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Ride Warrior Does Germany

The first time I went to Germany was for my Bucket List item, Raphael’s Sistine Madonna at the Dresden Gallery. The second time was for Oktoberfest, which was on spouse’s Bucket List. The third trip was suggested by daughter—Berlin.

Are mice mascots for every theme park? Asking for a friend

I was advised that Berlin has no fewer than 100 museums. This is not the selling point that one might think, for a seasoned traveler like myself knows that if there are 100 museums, three will be great, five more might be mildly intriguing, and 92 will be one room only/by appointment only/open only on Wednesdays 11 a.m. to 1 p.m./dedicated to an obscure subject like footstools or rakes or plastic hangers/on the outskirts of town reachable via train, bus, taxi and a 40 minute walk/have no website or any other means to ascertain their existence. Still, the DDR Museum alone was enough for me to be intrigued by this scene, and I acquiesced. Now, to a person of my generation, upbringing, and ethnic makeup the concept of “reaching Berlin” means something entirely different than to a younger person half a world removed, and so I braced myself for the encounter with the Brandenburg Gate in real life.

And then the trip went off the rails. Virtually sidling up to me via text, daughter started a relentless campaign of visiting an amusement park in Germany. This person has a great track record of persuasive videos: sending me a video about dogs being able to sniff out cancer was what finally convinced spouse and me to adopt a dog. And so far so good, I am happy to report. Thus at some point, I found myself planning to visit not one but two theme parks, and as far away from Berlin as it is possible to get in this one united Germany. Not my typical vacation, and I will not lie—I was mildly worried about many things, not the least of which was enduring several days of standing in long lines, possibly hurting my back, and missing out on all those museums. And then I said to myself, there have been and will be many museums in my life. But how many rollercoasters do I have left? And that was motivation enough and plenty. It’s not that I did not think there were amusement parks in Europe. After all, I have been to Meli Park https://oldladywriting.com/2025/11/23/whats-in-belgium/. They just were not on my radar—and now I am truly questioning my life choices, because (spoiler alert) I am still a Ride Warrior!

The trip started in the most hectic manner upon arrival in the Frankfurt airport, complete with a wild-ish goose chase of a rental car (I always hate myself a little when I have to rely entirely on my English in a non-English speaking country) and a couple of hours drive on what is most assuredly NOT the autobahn, all on 2 hours of stiff-necked airplane sleep and a 6-hour time difference. But once we entered Europa Park, all of my cares melted away.

No, this is not what you think–inside the giant golf ball is Eurosat-CanCan

It is an enchanting place, and none of my words can do it justice. It has the magic of Disney, but the unfamiliarity of it made it extra special and added to the joy of discovery. It is also not as children-oriented. It is themed like Epcot, with twenty [plus] distinct areas, including 18 European countries/areas, but each region is ride- and food-focused with significantly less commerce. There is the beauty of the park itself, with winding pathways through the trees, charming squares, and gentle rides over air, land, and water. And it has some of the best roller coasters I have ever experienced, led by Voltron, which defies description. It basically combines the best and most thrilling elements of every coaster ever. We rode it three times! Special mentions go to Eurosat-CanCan, where you literally go through giant stylized legs kicking it up; Wodan, a majestic and exciting wooden coaster; and Arthur, a suspended ride with beautiful special effects.

The differences between what I expected based on lived experience and what I got were all good: (1) The lines were not comparable to anything in the U.S. (let alone Russia) and very manageable, with nothing over an hour. The park was packed at the end of May, but somehow, there were no bottlenecks—including as we were exiting at closing time. Everything just moved in an orderly fashion. (2) The food was amazing and affordable. Herring sandwich in the Scandinavia area? Ćevapčići in Croatia? Yes, please. And did I mention, no lines beyond maybe a couple of people? (3) Commercialism was down to a minimum. Of course there were stores, but mostly upon exiting the main rides, and then a couple when you first come in. It really felt like a park rather than a large commercial venture, like something from a kinder, gentler time—despite all the latest in roller coaster technology.

Worst part? A most ridiculous bobsled coaster called Schweizer Bobbahn. Who knew that bobsleds are so incredibly uncomfortable? Honorable worst part mention goes to Euro-Mir, a spinning coaster in the Russian part of the park, which never actually spun for us.

We spent two days at Europa Park, and it was absolutely wonderful. Somehow it just felt very relaxing, alternating intense roller coasters (14 in total) with charming dark rides, boat and train rides, and shows. It was magical—and not enough. And despite being constantly on the move, the less hectic vibe left us rejuvenated rather than exhausted.

And then we went to yet another park, Phantasialand. This one was more of what I am used to—longer lines, more crowded, strictly there for the rides. It is a hilly, mildly claustrophobic, chaotic place, with many of the rides not visible from the waiting areas (which is not a bad thing, because you don’t know how scared you should be). It had its own cool moments: Fly, an absolutely terrifying coaster where you are on your stomach and literally go underground; Talocan, which flips you over, and over, and over; and Mystery Castle, which is an enclosed drop tower. Seeing people scream on the opposite wall when lights flash in the darkness is an absolutely haunting experience. And as previously mentioned, there was the beautiful Wellenflug, flying over an early 20^th century Berlin.

Worst part? A water ride called Chiapas, which apparently has the steepest drop on a log flume in the world and is allegedly the world’s best water ride. It was a good ride, but despite planning and plotting and trying to find the best seats to stay dry, we learned there was NO staying dry. Honorable worst part mention goes to the Fanta bottle that opened unexpectedly while we were riding Colorado Adventure, a mine train, almost making it a water ride as well.

Shockingly, there were no souvenir shops in sight at this park. To be clear, we did not look for them, but they also did not present themselves to us. And the food was excellent as well.

After three action-packed days, Berlin was practically a different world. And that is another story for another time…

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Ride Warrior, Part I – How It Started

I have always been a Ride Warrior, even before I knew what it was. There were no roller coasters in my childhood. In fact, we only heard of “American Mountains”, which is really bizarre when Wikipedia tells me that they originated in St. Petersburg as “Russian Mountains”. Well, there were no Russian mountains, literal or figurative, in my childhood either. There was the Motorbuilders’ Park https://oldladywriting.com/2020/08/18/valor-and-glory-of-the-motorbuilders/, where the biggest excitement on the children’s side was to ride the “boats”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6HrjMDwrOU Actual footage of the park in 1974, previously shared by me, but bears reposting. Look for the “boats” at 3:39, and then some “adult” rides, such as the “Devil’s (Ferris)” wheel (4:52).

I was always willing to wait in line for a “boat”, hoping to be paired up with a bigger, stronger kid to rock it, and someone’s dad to give us the initial push, just like the man does in the video. But because I was a preteen when I left the exotic utopia that is Yaroslavl, I never got to go on the adult rides. I must have been on the Devil’s wheel with my mother at some point, because I have a memory of looking at the city from above, but I would not bet on whether it is not a product of my imagination. There was one abortive attempt to get on a version of it during one summer in Pärnu, Estonia. My grandmother and I were promenading at a local amusement park with my friend Nika and her mother Marina, us girls a bit in front of the adults. I was 11, Nika was 13; to ride the wheel unaccompanied one had to be 12 years old, so we logically assumed that she would accompany me. We also assumed that our accompanying adults would not allow us to ride it. And so, we conferred among ourselves, sprinted toward the ticket booth, bought two tickets without any questions, and ran to the wheel. My grandmother and Marina clued in to what was happening and ran, shrieking, in mad pursuit. At 11, I did not have the nerve I subsequently developed; it took a few more years of resistance. We hesitated and all was lost. My grandmother was predictably furious; Marina claimed that she had an immediate hypertensive crisis and a near heart attack. This illustrates that (1) my grandmother was not unique in her attitude of pervasive fear, and (2) my Ride Warrior persona was actively suppressed.

Grandmother sort of redeemed herself when she took me to Disneyworld when I was 16. It was a guided bus tour from New York, one of three she and I have taken during my teenage years. The others were a day trip to Washington, DC with a Russian guide almost comically ignorant of American history, informing a bunch of rapt elderly Russians about a great Civil War general Lee Grant and other similar “facts”. The other one was a dull yet chaotic visit to Montreal, which the guide did his best to show off as resembling NYC as much as possible and dutifully avoiding any tourist attractions, and Quebec City, my only memory of which is ordering frites in my self-conscious three years of high school French. Montreal redeemed itself when I visited it with a gal pal a few years ago, though I still think of it as a Canadian New York. But I digress…

During one of the bus stops en route to Florida, I encountered a friend with whom I went to day camp in Brooklyn a few years prior, and the trip really took off. My grandmother did her best to thwart us, but we still managed to sneak out of our respective motel rooms after my grandmother and my friend’s parents were asleep and bond over teenage secrets and music in the parking lot. Like years before, my friend and I attempted to ride something forbidden by my grandmother as extremely dangerous—Space Mountain. I do not recall how I managed to get away from her, but freedom was short lived. Scouring the line, she spotted me and pulled me out of line with a lot of hysteria and reminders that as she paid for the trip, I must spend all my time with her. My friend stayed; her parents were unbothered. I went to ride the teacups, which grandma declared the best ride at Magic Kingdom, and did not get to Space Mountain until I returned with another friend my senior year of college. I screamed the entire time, and it was worth the wait.

This is at Cedar Point, but the one in Gorky Park was similar, without a cover.

My mother, who is most assuredly NOT a Ride Warrior, was, and remains to this day, an enthusiastic person who is open to new experiences and adventures. It must have been that same summer when I was 11 that the two of us happened to be in Moscow’s famous Gorky Park. To us, it was famous strictly for its amazing “American style” amusement rides, and it was before the novel anyway. We waited in line for what seemed, and might have been, an entire day to ride what is basically the Matterhorn. I did not see any roller coasters, either because the crowds were overwhelming, or because I was in a state of shock from all the excitement. My grandfather later confessed that one time when he was in Moscow he also went on this ride, and my grandmother was predictably furious to learn this, because (1) he had a bad heart, (2) he had a bad leg, and (3) he, the main provider for our family, risked his life in this manner. It will surprise no one that in all the summers I spent in Brooklyn with my grandparents, we never once went to Coney Island.

In July of 1982, my mother, stepfather and I went to Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio. It was a couple of decades before it became known as America’s Roller Coast, but it was already an incredibly exciting place, especially to us. It was a great day! My stepfather, who was also NOT a Ride Warrior, declined to board the Blue Streak. This old wooden ride still stands, for over 60 years now, and I rode it a couple of months ago. It is probably the least impressive and least comfortable that Cedar Point has to offer today, but the pull of nostalgia is strong. We convinced my stepfather to ride the Gemini, a racing coaster, and he arrived at the finish line nearly catatonic with his eyes firmly shut. These two, plus the Corkscrew, which all of us refused to ride that day because it flips you upside down and we were certain we will fall out, are still in the park today.

Much calmer was the Wave Swinger, a swing ride that in the Old Country was known as “hanging carousel”, to distinguish from a merry-go-round. There was one at the Motorbuilders Park’ as well, so partially for sentimental reasons this gentle, scenic flight is something I never miss at any amusement park. The sensation of flying through the air, looking at everything around and below, having that time to really watch and enjoy is not to be missed. Most recently, I was on a version of it called Wellenflug, in Phantasialand, a theme park near Köln (Cologne), Germany. To be continued…

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Requiem for a Friend

My childhood was spent on a quaint little street (which merits its own story) of post-war apartment buildings. My grandparents moved there in the 50s, but by the time I was growing up, it transitioned from being a new construction on the outskirts of town to being the last street of the old town before the bridge to the Motorbuilders plant and the wave of new developments. This location and timing were significant for two reasons. First, as the original settlers grew older and their children, those the age of my parents, starting to move away, our street started losing its children. I lived with my grandparents, so most of my friends moved away. And second, I was sent to attend school at the “exemplary” #37 (where I, rebel and delinquent https://oldladywriting.com/2023/11/11/scrap-metal-fiasco/, never lived up to the teachers’ memories of my mother, socially conscious gold medal recipient) while the few kids remaining in the neighborhood went to the local #57. As the result of these events, by the time I was of school age, I had no friends in the neighborhood or, as we say, “in the yard”. My great good fortune was that my best friend from the yard would continue to visit her grandparents every weekend, and she was more than enough.

The most magical street in any childhood.

My first conscious memory of Tanya was when I was five years old, and my grandmother and I were returning from my first summer in Crimea https://oldladywriting.com/2024/09/15/on-the-train-to-crimea/. Tanya and her mother were also returning from a summer somewhere, I want to say Gelendzhik, which back then was just a Black Sea resort with no palaces in sight. We all converged on the “sausage train” from Moscow, where Tanya and I pooled our toy resources in the aisle. She was two years older than me, but only a year ahead in school because of her December birthday, so she was just about to start first grade.

From then on, most of the memories of my childhood are connected with her. There was the routine of the Sunday mornings (we went to school six days a week, Sunday was our only day off) when I would knock on her grandparents’ apartment door to see if her mom brought her over on Saturday night. She was a late sleeper, so I would hang outside, dribbling a ball or jumping rope, until she came out of the building. There were also all the winter vacations, when we would split our time between skiing around the yard and sliding down various hills on a big metal plate, or watching TV and drawing at her grandparents’. We were never at my house—my grandmother hovered, my grandfather was seeing patients—but Tanya’s grandparents’ apartment was the most warm and welcoming place. Her grandfather, Sergei Ivanovich, was mostly silent and absent, but her grandmother, Anna Stepanovna, was the kindest, gentlest woman I have ever known. God gave her a long life with unimaginable tragedies along the way. It was my privilege to have known her.

Tanya, being older or most likely just being more talented and creative than me in every way, always took the lead, and I happily followed. She did not just draw—she came up with the idea of making a little magazine and we “published” an issue every day during one winter break. In the summer, she taught me various tricks and games to play with a bouncy ball and how to make dolls out of matchsticks and flowers. She came up with catchy poems, made up words, fun nicknames (her son still knows me by the enduring childhood nickname we called each other), and games that transferred our neighborhood into islands of adventure. She turned every outdoor game into a showcase, whether sliding on ice patches or jumping off milk crates. She called the back door to the nearby household goods and services building “mysterious”, and we would spend hours observing to see if anyone goes in or out (no one ever did). With her, the mundane became extraordinary.

Mysterious door; in our childhood, it did not have any signage.

She also instigated most, if not all, of our shenanigans, some more questionable than others: jumping on a mattress on someone’s patio until we got caught and chased away by the owners, sneaking into the training session of the folk circus until we got caught and chased away, running across our tiny street in front of infrequent vehicles until some truck driver stopped and yelled at us, throwing pebbles through the open window of the sewing shop of the household services building… Actually, that one ended badly: the manager (who probably exited through the “mysterious door”) chased us all the way to Tanya’s grandparents’ house, where we ran for safety. My grandmother was over at the time, dragged me home, and grounded me, even though we cried, apologized, and were forgiven by the manager lady. Anna Stepanovna came to our house to beg my grandmother to let us continue playing, but you can guess how that ended. Our piece de resistance was sporadically sending bizarre, occasionally rhyming, always pompous letters from “secret admirers” to Tanya’s great-uncle, an unassuming man whose appearance we found comical (although, to be fair, we never mocked it in our letters). We thoroughly enjoyed composing our outlandish missives whenever the spirit moved us, but the joke ended up being on us—the man taught at a technical school, and assumed that he did indeed have admirers among his female students.

Of course I kept the magazine, all 13 issues.

Because my grandmother liked and trusted Anna Stepanovna, Tanya was the only friend to whose house I was allowed to go unaccompanied. Sleepovers were not common in our world, largely because of lack of space, but one time, when there was a family wedding that my grandparents were attending, I begged and pleaded and was allowed to stay at my friend’s—which was a surprise to her! I was watching a children’s movie on TV when she arrived on a Saturday night, and hilarity ensued. I was preparing for this, she was not, so I take full responsibility for coming up with what seemed like such a good idea at the time, setting an alarm clock for the middle of the night and putting it under her grandfather’s pillow. It was the only time in my life I was swatted by a belt, which I richly deserved. It was also the only sleepover and probably the most fun and memorable night of my childhood.

I envied Tanya to some extent, but it was more of an admiration. She was a beauty, blond and blue eyed, tall and willowy. She was a ballet dancer in childhood, and I’ve hobbled on her pointed shoes. As a teenager, she no longer danced, but took up piano. She loved animals; she called her kitten “member of the family” and it was always used as part of his name. She desperately wanted a dog, a dream that was realized in her adult life so much so that her son became a dog trainer. Because of her early childhood in Bulgaria https://oldladywriting.com/2025/05/20/thank-you-for-the-alphabet/, Tanya had real Bulgarian friends who would visit with their exotic foods like lokum (Turkish delight) and gum. Her uncle had an Army friend who was stationed in East Germany and sent exotic toys. In the apartment where she lived with her mother, she had her own room. She was so cool in every way, but she also had an open, sunshiny personality. She was the never a “mean girl”.

I was, by every measure, a very late bloomer, so by the time Tanya became a teenager, our two years’ age gap became more marked. She no longer came to her grandparents’ every weekend, and the time I used to spend in the yard I started spending with my school friends. But she came to say a wrenching and tearful good bye on my last night at home…

There was only one visit after that, when I was 19. It was as if no time has passed. We retraced the steps of our childhood adventures; we had a lot of laughs. Her grandmother was alive and as warm and vibrant as ever. Our lives diverged quite a bit after that, as lives do, regardless of town and country, but we kept in touch. She got a lot less than she deserved, which is unfair and unjust. I will not write about that, for I was not a witness, and it is not my story to tell. Her last text to me was, “I remember the taste [of lokum]!” I always thought there would be more time, as one does…

Memory eternal. December 2, 1966 – June 16, 2026, 10:30 p.m.

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Yahrzeit

“It is so fatally easy to make young children believe that they are horrible.”

― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

My grandmother departed this life about a month short of her 102^nd birthday. Whenever anyone says that I have “good genes” and can expect a similarly lengthy tenure this side of paradise, I immediately rush to correct them. First, she was an outlier; we do not have longevity in my family, and my father did not make it to 75. Second, her long, long, LONG life was nowhere near a blessing that people imagine it to be, not to herself and not to her immediate family.

Grandmother lived life with an unshakeable belief that her way was always right. She tolerated no challenges to her authority, even in little things[1]. I would maybe concede that there might be something to this, being myself a person prone to doubts, regrets, and second-guessing, had any of it given her any joy. She often repeated her life’s philosophy: you have to hate yourself, and that will inspire you to be a better person. But even as a child, I suspected that deriving inspiration from self-hatred is not going to be my path in life. Years later, I came to the conclusion that her inflexibility was simply the result of lack of introspection, fear of the unknown and the unknowable, and an absence of curiosity.

She had a hard life, but that is neither an excuse nor an explanation. A lot of people have had hard lives. She lost her father as a teenager—but as far as losing fathers, I can certainly do her better. She lived through the wars—yes, plural, because she would always mention the Russo-Finnish War of 1939 in the same breath as The Great Patriotic War. I once read a book on history’s dumbest wars[2], and was delighted to recognize the Winter War as “Grandma’s War”. But again, the number of people who were affected by wars in their lifetime does not necessarily equal the number of people who permanently lose their joie de vivre. While I suspect that the privations and fear of the dark decade of the 1930s in the Soviet Union were not helped by one of history’s most stupid wars, our family did not lose anyone to it, or even to the massive devastation that followed, and did not live in a territory that was occupied by anyone since the Tatars-Mongols came to town in the 13^th century. And even my grandmother was not old enough to remember that. All of my friends had grandparents (and some even parents) who lived through The War, yet most of them were not forced to wage their private battle for independence against their own families.

A nephew drowned in the 1950s, which seemed to affect grandmother more than the young man’s own mother, my grandfather’s older sister. Grandmother drew the following conclusions from his accidental death: (1) water must be feared, and learning to swim can only lead to trouble (which made my growing up on a river and spending all the summers of my childhood at the seaside that much less pleasurable), (2) a tragedy is sure to befall your children as soon as you look away (despite the fact that the beloved nephew was an adult when he died—it truly was just an accident, a tragic accident that can happen to anyone who is living a life and doing things in the world), and (3) daring to enjoy life after bad things happen to loved ones makes you a bad person. The strongest condemnation that grandmother voiced about her sister in law who survived the death of a son was that “she must have loved herself too much”—too much for what? For going on living? Yes, that was indeed the implication, for loving oneself was the greatest character flaw she could imagine.

To be fair—though fairness has never entered into our relationship—the world has changed quite a bit from the time she was taking life lessons from her own mother in the 1920s to the time she was attempting to impart these instructions to me half a century later, and more drastically still to the present day. Looking back, I have trouble recalling any words of wisdom from her which I have stored away or applied to any situation in my life. There was always a lot about decorum, much of it so embarrassing that my hand does not rise to share it here. There was quite a bit about appearances, equally outdated and, not surprisingly, heavy on body shaming. But nowhere did she stand out quite like she did in teaching me basic homemaking skills: plucking chickens[3], scrubbing floors (on hands and knees—never make it easy by using a mop), darning socks, etc. Maybe the last one is not entirely useless—but that is mostly because I enjoy the needle and thread crafts. Still, her point was that no one will marry a girl who could not do these things. Despite my reasonable and consistent academic success, she labeled me quite early on as a potential failure in life due to my lack of enthusiasm for cleaning supplies over books, and for my unswerving commitment to learn how to enjoy life rather than endure it.

Food was the biggest and, in retrospect, the only language of love that she spoke. Talking about anything beyond the basic needs was simply not done. Are you hungry? If yes, have some bread with either salt or sugar. If not, go play outside. God, she was so tough when she was raising me, and in the era when it was no longer really necessary! She was always wearing an apron, always stirring a pot—no, literally, an apron was a part of her “uniform”. In her later years, when she would come to my house, she would bring an apron to wear around. Later still, she would bring a change of work clothes, an old dress that was no longer fit to be seen in public. My house was never clean enough for her.

She always made sure that I was well fed and clothed, and my physical needs were always met. She never said I looked nice without adding that something was off in my appearance. She never told me I did something well without mentioning that someone else did it better. She often lamented that I was not living the life that she felt I should be living in order to make her proud. I never tried hard enough, and I never measured up. I lived with her until I was almost 13, and it was possibly the greatest disappointment of her life that there came a day when she lost control of mine.

To many, she was a good friend, loyal, present, and generous. She never forgot a birthday and never refused a request for help. She kept in touch with several generations of acquaintances, neighbors, and distant relatives. Her tirelessness, which did not flag until her 90s, was remarkable, and I continue to hope that I inherited a sufficient fraction of it.

She outlived all her friends and most relatives, including some who were much younger. Only a handful of people remain who really knew her. There were some good times; I am deeply sad that there were not more.

[1] There was one thing—she did not monitor what I read, either among the books we had at home or the books I would pick up from the various libraries I frequented. Her loss of vigilance on this front was my saving grace, although she did think that I spent too much time reading and not enough outdoors.

[2] Stupid Wars: A Citizen’s Guide to Botched Putsches, Failed Coups, Inane Invasions, and Ridiculous Revolutions, by Ed Strosser and Michael Prince

[3] Did my aversion to poultry start in childhood? Over the past few decades, I worked my way from observing grandma burning feathers off chickens with a blowtorch to experiencing mild nausea at so much as a sight of a cooked chicken breast. It seems to be socially acceptable to be teased about this; I am happy to provide this cheap laugh.

Grandma’s teiglach. I have never tasted it anywhere else, and I do not make it nearly as well as she did.

Charlie Chaplin Christmas

I am not a total holiday Scrooge or Grinch. I do happily celebrate Christmas. In fact, my family’s most cherished and enduring Christmas tradition is to watch “The Muppet Christmas Carol”. We have not missed a year since it came out. I can recite all the words, just like I can to “The Lion in Winter” (another Christmas movie, though not part of our lore) and, of course, “Chariots of Fire” (entirely unrelated to this holiday, but I never pass up an opportunity to mention it). And a few years ago, I actually went to three churches on Christmas Eve: Orthodox Church for Eve of the Nativity service, Catholic Church because a friend of mine sang “O Holy Night” during mass, and Methodist Church for evening carols and candles. (This feat is not likely to be repeated)

If you are one of the very few people who have not seen this, go watch it now. You are welcome.

Back in the Old Country, all holidays were secular, some were political, and we only read about Christmas in classical literature. The religious aspect of it was merely a relic of antiquity, but we had the rest of it, the tree with all the trimmings, the gifts, Grandpa Frost and Snow Maiden, festive meal with friends and family, kids pageants, seasonal movies and, of course, “The Nutcracker”. It was just entirely conflated with New Year’s. It was the “New Year’s tree” and Grandpa Frost, bearing gifts, was joined, at a critical juncture, by Baby New Year. As a child, I had some vague notion that the pre-revolutionary holiday, while similar to our own, contained some forbidden mystical elements, but never understood why it was celebrated before the actual final day of the year—and what did people then do on December 31, the *real* holiday, if they already spent all of its currency the week before? I assumed it might have had something to do with the old Julian calendar, with its confusing two week delay, which was finally abolished in 1918.

Our first year in the U.S., my mother allowed me to open the gifts under the tree on Christmas rather than December 31, but strictly because I was a tremendous pest about it. She literally told me, “I hear in this country, they open the gifts a week early”! I took that as a very personal victory, and it was also the first time I heard that this unfamiliar holiday was still being celebrated, and in the New World no less. Who knew? We continued to do our tree/gifts/dinner thing on New Year’s Eve.

For the next decade, this holiday continued to elude me. American Christmas always seemed reserved for family, but it was also a part of the larger holiday landscape, so December 25 was really no different than any other vacation day until the big event—New Year’s Eve.

One time in college, I actually spent part of winter break with a Jewish friend. Her kind mother was so concerned that I was being deprived of some family tradition that she took me to a neighbor’s house to at least look at a decorated Christmas tree. It was nice, and I did not have the heart to tell her that the tree alone did not mean much, and it was a week early anyway.

On my drive home, late that Christmas Day, my car spun out on a highway in a snowstorm and ended up facing the oncoming traffic. Some kind man drove me home in my car, because I was too shaken up, while his wife followed in theirs. They kept asking if I had someone to be with me. I reassured them that I did. But, I lived alone in Michigan, my parents lived in Texas and were on a cruise to boot, my grandparents lived in New York and were visiting friends in Atlanta, all my friends were with their families, every single store and restaurant in town was closed, and this was before cell phones. I started watching TV, and it blew out in the middle of “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation”. It took me some years to learn how the movie ends.

The last time I did not celebrate Christmas was a tail end of a very rough year, probably one of the Bottom Three in my life thus far. My personal life was unsettled, I was fed up with living in Manhattan in a high-rent closet where cockroaches paraded by my futon every morning in search of sustenance (but the joke was on them, because I kept everything, including silverware, in a refrigerator that they have never figured out how to breach), and fed up with school after attending it non-stop in various form for almost two decades. I still lived alone, but finally near family, which was the one saving grace in an otherwise dark period.

The only photo from the unhappiest place I have ever lived.

My mother inexplicably sent me a small live evergreen tree, which was incongruous in my tiny apartment, and incompatible both with my hectic lifestyle and black thumb. Predictably, it did not survive the season.

I cannot remember now what depths of despair made me summon my grandparents all the way from Brooklyn on Christmas Day to my tiny studio. We first went to see “Chaplin” at the movie theater. Robert Downey Jr. was not the action star he is today but a handsome young romcom-ish actor, before all his troubles, and way before he successfully overcame them. The film was beautiful, and he should have gotten the best actor Oscar. I still think of it as one of the biggest Oscar snubs in my lifetime. Back at my place, grandmother fried up some liver and onions on my two-burner stove, and somehow all three of us managed to squeeze in and enjoy both the feast and the company, keeping the window open because the radiator emitted unrelenting heat—but I lived on the ninth floor, so it was safe. If this is not a quintessential immigrant Christmas in New York, I do not want to know what is.

The outside of my apartment building was deceptively nice.

Through the years, that day has acquired the soft patina of nostalgia, but I do know that it looked and felt less like “Home Alone 2” than “Fairytale of New York”, for this was a time before Disney moved into Times Square, and you could literally smell Manhattan Valley, the upper part of Upper West Side, as soon as you crossed into the 90s.

I did not record this particular day in my diary, but sometime before the end of that year, I wrote about how much I hated my life. Within a week, a new year dawned, and it turned out to be one of the Top Three for me. It just goes to show, the darkest hour is just before dawn.

Time Shelter: Reminiscence, not Review

“The past is not just that which happened to you. Sometimes it is that which you just imagined”*.

The older I get, the more disappointed—and, frankly, disbelieving—I am that we cannot travel back in time. The more years pass, the farther I get from certain cherished moments, the harder it is to accept the permanence of their departure. Watching Doctor Who, the ultimate wanderer in time and space, I get a vague sense of unease from the episodes set in the future. What is the far future to me? I will not see it, so I am not curious about it and not invested in it. But the past, well, it is full of second guesses disguised as second chances. It is full of the comfort of nostalgia. “It’s been written that the past is a foreign country. Nonsense. The past is my home country. The future is a foreign country, full of strange faces, I won’t set foot there”*.

In “Time Shelter”, Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov creates the perfect scenario for which my soul has been yearning. Gospodinov is Bulgarian, and we are exactly the same age. I feel his story almost instinctively, beyond the words, for he writes not just about the decades he experienced, but as only an Eastern Block Gen-Xer experienced them. It is rare that I hear the echoes of the voices in my head in print.

His first person narrator meets Gaustine, a mysterious psychiatrist who opens a “clinic for the past”. It is meant to evoke recognizable memories for Alzheimer’s patients by reproducing the surroundings of their comforting past lives, but the concept takes off and everyone wants to starts seeking shelter from the relentless passage of time by stepping into the past. “Everything happens years after it has happened”*.

Like Gaustine’s patients, I am not even interested in the historical past, someone else’s past. I do not want to meet Shakespeare (whoever he really was) or see dinosaurs or anything like that. (OK, maybe I want to meet D’Artagnan in his natural habitat, but that is all). And fine, I don’t even want to change anything. I saw “Sliding Doors”. I read “Midnight Library”. I am no longer sure which parts of my life I would want to erase if there is no guarantee that this would not have a detrimental effect. I can no longer fathom what my life would look like today if I had made different decisions at some critical junctures. I might have been spared some pain, but what unanticipated and ultimately avoided sorrows were waiting in the wings? The decisions that I made, I stand by them. The decisions that were made for me trouble me still with the passage of years but regret is useless. And it all basically worked out.

The pool would have been beyond that fence on the right

It is just that the melancholy longings come unbidden in the twilight, and that is when I sometimes wish I could revisit my past. I want to see the sun rise over the roofs from the balcony of my mother’s apartment, for every occasion on which I visited her there seemed special and wonderful. I want to sit in my childhood apartment’s dark room lit only by the lights of the Christmas tree, the only year my grandparents had a real tree and could finally hang up the one ornament that was too heavy for our little artificial tree—an orange, the size and weight of the actual fruit. I do not want to forget either that orange that always stayed in the ornament box in the entresol except for that one brief appearance or my favorite ornament, wild strawberry with a human face. I want to go to the grocery store on the first floor of our apartment building and buy birch juice by the glass and a hard block of coffee with milk, meant to be dissolved in boiling water and not gnawed like I did as a kid. I want to watch my collection of film strips in the hallway of our apartment on the coldest winter days. I want to marvel at the hollyhock mallow plants in our neighbors’ garden in the summer. I want to see again that inground public pool that was filled in when I was just a toddler, leaving behind a weed-covered wasteland—was my memory of this thing even real, a random outdoor pool on our quiet little street? And I want to sit on our old couch and read the books of my childhood. There is so much from that era of gentle stagnation which seems positively utopian in comparison to our present cataclysmic times. “Warning, history in the rearview mirror is always closer than it appears”*.

My favorite part of this mesmerizing novel, which I had to read twice in a row (and even that was not quite enough to fully take it all in; I am yearning to read it again), is when time shelters become so popular that European countries actually vote on returning to their respective favorite past eras. The clinics of the past are no longer enough; entire countries become engulfed in nostalgia. It is fascinating to read what decade each country chooses as representative of the glory of its people, yet still recognizable and not entirely devoid of modern comforts. Some decades of the last century are obviously fraught; 30s and 40s have their devotees, but Gospodinov is not going there. The story is not about that. So many countries choose the 1970s or the early ‘80s (including most of the [former] Eastern Bloc—the whiff of freedom in the air, before reality bit), with only Italy choosing the ‘60s. Bulgaria’s choice is not mentioned, but there is a hint. “What decade would you choose? “I’d like to be twelve years old in each of them.” * That would be my answer, too.

*All the quotes are from Georgi Gospodinov, “Time Shelter”, English translation by Angela Rodel

https://georgigospodinov.com/

[Caption: my time shelter, for better or worse]

Poison, Fire, and Flood

One of the main villains of my raucous childhood was one Shturman. This was, and is, his real last name. I am not changing it here because (1) he is not likely to read this, (2) this unusual name[1] is too much a part of him, and (3) every word is true.

Shturman’s code name was “Douche”. No, listen, in Russian, it just means “shower” (and in French as well, but we did not know it then). And the reason he was “Shower” was because we called him “D.Sh.”, which stood for “Durak Shturman”, which means “Shturman the Fool”. So it all fits together rather beautifully. Since “fool” was the worst insult we knew, literally everyone’s code name started with “D”, but this was the only one that is not lost in translation[2]. At school, he was known as “Shturm Zimnego”, or “Storming of the Winter [Palace]” (the event that, according to what we were taught at school, started the Great October Socialist Revolution), but we did not feel that he deserved so much honor.

All positive comments regarding these flowers will be deleted

My BFF and I met him on the first day of school, September 1, 1975. In fact, we all met each other for the first time that day. It was not a good day for me, for it started out quite literally on the wrong foot. All the girls were wearing pretty summer sandals (my friend’s were pink). I, as was my lot in childhood, was wearing heavy, hideous black/brown booties. I was perpetually overdressed in childhood by my overprotective grandmother; I always had a couple more layers on than anyone else. My mother, who gets incredibly defensive about every single choice made for me not by me, would undoubtedly say that prettier shoes could not be found—and that would be a lie. Everyone else wore common Soviet-style sandals readily available at any children’s clothing store in town. My ugly orthopedic boots were imported. And to top it all off, the trend of sending me off on the first day of school with a bouquet of chrysanthemums for the classroom teacher started that unfortunate day. You guessed it—everyone else had lovely summer flowers. I yearned for daisies, and cannot abide chrysanthemums to this day. But I digress.

Mine and my BFF’s mothers and both of Shturman’s parents went to high school together. Their paths diverged for a few short years after college and joined again on that day when it was discovered that they had children born in the same year (two in January, just a week apart, and one in November), who will be starting school not just at the same time, but at the same school and in the same class. Of course, given that our parents were friends, we were thrown together a lot in those early years, for all the holidays, all the birthdays, summer trips to the countryside, etc. Well, since I lived with my grandparents, I was not allowed to celebrate with my friends, so that was one very small benefit, having a bunch of 50+ year olds rather than Shturman over. And since I was born in November, I did not have to share my birthday with him, only with the October Revolution, celebrated in November according to the “new”, Gregorian calendar.

To commemorate the Revolution, we got a few days off from school—basically, our fall break. In that place and time, it was common to gather for all festivities. One year, when I was maybe in second grade, we all met at my BFF’s apartment. The adults, which consisted of Shturman’s parents and mine and my friend’s mothers (both divorced, but with or without boyfriends—memory fails) went for a walk. Do not be shocked, it was a kinder, gentler time; neighbors looked out for each other and each others’ kids. And it turned out that the real danger lurked within…

The adults departed for their nighttime stroll, and BFF and I hoped to have some fun: sing along to Soviet pop music with pantyhose on our heads, make plasticine animals, read about astronauts and plan our own future space adventures—really, the possibilities were endless. It was a Soviet studio apartment: one room, bathroom, and a kitchen at the end of the hallway. We staked out the kitchen. Shturman pestered us for a bit, at one point brandishing a bottle of wine[3] and boasting that he can drink it all. We called his bluff with all the disdain we could muster; predictably, he did nothing but buzzed off to the room. But our little gray cells were already activated.

As children, we were told that alcohol is poison. As we saw adults drink copious amounts thereof, the unspoken assumption was that it is poison specifically to children. Which budding sociopath came up with the cunning plan of serving tea laced with alcohol to our arch enemy shall remain undisclosed. I know that “Hey, Shturman, do you want some tea?” was not spoken by me. He and I were never verbal with each other, letting our fists do the talking.

My friend made him a cup of tea, which was actually mostly vodka. Shturman, clearly feeling very pleased with himself and his imaginary superiority over us, took a sip, immediately choked and started coughing, eyes bulging. You did not see this coming, right, because you thought Russians drink vodka from birth, and I am here to break down the stereotypes. He dropped the cup, and there was that moment in which you know things can go either way—and this is how they went, with him screaming “I will kill you!” and us shrieking and running. Studio apartment, where are you going to go? Bathroom, of course—the only place with a lock.

Shturman started pounding on the door and screaming, “Come out or it will be worse for you! I will break down this door!” BFF was sort of turning on me: “So, alcohol is poison, huh? He is alive and well, and even worse than he was!” I was just hoping the door will hold, and besides, it was a modern apartment, with a “combined” bathroom, meaning toilet, sink, and tub were all in the same place. We had all the conveniences, and could wait him out until our parents’ return. Eventually our enemy calmed down and walked away, and we settled in the bathtub, lulled into a false sense of security.

Suddenly, a scratching sound alerted us to a new potential disaster. Shturman procured matches and started lighting them and shoving them under the door. He decided to smoke us out, that weasel! But the joke was on him—we had access to plenty of water, and started pouring it on the matches, having emptied the toothbrush glass for this purpose. Neither side was going to surrender, but we assumed that the matches will run out before water. As luck, good or bad depending on perception, would have it, adults came home before either, to a minor river in the hallway, with purses and shoes floating by.

We refused to leave the bathroom until the Shturman family departed. I remember nothing of the aftermath of this event (not even the last of its kind), beyond never getting along with this Shturman until I left the country several years later. I have not seen him since. Wherever he is, I hope he is not holding a grudge.

[1] It literally means “navigator” in Russian. Unusual and kind of cool, if one stops and thinks about it.

[2] For example, we referred to Shturman’s father as “D.P.”, i.e., “Durak Papasha”, meaning “Dad the Fool”. We disliked him because his son looked just like him, and we never saw him as anything other than his son’s father. Yet DP was the only father that was present in our group of friends. Something to unpack here.

[3] Again I remind you, different time, different place, no burden of Puritan heritage.

More than Dracula

And then I went to Romania. It was not on my bingo card in this lifetime. It was not on my bucket, or any other, list. In the hierarchy of the Soviet Block, Bulgaria was the most accessible, and there was that personal connection that I already mentioned. DDR was glamorous and had amazing, coveted toys that sometimes found their way to our stores. Yugoslavia was practically The West. Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia were somewhere in the middle, and I never knew anyone who visited these countries.

The 1980s brought a version of Romania into my own life in the person of my stepfather. As a teenager going through a trauma that informed her entire life (to which he himself was not a minor contributor), I only listened to his stories on the good days, and those were few and farther between. He was born when Romania was still a monarchy, and left it for good during the next to last and not even the most brutal decade of Ceauşescu’s reign.

This is what I remember, and there is no one around who can challenge my [faulty] recollections. Like many, his family of well-to-do landowners suffered when the Communists came. There was a last name change, family separation, exile to a remote village, and the eventual cloak and dagger story of fleeing with his two friends Gheorghe and Mihai (straight out of Romanian central casting) with visas to Hungary which were then altered to get to Austria and with the ultimate goal of defecting to the U.S. He hated communism with a passion that was matched only by his hatred of everything Russian—and I hope you see the bitter irony in that. The ‘80s were not great for the Soviet Bloc, and for Romania in particular, though the very end of the decade finally brought the long-awaited relief. Some of those countries are democracies still…

My BFF of the annual girl trips and I were talking about making the pilgrimage, but somehow it seemed too fanciful. And then one day, it just didn’t. I figured, if guided tours were going there, it is no longer the place from which to flee. I know, I know, it has literally been decades, but those early memories last the longest. My friend’s grandmother came from Romania, but in a way of turn-of-the-century immigrants, from Transylvania via Ellis Island. Her childhood impressions of the far away ancestral home were quite different than mine. What a difference a few decades (and a mad dictator) make! I am happy to report that she found the Romania of grandma’s stories; I found only a shadow of my stepfather’s.

This is Sighisoara. Dracula was born here.

Arriving in the Western part of the country, I saw not even a hint of the dark and depressing past of the previous regime. It could be that, on a guided tour full of Americans, we were only shown the best parts, but we had enough free time to see beyond any potential Potemkin villages. Our lovely, warm, spirited tour manager warned us more than once, with just a hint of apology, that we will see some remnants of the Communist times, such as our hotel in Timisoara which, while the best in town, was ostensibly less luxurious than other hotels on our tour (but as for me, I concluded that all the hotels in which I usually stay are apparently “Communist”, including in places where Communists were not known to have made any inroads!). If this was the only outward reminder of that era, it was truly nothing at all. Instead, Romania unfolded as a land full of natural, architectural, and culinary wonders.

This is Castle Bran. Fun fact: Bram Stoker was never here.

We saw castles: Hunedoara’s Corvin Castle, as intricately feudal as anything France has to offer; Peles, an opulent gem of a palace; Bran, of Dracula fame, both charming and historic and surprisingly unspoiled by its reputation, and towns: Timisoara, where Romania’s present was born, with its three distinct, gorgeous squares; Sibiu, full of small-town European elegance; Sighisoara, with its medieval cobblestone streets and a clocktower with a view that takes one’s breath away; and Brasov, charming and joyous, full of unexpected delights like sampling local wine in a beautiful garden, jubilant Europe Day celebration in a square right below our hotel window, and Dracula himself roaming the streets. I did not know what to expect, but I did not expect this. I hate to say “normal”, because what is that, really, but “normal” is the word that kept coming to mind. After all the suffering, the deaths, the people fleeing into the diaspora, normal would be enough. But it is more than that. It’s glorious. It’s absolutely wonderful.

I did not see the Romania I thought I knew, if vicariously, until we reached Bucharest, and even that took a minute, for we arrived on the weekend, when the central street of the city, Victory Avenue, was closed to traffic for a kind of an extended block party. People were promenading, music was playing, food was being served everywhere, and it felt like the whole city was out and about, enjoying a warm Sunday night. The memories flooded the next day, with our walking tour. Just steps from our hotel was the Revolution Square. Our guide was telling us about how the dictator would speak from the balcony of the building of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and my heart just broke. To the rest of the group, most older than me, these were just words of unfamiliar history, a curiosity. To the guide, a man younger than me, it was his entire childhood. We spoke briefly; we understood each other viscerally, survivors of the tangentially shared past. This country has been through so much, and so recently, and you would not even know it unless you knew for what to look—and listen. A quarter of a century under a dictatorship, under a cult of personality, all those lives lost or irreparably damaged… The mind boggles that anyone would choose, or even just flirt with, tyranny as a form of government, but the extra heartbreak is that people do not learn from the lessons and losses suffered by others.

My stepfather and I had a complicated relationship all the way until his death at age 56. In the grand scheme of things, he died less than a year after Ceauşescu, and never saw this version of Romania that I just did. And that makes me more than a little sad, for everyone deserves to see their homeland thriving and free.

Papa Taught Hebrew in Harbin

My grandmother used to tell me stories about her childhood, in the 1920s, which were both exotic and relatable. She was only 45 when I was born, which seemed ancient to me, of course, but now I know that the half century mark is prime time for reflection and reminiscing. We are unreliable narrators of our own lives, and the charm of her mischievous and adventurous early years in the small provincial town on the Volga remains the biggest shared treasure of our fraught relationship.

Now that I am the age that she was when she was raising me, I realize how memory shifts as time goes by. In her telling, she was a spirited and inquisitive child that was frequently in trouble with her humorless but loving parents. The irony that these were the qualities she most deplored in me escaped me then. I also bought into this portrayal of her parents for the time being, while years later it came to me that perhaps the character trait she most chose to emulate—grim rigidity—was the least praiseworthy attribute of this couple. They never seemed quite real, just shadows of semi-forgotten ancestors, even though less time separated my childhood from them than from today.

I recently read “People Love Dead Jews” by Dara Horn. In this book, which had me both nodding in agreement and holding my breath, I came across a chapter about the Jewish community in Harbin in early 20^th century. I do not know if more is written about this place and time in history, but this was the first time I gasped in recognition: “Papa taught Hebrew in Harbin”. For among grandmother’s stories was always this nugget: her father spent several years in Harbin, teaching Hebrew to children while his brothers were running a business there. This has always been just a naked, stand-alone fact, and when I was a child, it always seemed like enough information. Great-grandfather, whom no one in my world besides grandma and her brother ever met, for he died before The War and before she left her hometown that neither my mom nor I ever even visited, was always described as a stern disciplinarian and seemed sufficiently boring to not merit additional investigation. But grandma’s own childhood memories of her father speaking Chinese to make the neighborhood kids laugh echoed my own delight when her brother, my beloved great uncle, would pretend to speak Chinese to me. I knew he was faking it, but he was so delightfully comical!

I finally learned that this interlude in great-grandfather’s life was not random, as I always assumed without additional thought. Fortunately for me and mine, his ultimate fate was arguably better than that of many of the people he would have known in Harbin—and that is saying a lot, considering that he returned to his hometown of Lyozna, Belarus [1] (at some point before getting engaged to my great-grandmother on June 12, 1919 in Vitebsk[2]), got married and had two children, lived through the darkest years of Stalinism, and died before he was 60 in 1940.

I have been an immigrant since I was a teenager. I have traveled. I spent two summers in Europe, and I have been to China on a work trip, to the beautiful and sophisticated Shanghai, which is actually nowhere near Harbin and has a completely different history. Every day of my professional life, I talk to people who have, at a minimum, spent several years in a foreign country. Until now, I have not thought of this remote, unknown man’s journey, his years (how many?) in a much colder climate, in a completely different world. I never imagined that he had his own “stranger in a strange land” journey.

As a child I did not know enough about the world to imagine China at the beginning of the 20^th century. I never gave a single thought to how great-grandfather traveled so far—and back—what kind of business these nameless brothers of his had, why and when did he return to Belarus, eventually making his way to and settling in Russia proper. My grandmother was not a person who did not talk about the past, but I do not know how much she knew about that period of her father’s life. Somewhere along the way, there was some falling out with these uncles that severed the family ties for all eternity (they were not welcome to attend their brother’s funeral). It might have been related to this business in China, but grandmother’s own mother never told her. In those days, people did not ask; children did not question their parents. It is nearly impossible for me to understand the respectful yet reserved, affectionate yet distant relationships of that bygone era. To the families of these great-uncles, whoever and wherever they are, my family is the missing link, the lost tribe. Do their descendants remember today that there was another brother, another uncle? Is this Harbin interlude a part of their family lore? Sometimes I lament the loss of family memories to family feuds on top of the already precarious and unreliable way history was treated in the Soviet Union. Other times, I concede that maybe it is only natural that the lives of ordinary people do not survive generational memories.

Dara Horn’s book gave me an unexpected glimpse into my great-grandfather’s unknowable life. There is a connection that survives time and space, and a memory that is a blessing.

זיכרונו לברכה אַבְרָהָם

[1] The birthplace of Moishe Shagal, aka Marc Chagall. I wonder if they knew each other? They would have been contemporaries.

[2] The only exact date in this narrative, because my great-grandparents’ engagement announcement somehow survived time and distance, and I treasure it.