Ilya Kaminsky
29 November 2021
A day of remembrance of Holodomor: nearly 90 years ago millions of people died in in man-made famine in Ukraine. It was forbidden to talk about this. Some who insisted on speaking were told they had delusions & forcibly placed into mental institutions. (See the poem by Boris Khersonsky that Katie and I translated for The Atlantic on this subject: https://www.theatlantic.com/.../poem-boris.../620569/)
But Holodomor wasn't the first man-made famine in the Odessa region. There was another such Hunger in early 1920s. Let me tell you a story.
It is the early 20th century and Natalia, the woman who adopted my father, is an eighteen-year-old peasant girl.
Talia we shall call her.
With her husband, a White Army officer, she has a baby girl, six months old.
When Father tells this story in the 1980s, there are no dramatics. Usually, my father is a man who likes to circle the room telling stories, he likes to climb a top of the kitchen table, and tell the story from there. But not now. His lips open and the story is slightly different each time, but in each re-telling they walk the streets of Odessa with a cradle and eat chocolate cakes at Deribasovskaya, the White Army officer and his girl. He buys her an umbrella and she is learning French.
The next month the government changes. The White Army officer has to escape because the color of his uniform is politically incorrect. Father doesn’t speak much about this, so perhaps something else about him was incorrect. Anyway, he escapes from this story. But Talia stays, her baby girl is seven months old.
Forty years passed since I, a deaf child, first saw this story on my father's lips. Memory of a language is a place where people defend themselves with what they can, with hands, legs, lungs, with their bodies—or other people’s bodies. Some, with shouts no one hears. Others with refusal to shout.
In the eighth month of the child’s life the government closes the borders. Talia begins to sew blue dresses so she can buy milk.
She sews day and night for the opera singers, she is walking behind the stage after the performance taking measurements, giving compliments, taking measurements. They adore her.
In every version of Father’s stories, they adore her.
Talia is sewing, the opera is singing, the soup in the little pot is bubbling, the baby is turning nine months old.
In her tenth month the government prevents food from coming into our city, Father’s lips say. It is an easy month, for now. The opera is still open, the audiences still arrive. But soon the audiences begin to walk out of our streets. They think they can find food in the neighboring villages. But there is no food in the neighboring villages either. There is no food in the farthest villages, but they do not learn of that. They die mid-way.
And the borders remain closed. And there is no food on the table, there is no table, no food in the little pots.
All I have is a story in the remembered motion of Father’s lips.
A different version each time he tells it.
But always in his stories the borders remain closed. And there is no food on the table. And the bellies begin to sing, and then the singing stops.
And the baby begins its eleventh month. The opera singers leave. Talia remains. Talia eats the earth. Soon she digs a hole in the earth. She puts the body of her baby girl into the box from the sewing machine and digs into the earth. In every version of Father’s stories, she digs the hole herself.
And, years later, at forty years old, nearly an old woman by early 20th century Soviet standards, she adopts the foundling: my father.
She tells Father the stories of this forced famine, and the next one that followed, Holodomor, and she hides this Jewish boy during the war, and she dances the tango with him behind closed windows of an occupied city, and teaches him how to cook, how to chop vegetables, how to pinch the spices into the pots.
One fact I know for sure: the cooking. Here, in America, I have her 19th century cookbooks. There are many notes in them in my father’s hand. And in my body lives a memory of the first days of winter of 1993, when we stood in line in snow outside the post office, mailing boxes of them to the USA. He is crazy, Mother kept saying and smiling. About to drop everything, about to leave the country for good, but mailing cookbooks. All my friends tell me there is too much food in my poems. Too many tomatoes. But perhaps there aren't enough.
