Episode 1: Somewhere in the World
Someone wise recently said to me that one of the greatest gifts a person can give is to share their lived experience. This is mine.
One of the first songs I remember learning is Gdeto na Belom Svete, which translates from Russian roughly as Somewhere in the White World.
I have no idea where I first heard the song. Maybe it was in a movie; maybe someone I knew sang it; maybe I heard it on the radio (the last is pretty unlikely, as I don’t remember having a radio in any of the apartments we ever lived in). In any case, I only ever learned the first verse, again roughly translated as follows:
Somewhere in the white world, there, where it’s always cold, bears rub their backs on the wheel of the world. Centuries fly past; seas sleep under ice. Bears rub against the wheel; the earth spins.
I loved this song then, and still do, all these years later, living on the other side of the world, where the song is never heard, except maybe in some dark little Russian tea room.
I was born in the Soviet Union in 1964 and lived the entirety of my childhood, even into early adolescence, in the city that was then called Leningrad. I had no idea there was anything wrong with my family living with a whole other family (mother, father, child, and grandmother) in a two-room, communal apartment. It’s how everyone lived, at least everyone lucky enough to have been granted an apartment in the first place. I also had no idea there was anything wrong with my family, specifically. There was. This remembrance isn’t mine; it’s my father’s. I have no memory of the event, but since it wasn’t the last one of its kind, have no reason to doubt its validity.
One afternoon, when I was about 3 or 4 years old, as my dad and I were exiting our apartment building, a grandmother and her grandchild were entering it. Upon seeing us, the grandmother drew the grandchild protectively to herself and hissed, “Careful, he might hit you.” My father had never hit anything in his life, discounting maybe a pesky fly now and again. He certainly had never hit a person, much less a child.
So, why the fear? Why did this grandmother, so protective of the grandchild in her care, shy away from us and feel the need to whisper such a dire warning to the child? Simple. We were Jews, my dad and I. That’s all, just a Jewish father and his Jewish daughter. But it was enough. As I said, in the years following this incident, I would see and hear this type of thing many times over. But on that day, my dad, pretending not to hear the venomous words, hustled me away from the building and on toward whatever errands awaited us, as both he and my mother would go on to do many times during my childhood in the Soviet Union.
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