“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Ferris Buehler
This blog interweaves two separate but related topics.
The first consists of the story of my family’s struggle starting with our escape from Moscow, my birthplace. This journey encompassed the escape from the Soviet Union at the beginning of WWII, our survival in Nazi Germany where we lived in grave danger for the duration of the war – including the intense bombings towards the end of the war, and eventually our immigration to Paris, France. Lastly it describes our immigration to the US – complicated by lack of legal travel papers of any kind (see Post on the so-called Nansen Passport).
The second topic consists of personal observations of what it is like to be a Russian living abroad. This part of the story is personal and subjective. It describes, for instance, the strange food fixations peculiar to Russians, the peculiarities of their predominant religion (Russian Orthodoxy) including the quasi-worship of the so-called Fools for Christ, and last but not least the Russians’ obsession with autocrats, from Monarchs to dictators. I touch as well on the prevalent anti-Semitism of many Russians, both abroad as well as in Russia, an important and highly upsetting aspect of the Russian character.
The journey part of the story involves my recollections of the courage and fortitude of my mother, Risha (a Russian nickname for Irene). It is backed wherever possible by the testimony of other members of our family, including that of Risha’s first cousin, diadia Volodia (“diadia” is uncle in Russian), as well as stories related to me by Risha’s half-sister, Vera, on my return trip to Moscow some twenty years ago.
Our survival in Nazi Germany brings back particularly painful memories, and inevitably leads one to speculate and comment on how warfare has morphed in recent years from battles between armies on battle fields into large-scale displacements of civilians and subsequent punishing bombings of cities and their civilian inhabitants – the theory being that inevitably the civilians will rise against their leaders. This theory has never proven to be correct in my observation, quite the contrary – bombing civilian targets has merely reinforced civilian’s patriotism.
As always, the famous song by Peter, Paul and Mary “Where have all the flowers gone?” with its painful refrain “When will they ever learn?” brings to the foreground man’s basic inhumanity, with other issues equally painful, including the issues of collaboration with the enemy (see Post on Collaboration), war crimes and genocides. Both sides of any conflict are frequently equally guilty.
To lighten the prevailing mood, I have included from time to time Soviet-era jokes, as well as snatches of poetry – largely in English, but occasionally in other languages.
Profoundly wise people, a number of whom received Nobel Prizes, were notably tone-deaf to the realities of modern warfare, among whom Winston Churchill, who at the infamous Yalta Conference humanized Joseph Stalin by referring to him as “Uncle Joe”. The Yalta accord resulted in a decades long “cold war”, with its enormous numbers of killed, jailed or otherwise brutalized civilians.
“When will they ever learn”.