Advertisments
Much Ado About Publishing
Walking to Siberia
When long-lost family from Russia came for a visit in the winter of 1977, I was reminded -- in a most colorful way -- of the free speech we often take for granted.
My great-uncle, Misha, and great-aunt, Betty, represented what life might have been like for the rest of us had my maternal grandmother, Esther, not left Russia around 1920 when she was only a teenager, and come to New York. Esther and her older sister, Nina (they called her "Nessie"), who was already in America, intended to bring the rest of the family here, but that was not to be. Esther married, and in 1936, during the Depression, she and her husband, Louis, and their children (including my infant mother) moved to a farm near Hartford, Connecticut.
Back in Russia, Misha was only three when his big sister Esther left their small town of Krevozer, near Odessa, and 25 years later, he would be the only member of their large family to survive World War II. Ironically, he only survived because he was off in the Russian Army, fighting with the Allies. Back home, his entire family was wiped out.
He met Betty, who had lost her husband and family, and they got married.
After the war, the family in America received word that Misha had survived. They maintained contact for a while, but then more than 20 years passed with no word from Misha, and without word from his American family reaching him.
Then, suddenly, through a series of coincidences and intermediaries, our family found him again. Shortly thereafter, in early 1977, Misha, then an engineer in his early 60s, and his wife Betty, a school principal, miraculously obtained a tourist visa for a one-month visit to America.
This was wild. In the U.S., practically nobody Jewish had any family from the original immigrant's generation still living in "the old country."
First stop, the northeast. Misha and Betty stayed with family in New York, then Hartford. My aunt, uncle, and cousins gave them the New England grand tour, but what fascinated Misha the most was the electric razor they bought him. He'd never seen one before.
The Hartford family then brought Misha and Betty south to spend a week with those of us who'd moved from the Northeast to Miami a few years earlier. I was in college and came home for the reunion.
Misha and Betty arrived with gifts from Russia, including one prompted by some unusual propaganda: They'd been told by the Soviet government that we had no black pepper in America. So they graciously brought some. A sack of it. More than we could use in ten lifetimes.
They also brought Russian dark chocolate (hmm good), Russian perfume (mmm bad), and Russian vodka (mmm I'm dizzy), and plenty of photos of their family, including those long gone, many dating back to the early 1900s.
Since I don't speak Russian or Yiddish, and Misha and Betty could speak nothing else, my parents and others who spoke Yiddish provided simultaneous translation.
Still, we had a problem.
Betty's and Misha's fear of the KGB and the Soviet government didn't let up, not in New York, not in Hartford, and not in Miami. They didn't want to say much about their lives, and refrained from expressing anything even resembling an opinion.
One afternoon, we all sat by the lake on the dock behind my parents' home. But, despite the relaxed setting, Betty and Misha still spoke vaguely when asked even the most basic questions about life in Russia. When I reminded them that they were free to say anything they pleased, they said that it was not like that for them in Russia, and that they didn't feel safe speaking openly here, either. They were still wary that somehow the KGB would know what they were saying. KGB in the bushes? Bugging the backyard? Maybe a neighbor could hear them and would report them to the U.S. government, or even to the Soviets?
Although a relative shot me a look that said, "Stop trying to get them to open up," I would not be deterred from my mission. I wanted Betty and Misha to feel free to say anything they wanted. Also, I was born curious, and had interviewed people long before anybody paid me to do it, so I was eager to hear whatever they had to say. Unwilling to give up, I decided it was time for something dramatic. So, I did the only thing I thought would prove how free they were here.
Jimmy Carter had recently been elected President. I knew they knew that. And I also knew they would understand me because I was going to use a Yiddish word they certainly knew. So, despite the fact that I'm a life-long Democrat who even volunteered on the Carter campaign while in college, I stood at the edge of the dock, and screamed across the lake at the top of my lungs:
"JIMMY CARTER IS A SCHMUCK!"
Misha and Betty turned white. Their mouths dropped open, their shoulders hunched, and their eyes darted around frantically. I had just called the President of the United States a jerk, an idiot, or, in the literal translation-- a penis.
In those days, if someone in Russia had said that about their leader in public, prison or worse might await them.
Misha and Betty were genuinely terrified that the worst was about to happen to me, to them, to all of us. After a few moments, when absolutely nothing happened, and everyone else was laughing, Betty and Misha smiled and relaxed in their deck chairs.
"See, I told you it was okay," I said in English as someone translated.
Point proven.
From that moment on, my Russian great-aunt and great-uncle were different. They'd experienced a kind of freedom they'd never known.
Gradually, they told stories, expressed opinions, and even made a particularly bold request. Betty understood only a few English words, and was eager to learn the language. But, she said that in Russia they were forbidden to have anything written in English. She rose above her fears and asked if we could write down the letters of the alphabet for her. She said she'd hide the piece of paper in her bra before going through customs.
This brave move no longer shocked me when I found out that Betty had survived World War II only because she'd fled Odessa early and walked almost the entire way to Siberia.
Oh, and she was pregnant at the time.
I learned that even though they had visitors' visas, when Misha and Betty received their airline tickets from their American family, the couple told their school-age grandchildren that the trip was to Poland. After all, Betty said, the children's school was communist-run, and she thought it best that the kids not run around telling everyone that their grandparents were off in America.
Although they were well-educated professionals, they lived in a tiny, cramped apartment with most of their extended family. The Russian apartment stereotype, right down to the bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling.
They had very little money, but even if they'd had more it wouldn't have mattered. They weren't Communist Party members, and the regular Russian shops carried very little food and other goods. Usually just a few items at any one time, and they had to stand in line nearly all day just to buy whatever happened to be in stock.
So, although not usually advertised as America's favorite tourist spots, grocery stores were the highlight of their visit. They thought it was the most amazing thing they'd ever seen: all that food in one place, no empty shelves, no waiting.
Betty and I had to speak words to each other through other people. But we could speak music to each other directly. We both played the piano, and when she was visiting us in Miami we sat next to each other on the piano bench as she taught me how to play her favorite Yiddish folk song, a beautiful haunting melody called Vu Is Dus Gesselle.
"Music is the universal language," she said to me through a family member who translated.
Although they didn't want to go back to Russia, Misha and Betty also didn't want to leave their family there, not knowing when or even if they could ever join them here. So, Misha and Betty didn't apply for residency, and when their month-long tourist visa was up, they returned to the Soviet Union.
Misha died a couple of years later.
I spoke to Betty on the phone once in the mid-1980s, with a friend of mine who could speak Yiddish on the extension translating for me and Betty. My cousin, Sylvia, spoke to Betty on the phone (in Yiddish), from time to time, and they exchanged letters often. Betty wrote in Russian. Sylvia found a translator.
In the fall of 1996, when Betty was in her 80s, she and most of her family finally left Russia for good when they immigrated to Germany. I spoke to her on the phone once again in a three-way call with Sylvia doing the Yiddish translating from Maryland.
For more than 30 years, I've wanted to apologize to Jimmy Carter, even though I'm sure he'd appreciate my staged insult as the colorful example of free speech that it was, and be happy to have lent his name to the occasion.
Betty enjoyed a few years of freedom before she died.
I still play the song she taught me.