Даваи Ребята!
Sep. 30th, 2005 09:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bliumchikToday while grandma was putting my brother to sleep, my grandad came into my room to try and persuade me to listen to a Vladimir Vysotsky tape of his. I managed to divert him by asking him about his youth Back In The USSR (VV does good poetry but BY GOD his voice...). He then launched into a ten minute tirade about Jesus until my grandma came in and swore at him in russian for waking the baby.
After quite a lot of exposition re: Ukrainian Anti Semitism, he told me that when he was born, in Harkov, his family lived in a chemical laboratory. I put on my best WTF face (although that would explain a lot, haha) and upon clarification it turned out that housing was short so they lived in a room right next to a lab, in the tannery. Okay.
WWII happened between his birth and his sister's, and he spent sang a song about loyalty to Stalin and the motherland. Then he said something about invading switzerland, and sang a song abut samurai. It's ind of sad that, post war, his "story of my life" thing was mainly a recount of where they lived. Then they gave us an apartment on that street. And then we moved to Odessa, they gave us a room on the outskirts, but afterwards they gave us a place in the center. And then we moved to etc. That encompassed the whole fifty years from the end of WWII to my birth. I had to go back and ask him questions about actual things that happened.
He actually met my grandma in quite an ordinary manner - her family stayed with his when they first came to Odessa, because the government didn't give them an apartment, what with the whole being the widow and child of an Enemy of the State thing. Враг Народа, it sounds so menacing, yet apparantly it applied to basically everyone who Stalin didn't like, and since that old bugger was as paranoid as a lame monkey in a carwash, that was a LOT of people. Hell, the guy had all his colleagues who were taller than him shot or deported! (No kidding, if you look at the party photos, the early ones before Lenin died, Stalin was a short lil guy. Post crazy Dictator Time, he's the tallest one there.)
I didn't manage to get Grandad's army years out of him. Just a vague mumble about invading Czeckoslovakia. I'll try again next time.
After quite a lot of exposition re: Ukrainian Anti Semitism, he told me that when he was born, in Harkov, his family lived in a chemical laboratory. I put on my best WTF face (although that would explain a lot, haha) and upon clarification it turned out that housing was short so they lived in a room right next to a lab, in the tannery. Okay.
WWII happened between his birth and his sister's, and he spent sang a song about loyalty to Stalin and the motherland. Then he said something about invading switzerland, and sang a song abut samurai. It's ind of sad that, post war, his "story of my life" thing was mainly a recount of where they lived. Then they gave us an apartment on that street. And then we moved to Odessa, they gave us a room on the outskirts, but afterwards they gave us a place in the center. And then we moved to etc. That encompassed the whole fifty years from the end of WWII to my birth. I had to go back and ask him questions about actual things that happened.
He actually met my grandma in quite an ordinary manner - her family stayed with his when they first came to Odessa, because the government didn't give them an apartment, what with the whole being the widow and child of an Enemy of the State thing. Враг Народа, it sounds so menacing, yet apparantly it applied to basically everyone who Stalin didn't like, and since that old bugger was as paranoid as a lame monkey in a carwash, that was a LOT of people. Hell, the guy had all his colleagues who were taller than him shot or deported! (No kidding, if you look at the party photos, the early ones before Lenin died, Stalin was a short lil guy. Post crazy Dictator Time, he's the tallest one there.)
I didn't manage to get Grandad's army years out of him. Just a vague mumble about invading Czeckoslovakia. I'll try again next time.
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Date: 2005-09-30 05:54 am (UTC)I wish I'd written down more of my grandmother's stories before she died.