My Mama, My Hero by Katia Raina

Last month, Katia Raina wrote for us about the fear she felt growing up in the shadow of Vladimir Lenin,a Soviet hero. She also promised to tell us about her personal hero, her Mama. Today, she keeps that promise. It's easy to see why her mother was a tower of strength during hard times and also her source of inspiration for a brighter future!

Mama and I shared a life,
but when we look back at it,
what I see
     isn’t always
             what she sees.

The mirror to the past grows foggy.

I could tell you about the struggles my mama went through in the U.S.S.R.,
    fighting her way,
           making mistakes
                toward her own personal freedom,
                    through the stale society that tried to suffocate her.

But do I have the right to share her with the world this way?

I decided instead
to just show you what I saw,
through my big scared Soviet eyes,
when I gazed
        at the beauty
            and freedom
               that was my mama,
                                  my hero.

There is a Russian saying:
“The tallest blade of grass
is the first one to be cut down by a scythe.”
In other words,
        don’t stick your neck out.
              Keep your head level.
                   Don’t stand out too much.

It was a difficult balance:
On the one hand,
teachers,
       parents,
            peers.
They spurred you on,
they wanted things from you,
expected greatness.
Dress your best,
        Raise your hand,
                  Show initiative
                          Make us proud.

But at the same time,
Even as they encouraged you to reach higher,
You could almost feel
The weight
Of an invisible hand
Pressing
          Down
              On your shoulder.

My mama was a short slender girl,
But her green witch eyes
hit people straight on,
always.
Her back stayed straight
Always.
She didn’t need heels
               To tower over the crowd.

She is Jewish –
People could tell
Just by looking at her.
          Her looks were a statement.

Her father dared emigrate
To the treacherous United States
In the 1960s,
The height at the cold war.
     That made Mama
             the daughter
                       of a traitor.

And still she wanted a Life with a capital L,
    Big dreams,
           big city,
                    journalism.
She wanted
the best
  university in the country.

      She wanted.
           How dare she?

She dared. She fought.
I watched her from a distance
Of phone calls
           and visits
                              and missing her.

With delight and yearning,
I glimpsed her secret life –
The illegal movies
About dissidents
she and her friends watched
Projected onto a white sheet,
Cracks underneath her apartment’s door stuffed with pillows,
Lest the neighbors overhear.

I collected snippets of freedom:
Her friends’ laughter,
Her secrets shared in passing –
“Have you ever thought that God might be real?”

As I grew,
My country changed,
Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary,
The breeze of perestroika,
             reconstruction
                            change,
Became the winds of true personal freedom,
That no wall could any longer stop.

Mikhail Gorbachev
 photo from Wikipedia Commons is in the Public Domain

Suddenly,
Mama’s unapologetic brashness
Became as cool as the jeans
She brought from visiting her father
In America

The 90s rolled in,
Finally, Mama was able
To take me in with her,
To Moscow

Finally, she could
Flood me with her secrets
that were secrets
no longer.

Everyone now talked about it –
The hideous truths
about our country’s history,
the things she knew so very well
a long time ago.

How classy your mother is,

My friends said,

I beamed, I’m sure,

But this was no news to me.

Today I sometimes wonder,
Does she realize?
Does she know –
How her secrets shaped me?

I wonder,
Would I ever be the same,
Would I be this brave –
                This freakish –
                       This crazy –

Would I dare
Be an artist,
Search for happiness
On my own terms –

Would I?
If I didn’t get to witness
My mama,
         My hero?

The way she dared
         To be her own person,
                     Long before freedom
                                              Became fashionable.

Is freedom in Russia but a passing fad?

Demonstration by the people during a 1991 attempt by Communist Party to regain control of Russia. Photo from Wikipedia Commons is in the Public Domain.


I hope not! For the next – and last – installment in this series, I am going to write about friendship – both personal friendship and a friendship between countries. I still stay in touch with my once best friend, Olga, but in so many ways, our relationship is drifting. When I hear and see the things happening in Russia today, I cannot help but observe the very same thing taking place on the global scale, between Olga’s Russia and my America.

Katia - Thank you for giving us this powerful, beautiful glimpse of your amazing mom. You've intrigued me with your thoughts about the relationship between Russia and America. Can't wait to hear more next month!  - Joyce

FEAR

Yay! Katia Raina is back to share the second installment of her personal story!  If you missed her first one, you can still read it, THE SOVIET UNION DID HAVE A GOD either before or after finishing this one.

Me in preschool

I fixed an enormous ribbon bow on the top of my head. My eyes lifted to face the preschool teacher. She had just told us to quiet down. The room was already pretty quiet before she spoke to us – as we sat at our tables, working on our drawings to commemorate the upcoming anniversary of the Revolution. But underneath the quiet, I had felt a happy layer of thoughts buzzing amidst occasional coughing and paper shuffling.

But now, even the sound of my thoughts was dead. Only the heels of the preschool teacher’s shoes could be heard tap-tap-tapping against the hardwood floor.

“In honor of the anniversary of the Revolution, which, if you recall, was a victory of the proletariat over the capitalist oppressors, you will hear a speech by the leader of the Communist Party and our great, powerful nation, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev,” she told us.

The year was 1980 or so. Once, when the Soviet Union was young, 1980 was thought to be a target year when true communism would be built. Decades before my birth, people used to dream that money wouldn’t exist in our country anymore, that every citizen would live in a spacious skyscraper apartment. People used to speculate how everyone would probably wear white all the time. How we would change the world by then. Make them all see light and reason.

Turned out, the magic date -- the year 1980 – saw the country smack in the middle of economic and spiritual stagnation. Most adults knew well by then, communism wasn’t going to happen. They now dreamed of foreign jeans and secretly listened to rock music. Or, just quietly pretended that everything had been as before, while the country kept on quietly crumbling. Prices kept rising. Food kept disappearing from stores. High-ranking members of the Communist elite continued living in luxury. The leader of the USSR, Comrade Brezhnev was getting old. Each day on Central Television the country watched his small eyes grow still tinier and his cheeks droopier. Some brave souls joked with each other about Brezhnev’s grammatically-incorrect speech becoming increasingly slurred and hard to understand from age and pure moroseness. Still, most adults continued pretending that everything was fine, citizens. Parents, grandparents and teachers kept feeding us children with the same fairytales they had known when growing up.

Also in Preschool

The clean, well-lit daycare/preschool facility smelled of boiled milk. I shivered, watching the teacher load in an LP disk with the speech of our leader.

“And…” She turned around and shook her finger at us – at me?   "You, as future communists, are to listen well. Now, up on your feet, everyone. No movement, and not a sound. You are to understand every word, or else…”

Or else what?

I stood at attention so hard, my legs started itching already. I didn’t realize how much work it would require to just stand still, to make your body obey you. Brezhnev’s elderly voice started crackling. My eyes prickled with tears. I don’t think there was a single word I could make out, let alone understand. I was doomed. I tried to look at everyone else – were they not moving? Did they seem to be following – unlike the dim-witted me? But it was hard to see anything without having to move even more. I strained my ears so hard, I got dizzy. White stains floated before my eyes. The stiffness in my legs climbed up the rest of my body, turning me into a stick that could barely stand at all.

We had been told God didn’t exist. We had been taught to make fun of the Bible, its crazy ideas of heaven and hell. But standing there, my body tilting, my cheeks hot with shame and my ears withering from the sounds coming out of the LP player, I found myself a sinner. Wondering how I would be punished, I stood there expecting nothing less than a supernatural act from above or below. Would something terrible take me away? Would the floor cave in under my feet? Would I die before I even make it to the end of his speech?

I made it to the end of his speech alive. I made it out all right, even.

As I grew up I realized, fear doesn’t kill you. It just etches itself deep into your earliest childhood memories. Which is all right, as long as you don’t let it burrow so deep that it defines who you are. As long as that fear doesn’t become a part of your soul.

Next month, I would like to blog about someone who taught me this courage, a woman who never became that scared gray little Soviet her country was trying to mold her into, a woman who formed me in more ways than one.

Next month, I will blog about my fearless mama.

Katia, Thanks so much for stopping in and especially for sharing such personal stories.  I am so eager to read more about your mama who won my heart in your last post!  

And to you, dear Reader, the following photo is Katia with another preschool teacher.  Be sure to check out her caption!

 Not every Soviet teacher was cold and uncaring.  This nanny treated me like I was her own personal doll  and made sure no one could hurt me. She surrounded me with love and care.




CHATTING WITH KATIA RAINA

As things happen in the blogosphere, I stumbled one very fine day upon Magic Mirror, a blog authored by Katia Raina.

Katia Raina

Katia introduces herself with these words: “When I was a little girl, I wore a pioneer scarf around my neck and believed in communism.”

Now that is a hook!

I’m super curious about Katia’s life in Soviet Russia and I’m excited that she’s agreed to guest blog for me about it – not once but on a regular basis!

But first, a convo with Katia. Feel free to eavesdrop.

1. Katia, clearly you’re a lover of words and literature. I’m curious - what did you read as a child? And how were your options limited or shaped by the Soviet system?

Well, first of all, keep in mind that I grew up in the 80s and became a teen in the 90s, after perestroika had already opened many doors, and even though there were still political prisoners sitting in the Gulag, information from the West was pouring in by then, and people were pretty much reading everything.

Then again, even if I were born earlier and say had to grow up in the awful stagnant 1970s under Brezhnev (whom I remember only briefly), I think my options as a child would still have been equally open. Kind of ironic when you think about it, because grownups’ choices were much more limited.

Either way, in addition to all the regular childhood propaganda picture books about the nice grandpa Lenin, the Russian fairytales and those by Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm (all of which I absolutely loved), like other Soviet children, I read Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe,” Rudyard Kipling’s short stories and “The Jungle Book,” known in Russian as simply “Mowghli,” things like that. I remember at around 11 years old, reading and re-reading getting into French literature: Voltaire I didn’t like so much, and Balzac I didn’t get at the time, either, but I loved George Sand (considered to be the first French woman writer, 19th century). I was especially crazy for Alexandre Dumas – I re-read “The Three Musketeers” six times and wept at the end every single time!

The Russians have always been fascinated – and enamored by the French culture.

Finally, I just want to add, after I turned 13, my new favorite became “Master and Margarita,” a totally insane fantasy/satire written in the 1930s, by Mikhail Bulgakov, in which the devil himself travels to Moscow where he of course wreaks all kinds of havoc. THAT book didn’t get published until the 60s, well after his death – and was definitely forbidden literature during stagnation, because it pokes fun at the Soviet Union. It is still my absolute favorite book of all time – still influencing my own work and making me laugh out loud every time I read it.

"It's funny when I was a kid I read all this hefty literature, and now it's hard for me to even open a book for grownups (with a few great exceptions). These days I devour American YA, especially contemporary and fantasy.

2. What do you want young readers around the world to know about life under communism? If you were a publisher choosing titles that you are passionate about, what genres and themes would you be publishing?
I am not really on a mission to educate young readers – or anyone about life under communism. The reason I write these stories is because they are making trouble inside me, wanting to come out, driving me crazy sometimes.  That said, I think it’s always a nice bonus for young American readers to “see the world:” they are so centered on what’s going on in their own beautiful, rather large, and isolated country. And I don’t blame them for that AT ALL – I think it’s a matter of simple geography: everything, except Canada and South America is just so far away! Of course, now, the world is shrinking, isn’t it, so what better time to find out what life is like – and was like – in far-off corners of the globe.

I think the main two things I’d like the readers to get out of my stories about life under communism is the fear – the pervasive fear people felt of their own government – and worse, their own neighbors, friends, people they wanted to fall in love with. In another story I wrote that is set later, in the 1990s, when Communism was collapsing, I wanted to show the widespread confusion that the changes have created in young people. On the one hand it was exhilarating to find all this freedom, you can be who you are now! Except, who exactly are you now? After learning that half the things you had been told your entire childhood were lies, it is hard to re-forge a new identity.

If I were a publisher choosing titles: I’d mostly go for what other publishers go for, I’d think: fun, quirky reads that make you laugh and cry and push the boundaries of your imagination, no matter what lands and times they are set in. I wouldn't concentrate oon historical fiction only -- but I also wouldn't shy away from it! Also, I think I would try and remember to give the kids the credit they deserve for being intelligent readers, for understanding the subtleties of human emotion, and for knowing right from wrong. Sometimes the grownups worry so much, and overprotect -- from too much emotion, too many story threads, too much information, or even a protagonist who makes wrong decisions. If I were a publisher, I would make it a point to not always assume everything must be explained to the young reader, to not always assume, the kids won’t get this, or they can’t handle that.

3. Can you tell us about your earliest impression or memory in which you felt at odds with the system you were living in? How old were you and what troubled you about it?
My mom was the one who was really at odds with the Soviet system, and she wouldn’t dare just flat out tell me about it, but she kind of let me know in bits and pieces. She told me that there was God, for example, even though Soviet children were taught not to believe that. She also told me I had a grandfather who lived in America, and I often dreamed about it – visiting him in a skyscraper – or even living there, even though we were taught that America was the enemy. The crazy thing was, when I was little, it didn’t feel like a contradiction – what my mom told me, and what I was taught in schools. Those two things were just two separate parts of me that wouldn’t mesh together till later.

I was about nine years old when I became aware that the contradiction was there. I told my mom I had a dream – a very dear dream I would do anything to make happen. She got all excited – she loves dreams, even now. “What is it?” she asked me. I said I wished and I hoped with all my heart that I would become accepted into the Young Pioneers organization – which every kid actually did get accepted into, it was like being a prelude into the Communist Party membership. I distinctly remember her reaction: “Oh,” was all she said. She didn’t say anything else. But her disappointment, it was so loud between us. I was stunned. I realized I had said something wrong – something “not cool” – something that let my mama down.

4. And now here you are, happy to be in the US.  How old were you when you came and what brought you here?
I was just a few weeks shy of my 16th birthday. My mom brought me and my grandmother to New York City. We received the status of Refugees, and the fact that my mom was a political dissident, and that her father lived in California helped, of course. By then I was so-o excited to go. When I arrived, the moment my foot stepped into JFK, I felt home. More home than I ever was in Russia. It was a truly mystical moment – like meeting a love of your life. I just felt like this was where I had always belonged.

5. Recently, I watched a documentary about the German Democratic Republic. One of the interviewees said something like, “East Germany’s history is my biography.” Can you reflect on that in terms of your own history in Russia?

Maybe if I was older, I would have said that. Because the government, the heavy propaganda, it dominated everything, it probably dominated who you were, too. When I was a really young child, my country probably did define me in too many ways. (And I hope to get into that a little more in some of my upcoming blog posts for you, Joyce. Some of my early childhood memories were actually pretty scary – I have one in mind I am thinking of sharing with you and your readers a bit later.

But even then, even in the scary times under Stalin, in the 1930s, when a wrong joke could send you and your entire family to the camps – or to death, even then there were people who let this awfulness define them – and then there were the brave souls who chose to define themselves, on their own terms. I don’t know if I would have had the courage to do that, if I lived in more oppressive times. I know my mom would have. I guess I am lucky to have been born a little freer.

6. Want to tell us what you’re working on?
My first manuscript, “Castle of Concrete,” set in the early 1990s, against the backdrop of the falling apart Soviet Union, is about a Jewish girl who befriends another Jew, while falling hard for a boy she fears might be an anti-Semite. The story is now on submission to editors, represented by Jessica Regel of Jean V Naggar Literary Agency.

Right now, I am working on another Soviet-based manuscript for teenagers – this one set in Stalin’s late 1930s, the times when the oppression was at its worst. It’s a historical fantasy. I am so sorry, but as this is still a work-in-progress, I am feeling a bit superstitious about telling the world more about it at the moment. If things go well (meaning, if I finish it – no, when I do, and if my agent loves it), I will tell you all about it – hopefully soon!

Thank you so much Joyce for having me!

Oh wow, Katia - the pleasure is entirely mine.  I am so touched by your story and so eager for more.  I can't wait for that first guest post!  (Soon, please!)  Oh, and a hearty congrats on getting the agent.  I'm cheering for Jessica, you, and Castle of Concrete.