Fairy tale characters always appeared to have a pretty tough time fighting dragons and scaling thorny walls no matter their goal. If the character’s story is set somewhere vaguely in the central or eastern parts of Europe, the dragons often seemed to be angrier and the walls higher and more treacherous. Or maybe during the time I was reading these tales, I hadn’t yet connected the metaphoric dragons and walls to modern political history moving across our black and white TV set.
Europe, Eastern Europe in particular, makes me think of struggle; physical, mental, social and in the late 1970’s, political. The political walls that separated the East from the West, only a small portion being actual, physical walls, were solid and seemingly impenetrable. As impenetrable as the rhetoric was cold, “icy relations” was a common descriptor. It certainly wasn’t termed the “Cold War” for nothing. American and Soviet relations in particular had been so cold for so long that one expected the lead story on most national new stations every night to lead with Cold War updates.
It may be those very walls that helped fuel part of my fascination with Russian language, literature, culture, history, and the “others” behind the walls. Maybe it was all those movies and TV shows where the Americans were always “the good guys” saving the world from the Russian “bad guys.” I did have a personal conundrum with the whole “bad guys” moniker as much of my family came from pre-iron curtain Eastern Europe. When I was in 7th grade, I took a year of Russian because my grandfather, who was born in Ukraine, would break into a heartfelt version of “Очи чёрные” to me and I wanted to know what it meant.
Очи чёрные, очи страстные
Очи жгучие и прекрасные
Как люблю я вас, как боюсь я вас
Знать, увидел вас я в недобрый час
Dark and burning eyes, Dark as midnight skies
Full of passion flame, full of lovely game
Oh how I’m in love with you, oh how afraid I am of you.
Days when I met you made me sad and blue. (See NOTE)
How lovely, how passionate. I started reading Russian history books from the time I was 12. I changed schools and of course Russian wasn’t a language choice, but I did try to get my high school to teach Russian. That effort fell flat. Really, really flat…social suicide flat but things like that were of no consequence to me, I knew my peers would just ignore my machinations. I feel compelled to mention however that about ten years after my request, my high school would see a huge influx of Russian émigrés into the student population. I’d be lying if I denied feeling a bit self-righteous, we could have been ahead of the curve. There is even an ice hockey team at that school.
My attempts to keep up on learning Russian failed; I needed a classroom and a teacher to make progress. Keep in mind that the concept of high school students taking college courses then didn’t really exist and certainly a moderately good student like myself would not have been encouraged to work above what the old guard of the day would have considered my “ability” as assessed by teachers for whom I had never been a favorite. Like the political walls, the social, academic, and gender walls were strong and tall and thorny and I didn’t have the desire to try to scale them, I had other things to tend to.
Like the throngs of other Ohio kids, I put in my application to the state university that accepted pretty much everyone at the time. I had picked walls that weren’t so high or so hard to scale and off I trooped with 60,000 other undergrads. What I found out was that even if I didn’t see that public institution as an academic threat, the paperwork war was amazing and bloody. I sometimes think that my undergraduate degree had more to do with nimble administrative navigation than it did with any concern of grade point averages or course struggles. Couple that with the fact that my other options disappeared as soon as I signed my acceptance letter; my divorced mother immediately moved to a smaller apartment in a different suburb and she didn’t include me in the space count, so scale those academic walls I did. Once I took my seat in public classrooms that had clearly seen hard times, I realized it was exactly what I had longed for, what I needed. But this is really just the prologue to the real story, a setting of the stage of a much more transcendent learning experience.
Jimmy Carter was President of the United States and I only mention this because as soon as Reagan was elected in my senior year of college, the student loans dried up. Carter, who was totally unprepared for the quagmire that is Washington politics to this day, was like a puny middle school boy being pushed around by high school bullies, but I do owe him some thanks for my education. I had just about as much federal financial aid possible for some who was not an academic high achiever and part of the aid package included a good amount of work/study funds. And this is where the story really begins.
After an awful first job experience at one of the campus libraries, I looked through the binders, yes, binders (it was the late 70’s after all) and saw a job at the Department of Slavic and Eastern European Language and Literatures. BINGO! That was home! These were people I understood. I knew it would be a “characters welcome” roster. From the Serbian Orthodox priest to the African American professor who was the Serbo-Croatian expert, it was an amazing and unique place to work. Characters weren’t just welcome; they were created in places like a Slavic studies department during the Soviet period. Just consider what it took to organize a study abroad program in those days! A professor from Romania, with whom I still feel a very deep bond, was a “Ceaușescu” survivor.
Nicolae Ceaușescu was proud to be the autocrat of one of the eight Soviet satellite countries. He and his wife were responsible for starving and repressing the people living in Romania and whose execution in 1989 was televised to, and by the population they brutalized. Among their many cruel policies, Decree 770 outlawed abortion, and was in fact an agenda to boost the size of the Romanian population and thus seemingly achieve more power using a numbers game. Women were expected to have a minimum of four pregnancies. In a country impoverished by war and held in check by a ubiquitous, authoritarian government, people were starved by decree. The onus of forced pregnancy only led to illness, suffering and death by the most defenseless, the least “connected.” This was no “state secret” but most American’s were not really interested or educated in people’s lives behind the Iron Curtain. Romanians were just more of the enemy who must be defeated. What we didn’t know or care to learn was that the Romanian people had already been defeated behind that Iron Curtain by their own leadership.
In a square, squat concrete building at the far end of my academic world was the foreign language building whose bland façade was so very Soviet in design that even my freshman mind had to laugh at architectural irony. Among the language departments in all that concrete ugliness, was the Slavic Department of course. There has been long-standing folklore that the architect of the building committed suicide and there’s something about that story that rings true. A building that was supposed to have an atrium and seven floors ended up an aesthetic nightmare. The three blanked out buttons on the elevator panel for the floors that never materialized mocked us until the language departments moved out in the early 2000’s and the building’s renovation made it unrecognizable from its previous incarnation.
The door to the Slavic Department was positioned in probably the most absurdly appropriate place possible. It was in a hidden corner on the second floor. If you didn’t know it was there, you might never notice it. Once in the door however, the language, history and politics seeped out of the concrete walls and the surprisingly long bright windows had a certain bright surprise to them. If you have never had the opportunity to spend time with Slavs and Eastern Europeans, you might not understand why some of us have a special place in our hearts for them. They often emit a kind of hopeful weight of the world and dark humor that marks them. The other day I had to visit the Slavic section of our beautiful new campus library and in the light, bright surroundings and rounded-edged new furniture, the old books and manuscripts spilled over everywhere and demanded attention. How could you not run your eyes over the Cyrillic letters and gold-leaf toned covers of books that smell like books and would never, never smell like a Kindle. I told my office I would be back after my library errand, in about 20 minutes, and over an hour later, including at least a half dozen stories, some eye-rolling at their own inefficiency and the dozens of stories told over other stories because there were just so much to explain and know, I walked in the door of my office apologizing that I had taken so long with the explanation that I had forgotten I was dealing with the Slavs and nothing “only takes a few minutes.”
Seeing those vestiges of history and language I was brought back to that odd concrete block corner office and one of the most pertinent lessons I ever learned in college. I think I was sorting mail or running dittos – that really wasn’t so very long ago – while greeting and talking to that favorite professor of mine, who I will call R. As she chatted and liltingly rolled her r’s in a way only a native speaker of an r-rolling language can, another woman academic walked in the door. I think she heard R talking and wanted to say “hello” which of course in academia is never just “hello” and stood inside that innocuous doorway with R while I stood in my space like a quiet, mannerly undergraduate should but rarely does. The conversation was very quickly co-opted by the visiting academic who I recall was from the Romance language department. (Sad that so few departments of Romance languages use that name any more.) The visitor quickly turned the topic of conversation to how upset she was when she had heard R use the term “abortion” in a previous conversation and that she was just sure that R couldn’t support abortion as R’s father was a clergyman and she had clearly been raised in the “church” so she couldn’t possibly be supportive of “killing babies.” She said she realized that R was not a native-speaker of English and therefore actually meant to use the word “miscarriage” of course.
R dispelled that notion immediately and with no vestige of any apology to be found. She certainly understood the difference and absolutely, without hesitation supported a woman’s right to safe legal abortion. She had seen what happens when that right is taken away. Everyone suffers and no one more than the children whose mothers angrily took these obligatory children to the state-run orphanages calling them “Ceaușescu’s child,” and if “he wanted children so badly, he could raise this one too.”
You may take a moment to recall the Romanian orphanages that garnered a reasonable amount of attention after the fall of Communist Romania. Horrible, dirty, underfunded places where HIV/AIDS was rampant due to shared needles and children were seen rocking in their cribs as stimulation because so few people tended them and some were only touched when absolutely necessary. This was the reality of what happens when the government starts legislating people’s bodies and is one demonstration of the difference between being pro-life and pro-birth, ulterior motives may not be of the religious sort but that does not matter to children.
R was as adamant as she was unapologetic and I have never heard such clear, unveiled language when it comes to the topic of abortion. R had been a principal in an elementary school, she knew these children, she tried to educate these children. She saw the effects on the adults who had no means to feed themselves, let alone be forced to have more offspring at the behest of the state. No, she absolutely believed that abortion should never be outlawed; not by religions, not by bureaucrats, not by anyone who wasn’t in a position to be held responsible for rectifying the consequences of their own legislative lunacy.
I think I was probably standing there with my mouth hanging open but not for the same reason as the visitor, who made some sort of excuse and left, entirely vanquished through the Slavic portal, post haste. I always wondered if she ever interacted with R again or changed her friendly demeanor toward R but R was as tattooed with that experience as any Holocaust victim, she had lived daily with the vestiges of the evil only man can do to man or in this case it seems to woman. She was not fazed by someone else’s “theory” on correctness.
I think R poured herself another cup of coffee, took her mail, and quietly rolled her elegant r’s up to her office, no recounting of such horror could even faintly compare with having lived it but just the experience of having heard it stays with me always. It reminds me of what can happen in the world when we allow someone else to make the rules that we have to accept by default and inaction and how the unintended repercussions of any policy constructed by those who don’t have to abide by it can often reach into the future and future of the future. In my mind I sometimes stand inside that unobtrusive doorway and try to remember some things should not be talked about in clouded, polite, politically correct rhetoric. It’s just too dangerous.
It seems so long ago that laws were passed and the battle for a woman’s control over her body ended in victory, but just the other day a report came out that stated women who live in areas where there legislation was used as a weapon to block women’s health options led to very rapid disintegration in these women’s lives and fortunes So much like Soviet Romania in the long run, the US politicians seem to have figured out a smarter, sneakier way of passing legislation using self-serving ideology and denigrating the consequences by blaming their victims. So maybe we have to climb back over the walls we managed to scale before, open up the wounds from the thorns that we thought had healed and start over again, this time removing the vicious thorns and finally felling the walls that still stand.
NOTE: The lyrics of the song were written by the Ukrainian poet and writer Yevhen Hrebinka in Ukrainian. The first publication of the poem was in Hrebinka’s own Russian translation in Literaturnaya gazeta on 17 January 1843. The words and music were written respectively by a Ukrainian poet Evheniy Grebenka (Евге́ний Па́влович Гребёнка) and a composer Florian Hermann
Khatzkel Did It 