“Where Bones and History Won’t Stay Buried.” It seems like the former USSR will forever regurgitate its dead. Andrew E. Kramer’s article and the imposing photo of tall trees resembling eternal sentinels reminded me of past photos in other forests dotting the former Soviet Union. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/14/world/europe/in-ukraine-bones-of-war-dead-re-emerge-to-stir-political-passions.html?ref=world
“Again?” I thought. In the case of Lviv in the western Ukraine, the perpetrators could be Soviets or Nazis. The Ukraine is even divided on which was the more evil enemy.
The attitudes Kramer encountered from residents of Lviv regarding the unearthed bones varied widely. Some were eager to rebury Ukrainian bones because they represent the ancestors of Lviv’s residents. Others want the past to remain past, “Let them lay there,” states another. And what of the mass graves of Poles shot by the Ukrainian Partisan Army? What about the Jewish skeletons?
Can a country, a region, a town, a person live without feeling he or she is living in a region haunted by history? Leslie will reflect more on this next week as she writes about her trip to Eastern Europe.
Alexander Etkind uses the term hauntology in his 2009 article, “Post Soviet Hauntology: Cultural Memory of the Soviet Terror.” http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/slavonic/staff/ae264/constellations.pdf It captures the feeling of the past bleeding into the future in the Former Soviet Union. Even for those who claim they pay no mind to the past, every monument to a dead Soviet leader, every monument to the unknown buried beneath their feet reminds inhabitants of the FSU. History demands to be stripped of lies. The past will not stay buried. We all breathe our past history as we exist in the present.
When Leslie and I interviewed Vera and Alla and wrote Jewish Luck: A True Story of Friendship, Deception, and Risky Business, we were uncovering their individual pasts. It seemed compelling, interesting, and fun. Until we reached the sad and painful memories. Vera’s floated to the surface early as she remembered the hard lives of her parents and her dad’s much too early death. Alla’s memories were locked down. Once she immigrated to Sweden, she shut the door on her Soviet memories focusing, instead, on the present and future. Leslie and I prodded Alla to look at the bones of her past and reintegrate them into her personal history. Painful as it was for her to retrieve some of those feelings, she dug deep. Slowly, past emotions emerged. To protect herself, Alla had vowed never to return to Russia once her parents were safe in Sweden. The trip to St. Petersburg in 2011 with Vera, Leslie, and me demonstrated her willingness to confront the buried past. Our first stop with Allaand Vera—the Preobrazhensky Cemetery to visit their family’s graves.
During the five years Leslie and I have been working on Jewish Luck, we, too, have discovered old hurts, resentment, and insecurity. We had to arouse those feelings, many buried since childhood. Not in a day, but in the course of the past years we have forged a more honest working relationship. Of course, those of you who know us realize it doesn’t mean we always agree. We listen to each other’s positions with more openness and understanding.
When we began our project with Alla and Vera, Leslie and I did not know exactly where we were headed nor what we would unearth. I was unprepared for the power of the ghosts of the past to haunt the present. Fortunately, our quest resulted in renewed and deeper friendship between Alla and Vera and Leslie and me. As for the history of the Ukraine, Russia, and other former Soviet republics, many more bones remain haunting the region, more bones to disinter and to confront.