Episode 7: Words, Words, Words
As I have mentioned before, I was, as a child, and remain to this day, a devout bookworm. Reading is a sanctuary from stress, a relief from daily worries, a way to shut out the present world and dive into worlds of my choosing. I discovered the magic of reading early. Russian is a phonetic language, with an alphabet of 33 letters (10 vowels, 21 consonants, and 2 modifiers), compared to English alphabet’s 26 letters. Each Russian consonant represents only one sound. There are no th sounds, and the sh, ch, long j or long s, and tz sounds each get a letter of their own. The sh sounds actually get two letters — one for a soft pronunciation, and one for the hard pronunciation, depending on the placement of the tongue in the mouth. The two modifiers change the sound of the letter before them to either a hard or a soft pronunciation. Each Russian vowel also represents only one sound, so there’s no need for rules or letter combinations for changing the sound of the vowel from long to short. Therefore, learning to read requires only a basic mastery of the Russian alphabet. Once you know the letters, and the sounds they make, you can read!
My mother made sure that I could read by the time I was 5 or so, which meant that I would be happily occupied by the time my younger sibling made an appearance. I was pretty excited about the addition of a baby to our family, and I lobbied hard for a younger sister. The day my mother went into labor, I was at my grandparents’ house, dealing with a raging middle ear infection and a doctor’s appointment. The day is etched in my memory with vicious clarity. Ear infections, as well as tonsillitis, and eye problems, not to mention many broken bone incidents (I was a major klutz, but more on that in a later episode), occurred regularly during my childhood, so trips to health clinics and hospitals feature pretty prominently in my memories anyway, but this trip really stands out. My grandmother insisted that this visit would be painless, probably to get me to stop crying and keep me quiet on the bus, or trolley, or whatever mode of public transportation was required to get from the apartment to the doctor. I tried very hard to believer her, even though I had lots of experience that told me she was wrong at best and quite possibly lying through her teeth. As it turned out, it did hurt. The pain was excruciating, as the doctor poured some sort of drops into my ear and then proceeded to dig in the same ear to get out the, well, never mind. I howled and thrashed, and afterward no amount of ice cream would make me forget.
Later that day, as I was quietly sulking and hating my grandmother for lying to me, my father arrived with the good news that the new baby was here! Forgetting my inflamed ear and my inflamed sense of personal injury, I jumped up and down, thrilled at this new development. My baby sister was here! What would we name her? Could I help name her? When was she coming home? My tired and overwhelmed father, having traveled for several hours from the hospital by bus, trolley, metro, etc., then had the unenviable task of telling me that the new baby was a boy. But I had asked for a sister, and they promised me a sister! I had been lied to twice in the same day! In vain did my father explain to me that girls were much more expensive than boys, and they simply couldn’t afford a baby sister. They could have used the coins in my piggy bank! But no, they went and got a boy, and I would have to have a brother. I would never forgive them, any of them.
My brother turned out to be OK, I eventually conceded. He was a fat, happy baby, with huge brown eyes and an irrational fear of the phone, whether it was ringing or not. He would need my guidance and protection.
So, I read all the books I could get my hands on, and I told the new baby brother everything I could remember. It was a lot. Once word got out that I could read, all birthday gifts, New Year gifts, “we’re having a party and need you to be quiet” gifts, etc. became gifts of books. I read Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book and Rikki TIkki Tavi, Jack London’s tales of the Klondike, fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Greek and Roman myths, Middle Eastern stories about genies and magic carpets, Russian folktales, and countless others.
All the books I read as a child remain treasured memories for me, except one. For my ninth or tenth birthday, friends of my parents gave me a large book of fairy tales. I was, of course, thrilled, and began reading it that night, just before going to bed. Big mistake! The first story was about two children who are kidnapped by a pack of lemurs. The book was beautifully illustrated, so not only were there rich descriptions of these creatures with their strange, liquid eyes, but huge, terrifying illustrations. I skipped ahead to the next story.
It turned out to be about a farmer and his wife, who had no children. One day, while driving his mule down the road, the farmer finds a basket with a baby girl inside. Of course, he takes the baby home, and he and his wife adopt her. The child can’t seem to learn to talk, but she makes a sound when sneezing that translates into something like “cha hanna harra,” so that’s what her adoptive parents call her. One day, the farmer finds one of his chickens dead in the yard, completely drained of blood. And so begins a series of grizzly finds — pigs, sheep, goats, all found dead, their corpses drained of blood. The farmer and his wife are distressed and worried about the possibility of a wild animal. One night, the farmer hears the cow mooing loudly, and, thinking to catch the animal who’s been killing his animals, he grabs a rifle and heads to the barn. When he rushes into the barn, he sees the cow, lying in the hay, its eyes staring blankly, and the baby Cha Hanna Harra drinking the cow’s blood from the animal’s neck. They had adopted a baby vampire! The rest of the story is a blur in my memory. I think the farmer and his wife tried to reason with the kid. I think neighbors started to talk about their own animals getting killed. In the end, I think the farmer took the little ghoul far away and left her on the side of a road or in the forest, or something.
I was traumatized and never cracked that book open again. The stories haunted my dreams. I saw those awful lemur eyes in the dark, and imagined the horrible sneezing sounds of the baby vampire. It took a very, very long time to get over that book. But as horrible as those stories were, they didn’t keep me from reading everything else.
And there was always plenty to read. My parents valued books. There were several large bookcases in the apartment, stuffed with British classics, Russian classics, poetry, mythology, and many other works. Many of these books were contraband, bought who-knows-where, at great risk to both the seller and the buyer. These books were banned. Their authors were Russian dissidents or foreign agitators or just writers not sympathetic to the cause of Communism. As a child, I didn’t know which books were banned and which weren’t. I just read!
One day, I came home from school to find the bookcases empty, most of the books gone. My children’s books were still there, some of them, but the great collections of poetry and classics were nowhere to be seen. My father explained that they had to sell the books in order to buy plane tickets for when we emigrated from the Soviet Union in a couple of months. Years later, I found out that the books were indeed sold, but not for plane ticket money. But that’s a whole other post.
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