BLUE EYED STRAIGHTFORWARDNESS
Fitzcarraldo EditionsFebruary 2021Selected by Barbara Epler
After the death of her aunt, Stepanova is left to go through an apartment packed with old postcards, letters, faded photographs, foxed diaries and heaps of withered souvenirs. Starting with these shards, she tells the story of how a seemingly ordinary Russian-Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. She circles, rummages and delves, reaching beyond her family into books, films, Tolstoy, Rembrandt, prisons, archives: she goes through but also beyond all sorts of history, both personal and global. By pulling at the fabric and peering through the rents, she keeps very lively company with the past.
So much more than an inventory of things left behind, this full-blooded inquiry is hypnotically alive and alluring. What might at first glance look like a large drawer being pulled out to reveal its jumbled oddments becomes, as the reader progresses, a sort of bottomless, multi-dimensional space, a space we enter, where memory and our knowledge of the past move all around us like black-water-dwelling, deep-sea creatures, never still, lit up in rainbow phosphorescence, glowing one moment in the dark waters, disappearing the next, flickering between damage and perfect beauty, and, while illuminating the past, lighting up the present. — Barbara Epler
There’s a memorial in Moscow at Lubyanka, a square surrounded by high buildings that have housed the various incarnations of secret police for the last hundred years. It’s an unobtrusive memorial, usually just called “the Stone”, the Solovetsky Stone, brought from the Solovetsky Islands where, in 1919, one of the very first Soviet prison camps was opened. Many more followed.
Every year in Autumn there is a special day when people gather to take part in a communal event. Everyone is given a little square of paper with the name, surname, and profession of a person who was executed during the years of Communist Terror. Then they line up to approach the Stone in order to say these names aloud. It lasts a whole day, and could go on far longer. Even towards evening, when it’s getting cold, there is no shortage of people in the queue. Those who lost parents and grandparents read their names alongside the names of strangers. Candles are lit by the Stone. A few years ago our ten-year-old son went to stand in line. He knew more or less why he was there, but he got cold and miserable waiting his turn. Then suddenly, when he heard the names and dates being read out, he seized hold of his father and burst into tears: “They killed that person on 6 May, on my birthday, Dad… how unfair is that, Dad?”
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Birthdays do matter after all. My grandmother Lyolya was born on 9 May, Victory Day. I learnt that important fact almost before I learned to walk. My mother loved to remember the Spring of 1945 when they returned to Moscow from evacuation: fireworks over the Kremlin, a long table with everyone eating together: family, friends, all the inhabitants of the communal apartment, and all this felt like a natural ending, like a long-awaited birthday present. Grandmother was born in 1916, but the year wasn’t important. The general victory celebration completed her own quieter celebration, confirmed that her birthdate wasn’t just chance.
The natural connection between Grandmother and 9 May was such an integral part of family mythology that it was only recently that it occurred to me that she was in fact born on 26 April, back in the old world and according to the old Julian Calendar. It occurred to me too that her father, my Great-grandfather Misha, was born under a different name and lived with it for a few years. Amongst the old papers there is a certificate given to Mikhel Fridman, apothecary’s apprentice, and however hard I strain my eyes I can’t make out the moment of transformation, when something shifts and Great-grandfather appears in the world as the young lawyer Misha, a court solicitor in polished boots, carrying volumes of Tolstoy. All I know is that he gave his student nephew a single piece of advice: “Live an interesting life.”
Did he live an interesting life, I wonder? For these people, changing names was as common a matter as moving from one town to another. My other great-grandfather, the handsome Vladimir Gurevich – in his striped jacket with a jaunty group of friends at the seaside – unexpectedly turns out to be Moisey Vulf, according to his papers. How did he pull off the old skin, and how did he choose the new one? Mikhel becomes Misha almost effortlessly, Vulf becomes a Vladimir, as if he had always been a Vladimir. Sarra’s brother, the wonderful Iosif, the firstborn and favourite son of Abram Ginzburg, who broke his father’s heart when he converted to Christianity, was transformed into Volodya (hardly the obvious shift from Iosif), as if the age demanded of its children only blue-eyed straightforwardness.
Other surnames stayed in place and their owners wore them as they were. The Ginzburgs and the Gurevichs, who were from distant Polish and Bavarian towns, heaved toponyms around like sacks of possessions. The Stepanovs, with their bland new-build surname (with its vaguely Greek root: “stefanos” meaning crown or garland), had nothing distinctive in their names. The branches of the family tree are curiously bare of “Rosen” and “Mandal”, of stars and precious jewels. But it is peopled with apparently gentle, peaceful Libermans and Fridmans.
In our own history the most interesting part is what we don’t know. In other people’s histories it’s the animal magnetism of elective affinities which singles out this one from hundreds of others. Sebald’s method, his way of thinking and speaking, is founded on refusing to choose. Although when you begin reading, his books can seem riddled with tunnels, like an ant nest, all leading to unexpected consonances. “Across what distances in time do the elective affinities and correspondences connect? How is it that one perceives oneself in another human being, or, if not oneself, then one’s own precursor?” If we are to believe him, then these connections come about of their accord, in the way that a magpie drags everything it can find into its nest. Sebald was touched above all by dates that coincided, birthdays, deathdays and events through which you could see your own life.
When I bring to mind a date or an important event, sometimes it gives rise to a thought-experiment, the point of which I hardly know myself. “If a child had been born to that day,” I think to myself, “then that child would now be x years old.” I express it like that – born to the day, and not to me or someone else, as if the event which changed my life had also given birth to someone new. There are by now lots of these invisible children, and they are growing up; but I remember one of them more often than the others. The child born to 15 January 1998, a frosty, radiant day in Moscow and a grey tricklingly damp day in Würzburg – the date of my mother’s death – would now be an adult. ◉
From 1926–1990, Lubyanka Square was renamed Dzerzhinsky Square after Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the first Soviet
secret police organisation and one of the architects of the Red Terror. In 1958, a 15-tonne iron statue of Dzerzhinsky was set up in the centre of the square. In 1990, the Solovetsky Stone was placed beside the statue, which was removed the following year.
W.G. Sebald was a German writer known for his elliptical style, which combined memoir, fiction, travelogue, history and biography. His novel Austerlitz contains a sentence that is nine pages long.