In my mind Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya served as a trigger: For the revisions to Kosmodemyanskaya’s mythology, see A. Zhovtis, ‘Some Corrections to the Canonical Version’ (‘Уточнения к канонической версии’), Argumenty i Fakty, no. 38, September 1991. ‘Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya: Heroine or Symbol’ (‘Зоя Космодемьянская: Героиня или символ?’), Argymenty i Fakty, no. 43, November 1991.
Svetlana Aleksievich writes that women remember: From War’s Unwomanly Face, cited earlier.
Chapter 12: Kiev
Of course, that time in Kiev, the time of my mother’s late teens: Ilya Milshtein, ‘Children of the 20th Congress’ (‘Дитя XX съезда’), Zarubezhnye Zapiski, no. 6, 2006. William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, W.W. Norton, 2003.
While the late 1950s and early 1960s was undoubtedly one of the best times: I am indebted here to the musings of writer Aleksandr Ageev, ‘They Were Lucky’ (‘Им повезло’), Znamya, no. 11, 2007.
I remember reading writer Zoe Heller’s description: In Joanna Goldsworthy’s (ed.) Mothers by Daughters, Virago, 1995.
When we finally identify her family’s old home: I have found the description of Kreshatik after the war in Viktor Nekrasov’s Notes of a Gawker (Записки зеваки), ImWerdenVerlag, München, 2009. I have drawn on this book in my discussion of Nekrasov’s ideas about his city, in particular in chapter 13 which deals with his response to Babi Yar.
Chapter 13: Babi Yar
If there is a sacred site for my family anywhere in the world: I have drawn here on Anatoly Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar: A Documentary Novel (Бабий Яр. Роман-документ), Kiev, 2008. In English: Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel, translated by David Floyd, Jonathan Cape, 1970.
His war reporting went beyond the Holocaust: See Vassily Grossman’s A Writer at War: Vassily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941–1945, compiled and translated by Anthony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova, Pantheon, 2006.
Billie, of course, knows about Babi Yar: I learned about Zola’s famous open letter to the French President from the most treasured book of my pre-migration adolescence, Aleksandra Brushtein’s autobiographical trilogy The Road Disappears into the Distance. In all the books I went though growing up (whatever I could get my hands on really) there was no other character with whom I identified more than Sashenka – Brushtein’s fictional rendition of herself as a young girl. A daughter of a much-admired doctor in the pre-revolutionary Russian Empire, Sashenka is a deep, compassionate and brave young woman – just the kind I have always wanted to be. She is also obviously and importantly Jewish. Throughout the three parts of the book, her quest essentially is to figure out just one thing: what it means to be a decent person. She doesn’t have any ready-made answers, which in itself is remarkable; she just keeps searching page after page. I bought a copy of the book in St Petersburg with Marina by my side – I wanted to have it on my bookshelf, whether Billie would let me read it to her or not. Already in Australia, I Googled The Road Disappears into the Distance and discovered many people like me (women mainly) who consider Brushtein’s trilogy to be the best, most important book of their childhood. I, for one, read and re-read it an untold number of times, coming back in particular to the section dedicated to the Dreyfus Affair, which was taking place in France at the same time as the book’s narrative. Brunstein gives us Sashenka completely consumed by the story of the French writer’s public defense of captain Alfred Dreyfus (another assimilated Jew), wrongfully convicted on fabricated espionage charges. As Sashenka is devastated, enraged and inspired, so am I. Every single time. I leafed through the book back in Australia and saw what I could not have seen before – how Dreyfus’s Jewishness is sidelined and his affair reconfigured as a confrontation between France’s progressive and reactionary forces (the only way Brushtein could have written this part of the book). There is no mention of Zola’s accusing the French establishment of anti-Semitism, of his timeless words: ‘It is a crime to poison the minds of the meek and the humble, to stoke the passions of reactionism and intolerance, by appealing to that odious anti-Semitism that, unchecked, will destroy the freedomloving France of Human Rights.’ But at the time I was growing up – what the book could and did say was a true gift. In the book Dreyfus is a Jew and, unquestionably, a hero – an embodiment of dignity and courage, as is his Jewish wife. What is more, he is publicly defended by a famous and deeply respected non-Jew – one of the most influential people of his time. The famous non-Jew puts himself on the line to fight for the wrongfully accused Jew. Are you kidding me?
Writer Daniel Mendelsohn, a Jewish New Yorker of striking literary brilliance: Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million, HarperCollins, 2007.
Like Anatoly Kuznetsov, the writer Victor Nekrasov was not Jewish: I am drawing here on Nekrasov’s Notes of a Gawker, cited above.
For his part, Nekrasov was to pay dearly for his involvement: Kuznetsov’s son has written movingly about re-discovering his father already as an adult: Anatoly Kuznetskov, ‘Mama, I am alive-and-well! All is fine’ (‘Мама, я жив-здоров! Все хорошо’), Znamya, no. 5, 2001.
It took me a while to see what Mum had also realised: Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.
Epilogue
‘Insofar as we retain the capacity for attachment’, writes Eva Hoffman: Eva Hoffman, Life in Translation, cited above.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MARIA TUMARKIN HAS PUBLISHED two books, Traumascapes (2005) and Courage (2007). She lives in Melbourne with her two children and is currently working as a Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Research, Swinburne, on the international Social Memory and Historical Justice project.
Copyright
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