass affluent than upper affluent, by New York standards,” he bragged) work “source,” who invited me to meet for drinks and then made it a point to say he “relies on reporters to buy him drinks,” rattled my roots in etiquette and egoism. In the tradition carried down by my mother, it is self-centered and self-congratulatory to focus on one’s own birthday. It’s the Saint’s Day which is feted, but as a religious feast, not as an opportunity to receive gifts.

Luba is short for Lubov (more commonly transliterated as Lyubov), and means Love. Along with Faith (Vera) and Hope (Nadezhda), Love is the youngest of three daughters of Saint Sophia the Martyr. The girls were named after virtues mentioned by Saint Paul in 1 Corinthians 13. Born in Italy, Sophia is venerated by all the Eastern Orthodox churches. The story goes that Roman Emperor Hadrian (117-138) ordered the three young girls to be tortured by being burned over an iron grating, then thrown into a hot oven and finally into a cauldron with boiling tar. Lubov was tied to a wheel and beaten with rods until her body was covered with bloody welts. Sofia was forced to watch as her three daughters were beheaded. During my mother’s own lifetime, her father watched as his sister and mother were brutally tortured and killed. My mother herself witnessed countless brutal murders and sudden deaths of many of her loved ones and fellow ethnic Russian friends throughout her early child. My mother still lives her life as a martyr, sacrificing everything for her own daughters. This, after caring at home for her father, her mother and her husband, while all three suffered debilitating and consecutive illnesses over a period of decades.

I, too, was named after a martyr, or holy sufferer, Natalia (Natasha is the most common Russian diminutive and is my legal first name), the wife of Saint Adrian, also known as Hadrian, or Adrian of Nicomedia, a Herculean Guard of the Roman Emperor Galerius Maximian. They were married for a year before being martyred March 4, 306. March 4 (by the Gregorian or as my mother calls it “American” calendar) is the day my maternal grandmother died.

Such details have been a prominent part of my life, and often the topic of ridicule by those who shun any such coincidence as evidence of some greater force in the universe. This is why I rarely speak publicly about mysticism or other spiritual pursuits for conscious awareness of an ultimate reality. My study of Russian literature was one of the few periods of my life when I could indulge such ideas and examine, from a scholarly perspective, the deep, layered meaning of names, dates and anything that can be tied to a person’s destiny. Readers of 18th and 19th century Russian literature know that names are extremely significant and are chosen deliberately and carefully. Perhaps the most blatant name symbolism is found in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Kara come from the Turkish meaning "black" and maz in Russian means "paint" or "smear,” so the name is loosely (or tightly, if you choose to make the argument I did in undergraduate essays on the novel) means smeared in black or, more symbolically and obviously, just destined to darkness or cursed. Though in the years since I left grad school I’ve meet a shocking few people who have read this literary masterpiece, it is interwoven into the cultural fabric of all our lives via its influence on a cross-disciplinary group od highly influential figures including Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Cormac McCarthy and Kurt Vonnegut. The Brothers Karamazov is one of the most profound and complex ethical debates of God, free will and morality, and the meaning behind each name is an intrinsic part of the intricate story that frames the intellectual discourse. The exploration of the dialectic is not undermined, but enhanced, by an appreciation of and respect for the chosen names.

 “I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they've shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.” _ Part II, Book V (Pro and Contra), Chapter 3 (The Brothers Make Friends.)

Oh, if only.

More like this:

"I'm a Karamazov... when I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I'm even pleased that I'm falling in such a humiliating position, and for me I find it beautiful. And so in that very shame I suddenly begin a hymn. Let me be cursed, let me be base and vile, but let me also kiss the hem of that garment in which my God is clothed; let me be following the devil at the same time, but still I am also your son, Lord, and I love you, and I feel a joy without which the world cannot stand and be." _ Dmitri (Mitya) to Alyosha, saying he has fallen in love with a "low woman,” Grushenka, Book III (The Sensualists), Chapter 3 (The Confession of a Passionate Heart.)

Now for a little comic relief. In her single years, my mother had a male admirer who called her Grushenka. She took great offense, because the lusty character is a depicted as a contemporary Mary Magdalene. My mother, a virgin until she married my father, viewed herself as the opposite of a Grushenka. Most women might have considered the comparison a compliment. Dostoyevsky’s Grushenka evolves from a free spirit to a faithful companion who accepts her role in the murder of Fyodor and agrees to share the guilt with Dmitri, only to become the personification of the ideal Russian woman. No wonder Marilyn Monroe wanted to play her in the movie.