Moral codes that withstand the wreckage of history
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Need a break from the tensions of the U.S. election cycle and a reminder that we are part of a living world, too? This essay about serviceberries, kinship, and the true meaning of abundance is one of my favorites from last year.
Audio version:
At the age of nineteen my grandfather, Jacob Davidovich Malchik, flipped an electric switch, saw a working light bulb for the first time, and knew his future waited somewhere outside his muddy Ukrainian village. In post-Revolution Russia, he left the Pale of Settlement’s shtetls, where Jews had been confined to living for generations, for proletarian Leningrad. With the tsar gone and the Bolsheviks promising equality for all, he had the chance to discard centuries-old restrictive laws that had been attached to him more closely than clothing, ground into his skin like a tattoo.
But Jacob hadn’t counted on the damage a dictator’s paranoia would do to that dream. As a Jew and the son of a moneylender he struggled even to gain admission to the Leningrad Polytechnical Institute in the 1930s, despite his top score each year on the entrance exam. It took him years to finally become an engineer, and only his intelligence, work ethic, and sheer luck pushed him against the later current of Stalin’s deeply anti-Semitic Soviet Union.
Those very qualities endangered his life in a Soviet state that required thinking and acting only in absolutes.
In 1937, the year Stalin’s first great purge of “undesirables” began, a popular Party boss summoned Jacob to his office and ordered him to denounce a man who was suspected of being an “enemy of the people.”
Hard words, those: denounce, enemy of the people, the Party. Concepts that in that world, at that time, had punitive, harsh meanings, a black hole of language dwindling into singularities, hostile to nuance or texture.
Jacob replied that he didn’t believe the man was an enemy of the people. In doing so, he knew the risk he was taking. To be denounced in 1937—and, equally, to refuse to denounce someone—meant a surprise visit in the middle of the night followed by a show trial, possibly torture, and either a bullet or exile to Siberia. Denunciations were anonymous, required no proof, and more often than not led to the victim’s death.
Two million people died during Stalin’s first purge, known as the Great Terror, an average of a thousand executions per week.
The Party boss tried again to convince Jacob to write a denunciation, but he refused to comply. Jacob went home that night, told my grandmother Anna Davidovna what had happened, and together they packed a small suitcase and waited for the KGB’s midnight knock.
Jacob knew what was being asked of him. He also knew that his own morality—for which the words justice and honor and honesty are only brushstrokes—would not allow him to sacrifice an innocent man’s life for the sake of his own, innocent, life.
My grandparents were not active dissenters against Stalin. But they retained hold of their sense of self, of who they knew themselves to be and the difference between right and wrong. They read forbidden Solzhenitsyn with their children at night, sitting around the table passing each illegally copied page to the next person as they finished. My grandmother listened to banned Voice of America and Voice of Israel—though I imagine that these days she would feel about the Israeli government the way most of my family in Russia does: absolutely opposed.
In the last few years, my cousins in Russia have spoken up against the invasion in Ukraine and found themselves silenced in the face of mass arrests. Relatives reported years ago of watching ballot boxes stuffed with pre-filled forms during sham presidential elections. Nobody in my family takes democratic freedoms for granted, but perhaps it takes living under dictatorship or oppression to realize that even the right to fight for something better can be stripped away.
Most of what I know about being a good ancestor comes from grandparents I never knew. To do what is right without expecting recognition for it, without even expecting to survive. They taught me that in good times and bad, being a good ancestor entails treating all your relationships with respect, no matter how intimate or how distant. To live with integrity, whether you’re ever recognized for it or not, and whether or not the world around you seeks to shatter all that you value as good and right and moral.
Being a good ancestor begins with how we treat those beings closest to us. That’s a minimum but not the totality.
The KGB never came for my grandfather. The next morning Jacob found out that the Party boss whose orders he refused had been arrested, with a letter in his vest denouncing Jacob as an enemy of the people. The man was shot a few days later. His letter, his “right answer,” gave my grandfather some immunity from further accusations; if Jacob had given the answer he knew was expected, I would not be here.
Jacob and Anna never saw the end of the Soviet Union—or barely did, in my grandmother’s case. They had no expectation that their world would shift to meet their values, but they likewise refused to abandon their values to meet that world.
When my father was finally given permission to emigrate from the Soviet Union with my mother and older sister in 1974, he was given three days to leave the country. Three days to say goodbye to his family, his friends, his job, Leningrad with her endless canals and pastel light under a midnight Sun, ice skating on the Neva River in the depth of that far northern winter that I crave returning to the way I crave water drunk from cold mountain streams, or walking this world barefoot.
Three days, and he was told not to return. He didn’t even speak English when he came to Seattle at nearly 30 years old.
And he never saw his father again. Jacob died a few years before Mikhail Gorbachev began loosening the restrictive borders of the Iron Curtain. Anna Davidovna, my grandmother, died shortly after the Soviet Union fell, less than a year after I met her for the first time. I was 14 years old.
My grandparents left me some small understanding of the complexities we live with when daily routines and adhering to one’s higher values are riddled with life-or-death pitfalls. They also left me with a question I wake and walk with every day of my life: how do I make choices and exist in a world that seems intent on destroying everything I care about? How does anyone?
The work I do is aimed at exploring these questions, and on reviving and strengthening truths like those left me by my grandparents, at bringing us back to the good in the world, to reminders that we are all alive, interwoven with all of life, and that how we treat one another and non-human life alike matters. Interconnection, relationship, kinship—they’re a mosaic that presents the opposite of individual ownership and private property.
Under authoritarianism, my father told me shortly after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, you have to find your red line—like his father did when asked to denounce another innocent man, the line you will not cross, even at risk of your own life.
Audio: find your red line
No matter who wins or loses elections large and small, these truths have been under assault for thousands of years. They need repair, just as the wild, breathing, beautiful living world needs our attention and care.
No matter what times we live in, no matter who holds power or who is being oppressed, we all have to hang onto ourselves, to what we know to be right and good, to not sacrifice those values even for our own skin, much less our own power, success, or status.
The moral codes we live by do not have to be immaculate. They do not have to check every box of what we think is expected of us, or what we expect of ourselves. All they must be—and this is harder than it sounds—is sturdy enough to withstand the wreckage of history.
As always, so extraordinarily well said and true.
And it is so hard to deal with someone who doesn't acknowledge your line exists, or doesn't deem it important, or believes you're dead wrong in drawing it there ("of all places!). Maybe this speaks to moral flexibility in others, or to the kind of relativism that tries to render such lines meaningless (aka. "alternative facts"). That process can be so hard when someone else treats it like a battle of wills to be won, rather than an opportunity to learn someone else's world view in order to enrich your own. And - well, that's kind of what a dictatorship can be, I guess? A rendering of all moral codes null and void in the face of the Great Man's version of reality - "There Is No Red Line" delivered in the style of a Cardassian interrogator attempting to brainwash Captain Picard into seeing the correct number of lights.
Ah. It would be nice if humanity learned the apparently super-difficult business of everyone comparing their red lines without feeling attacked by other people's definitions of them.
Also: I would love to read Jacob's entire history in biography form.
It seems that many hard earned lessons during the Cold War have been forgotten by now. Thanks for helping us remember. I'm struck by the similarities between your view and my friend Mark Slouka's (his parents narrowly escaped Czechoslovakia after the Soviet coup). And also by Solzhenitsyn's disappointment with the West.
I've come to a similar place about the election. I'd like to do something to make a difference in Pennsylvania, where I live, but I feel like there aren't many levers left to pull, especially since I don't know anyone here who is on the fence. The DNC should know who I am, how I've voted, that I was a volunteer for in the last two primaries. But they are still wasting money on mailers for me. The red lines are subtle, hidden. I suppose that itself is a mercy (for now).