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Thank you. Interesting and thought provoking article. We can all learn from those who have gone before, and try to act in a way that our own descendants will admire.
I lean on them tremendously, especially my grandmother. And even though I never met him and only met her twice before she passed away, they are my surest guides. 🧡
That’s beautiful. We have this concept in our tradition that if your parents/grandparents were good people, that it generates baraka (blessings) of all kinds in your life. It’s karmic in a way. It’s the energy they pushed forward to you.
Hey Antonia, this is so powerfully written; I think because it is so immediate to you, so entwined in your ancestry and hence into your own experience, it feels infinitely real to us to read.
Knowing about the purges, knowing about the KGB, about the Stalin years is one thing on an intellectual and historical level, it becomes something very different when we look at it - when we read it - through your eyes and the lives of Jacob and Anna.
And sturdy moral codes may, sometimes, seem a thing of the past; but as you point out, and show us in your writing, they are not. They are there for us to hold on to, to help us, to keep us on the just path. They do not have to be perfect or immaculate - indeed, they cannot be because the forces they withstand (those wreckers of lives who create the risk of wreckages in history) are powerful indeed and need ballast and fibre to stand up to them: they have to seem above us, difficult even, to keep us working to attain them.
Wow, Nicholas, this was powerful to read. In fact, this is a comment I'm going to print out and keep as a reminder to myself of what's at stake, and what he constantly have to ask of ourselves.
There's something of those Stalin years I keep wanting to write about but haven't found the right context yet, of my stepmother getting her grandmother's and great-aunt's files from their trials and time in the gulag and what that meant to her. She got them from an organization that Putin outlawed a few years later.
Just been having some long conversations on ancestral stories with some other writer friends (prompted in part by all of us serendipitously reading Women Who Run With the Wolves) -- what you can learn along with what is lost. Feels more relevant than ever.
In my family it’s complicated by the fact that my grandmother’s father, the WASP with the Mayflower lineage, was deeply prejudiced against the Irish in a real turn-of-the-20th C way. Shamed my grandmother for marrying a (3rd gen) Irishman, having 4 kids, and especially after he succumbed to alcoholism. Finding those stories feels very like the experience Chris La Tray describes about unearthing his Indian heritage.
Beautifully written, Antonia, especially this: All they must be—and this is harder than it sounds—is sturdy enough to withstand the wreckage of history.
I think Americans have grown very complacent and can't imagine having to ever think about the "red lines" they might be forced to cross. Perhaps that's why so many were willing to vote for Trump. I hope we don't all come to regret it even more than many of us already do.
Thank you for sharing your family with us. The audio files always move me so much. I am finding strength in their (and your) words and your stories also make me curious about my own ancestors. I have been holding onto the words of wise elders and ancestors this week. Sending lots of love to you and yours.
I bet a lot of us have ancestors like these somewhere in there, if we can find their stories. I'm lucky that my dad is a born storyteller, and likes to talk, and my stepmom, too.
And then we share our stories, and find strength together where we can ...
(That's nice to hear about the audio files! Thank you. I'd like to start doing more outside again, but my life hasn't been very conducive to that recently.)
Nia after reading this, I think it is safe to say that you are your ancestors dream. You really exhibit the same power of quiet revolution that Jacob and Anna skillfully employed to wade through the dark waters of soviet era. What a gorgeous thing to read this week. Thank you Nia for letting us witness the prior carriers of courage in your bloodline. My prayers right now for the world is this - may we all be seen and understood in ways that we deserve.
I believe you are right Nia, and I feel seen and understood too and oh my the dimensions it opens in one’s heart to love with more reckless abandon. I think that feeling of putting our arms around the world and love it fiercely also is a rare heritage of our ancestors.
You just completed my thought with the right reasons. This is exactly my intention behind the fears. There’s an African proverb that goes ‘The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth’
I think you might be right about that fierce love and our ancestors. I wish so much I'd known my Russian grandparents. What they've left me is a gift, but I wish I could have known them as themselves.
And OMG that proverb. That's exactly it, isn't it?
They stand right behind us and the only way to know them is to know ourselves and keep working towards creating the world we want to inhabit - a world they would have dreamed of. I can imagine how proud your ancestors would be of you Nia. Your light is inescapable. ✨💜🔥
Swarna, it is a gift of yours, making people feel seen. Maybe because you *do* see. And I hope you know you are seen, too. By me, by many others, and by your own ancestors, who I can't imagine would be anything but proud of who you are and the work you are doing.
I have the same prayer, in large part because I care, but also because when people are not seen and understood, many turn to the shadow, whether it's their own internal shadow, or the societal shadows they are invited to feed. When people are not seen, loved, and understood, everyone suffers.
I was so excited to read this newsletter when you published it and then was so busy I didn’t have time till last night. The timing was perfect, unfortunately. It provided me with the small bit of hope that I needed to help me finally fall asleep.
I copied so many of these sentences into my quote notebook and I will return to them over the next four years. I hope it’s ok that I forward the newsletter email to my extended family who are also feeling confused and angry and hopeless.
Thanks for these words of honor and connection, kindness and hope. There are many other important feelings here, but those are just a few. All of them are precious at this moment.
Love to all who are feeling trapped in this timeline they didn’t choose or support.
Marti, you can always forward the newsletter to anyone! I hope it helps, though I wish it didn't have to. Just as I wish my grandparents hadn't had to live through all they had, but am glad I can benefit from some of their lessons, and hope others can, too.
That last line, just -- oof. That's one *I* am writing down in my notebook. When I think of how much of humanity that has applied to for how many millennia, too ...
Thank you so much, Chad! That is incredibly high praise.
And as far as the election -- huge, obviously, for everyone who has been and is going to be affected by suffering. But one of the books I've turned to a lot since reading it earlier this year is Nick Acherson's "Black Sea," about the history of the Black Sea region. There are thousands of years of oppression, wars, brutal invasions and takeovers, all largely forgotten now by most of the world. Yet the people within those times loved, laughed, and suffered just the same.
The words, "enemy of the people" and "undesirables" caught my eye. I've heard this kind of rhetoric emanating from the villainous lips of a certain American politician who craves wealth and power, and who yearns to hold the highest Office in the Land in order to pursue them both. And speaking of red lines, it seems there is no line, red or otherwise, that this miscreant and his sycophants are not willing to cross. The question is...what is that red line for the rest of us? We are about to find out.
I think about this all the time, as language and ideas and even empathy is weaponized.
Thinking of you and yours as we make our way through this week, Kenneth. And the rivers of our region, the trees and mountains, that still manage to sustain our spirits.
Thank you, Nia. I have goosebumps. “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?” Thank you, as always 🙏🏻❤️
You and Sarah Kendzior are giving me backbone right now. Reading the two of you, powerful women, I feel my resolve strengthen in the face of massive anxiety and grief. Thank you.
That is high praise, Rebecca! I don't read Sarah all the time but she has been giving me courage and strengthening my spine for years, with her constant reminders of what Missouri has been trying to fight for far longer than much of the country.
Thank you for sharing! I recently read the biography of Navalny, "Dissident." Even more relevant now as I write after the U.S. election, and wondering what gave Navalny his courage -- and his wife and daughter too, now, as they continue his work. It takes a tremendous amount to continue what he did, even before he knew they were trying to kill him, much less after.
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.
Always there with the great points, Mike -- there are far, far too many people who refuse to acknowledge or respect others' red lines. "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" says a whole lot about problems of humanity at ever level of existence.
One of my "someday" projects is to write a biography of Jacob & Anna!
Did you ever read Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon," a kind of dystopia in the realm of 1984 and Brave New World? I think the "there are 4 lights" scenes originated in that book, though I haven't read it since I was a teenager.
Thank you. Interesting and thought provoking article. We can all learn from those who have gone before, and try to act in a way that our own descendants will admire.
We can do our best 🧡
Thank you for this Antonia. Your grandparents were good people who recognized that goodness doesn’t always get rewarded or recognized
I lean on them tremendously, especially my grandmother. And even though I never met him and only met her twice before she passed away, they are my surest guides. 🧡
That’s beautiful. We have this concept in our tradition that if your parents/grandparents were good people, that it generates baraka (blessings) of all kinds in your life. It’s karmic in a way. It’s the energy they pushed forward to you.
Oooh ... I love that so much. And feel it! there's an energy that comes from my grandparents I can't describe. I feel very fortunate in them.
Hey Antonia, this is so powerfully written; I think because it is so immediate to you, so entwined in your ancestry and hence into your own experience, it feels infinitely real to us to read.
Knowing about the purges, knowing about the KGB, about the Stalin years is one thing on an intellectual and historical level, it becomes something very different when we look at it - when we read it - through your eyes and the lives of Jacob and Anna.
And sturdy moral codes may, sometimes, seem a thing of the past; but as you point out, and show us in your writing, they are not. They are there for us to hold on to, to help us, to keep us on the just path. They do not have to be perfect or immaculate - indeed, they cannot be because the forces they withstand (those wreckers of lives who create the risk of wreckages in history) are powerful indeed and need ballast and fibre to stand up to them: they have to seem above us, difficult even, to keep us working to attain them.
Wow, Nicholas, this was powerful to read. In fact, this is a comment I'm going to print out and keep as a reminder to myself of what's at stake, and what he constantly have to ask of ourselves.
There's something of those Stalin years I keep wanting to write about but haven't found the right context yet, of my stepmother getting her grandmother's and great-aunt's files from their trials and time in the gulag and what that meant to her. She got them from an organization that Putin outlawed a few years later.
These are the lessons out of the Irish side of my family too. There are things you can't change, but you can also refuse to comply.
Just been having some long conversations on ancestral stories with some other writer friends (prompted in part by all of us serendipitously reading Women Who Run With the Wolves) -- what you can learn along with what is lost. Feels more relevant than ever.
In my family it’s complicated by the fact that my grandmother’s father, the WASP with the Mayflower lineage, was deeply prejudiced against the Irish in a real turn-of-the-20th C way. Shamed my grandmother for marrying a (3rd gen) Irishman, having 4 kids, and especially after he succumbed to alcoholism. Finding those stories feels very like the experience Chris La Tray describes about unearthing his Indian heritage.
Race and class, the American story.
Beautifully written, Antonia, especially this: All they must be—and this is harder than it sounds—is sturdy enough to withstand the wreckage of history.
I think Americans have grown very complacent and can't imagine having to ever think about the "red lines" they might be forced to cross. Perhaps that's why so many were willing to vote for Trump. I hope we don't all come to regret it even more than many of us already do.
Complacency is the word. And comfortable. And too many do not understand what more can--and will--be lost.
That means a great deal to me, Michael, thank you.
Thank you for sharing your family with us. The audio files always move me so much. I am finding strength in their (and your) words and your stories also make me curious about my own ancestors. I have been holding onto the words of wise elders and ancestors this week. Sending lots of love to you and yours.
I bet a lot of us have ancestors like these somewhere in there, if we can find their stories. I'm lucky that my dad is a born storyteller, and likes to talk, and my stepmom, too.
And then we share our stories, and find strength together where we can ...
(That's nice to hear about the audio files! Thank you. I'd like to start doing more outside again, but my life hasn't been very conducive to that recently.)
Nia after reading this, I think it is safe to say that you are your ancestors dream. You really exhibit the same power of quiet revolution that Jacob and Anna skillfully employed to wade through the dark waters of soviet era. What a gorgeous thing to read this week. Thank you Nia for letting us witness the prior carriers of courage in your bloodline. My prayers right now for the world is this - may we all be seen and understood in ways that we deserve.
I believe you are right Nia, and I feel seen and understood too and oh my the dimensions it opens in one’s heart to love with more reckless abandon. I think that feeling of putting our arms around the world and love it fiercely also is a rare heritage of our ancestors.
You just completed my thought with the right reasons. This is exactly my intention behind the fears. There’s an African proverb that goes ‘The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth’
I think you might be right about that fierce love and our ancestors. I wish so much I'd known my Russian grandparents. What they've left me is a gift, but I wish I could have known them as themselves.
And OMG that proverb. That's exactly it, isn't it?
They stand right behind us and the only way to know them is to know ourselves and keep working towards creating the world we want to inhabit - a world they would have dreamed of. I can imagine how proud your ancestors would be of you Nia. Your light is inescapable. ✨💜🔥
Yes that’s exactly it!
I know yours are watching over you, Swarna. I can see your light from across the world.
And I can see your starlight soul from here 💜⭐️
Swarna, it is a gift of yours, making people feel seen. Maybe because you *do* see. And I hope you know you are seen, too. By me, by many others, and by your own ancestors, who I can't imagine would be anything but proud of who you are and the work you are doing.
I have the same prayer, in large part because I care, but also because when people are not seen and understood, many turn to the shadow, whether it's their own internal shadow, or the societal shadows they are invited to feed. When people are not seen, loved, and understood, everyone suffers.
I was so excited to read this newsletter when you published it and then was so busy I didn’t have time till last night. The timing was perfect, unfortunately. It provided me with the small bit of hope that I needed to help me finally fall asleep.
I copied so many of these sentences into my quote notebook and I will return to them over the next four years. I hope it’s ok that I forward the newsletter email to my extended family who are also feeling confused and angry and hopeless.
Thanks for these words of honor and connection, kindness and hope. There are many other important feelings here, but those are just a few. All of them are precious at this moment.
Love to all who are feeling trapped in this timeline they didn’t choose or support.
Marti, you can always forward the newsletter to anyone! I hope it helps, though I wish it didn't have to. Just as I wish my grandparents hadn't had to live through all they had, but am glad I can benefit from some of their lessons, and hope others can, too.
That last line, just -- oof. That's one *I* am writing down in my notebook. When I think of how much of humanity that has applied to for how many millennia, too ...
Three paragraphs stopped me in my tracks and had me rereading, savoring the word choice & potency.
1. Words as black hole singularities, flattening all nuance
2. The one I quoted in my restack
3. The closing
SO GOOD, Nia.
I also love the implied question about the upcoming election: does it register as large or small, on the scale of thousands of years of destruction?
I want to hear you speak this in front of a packed room!
Thank you so much, Chad! That is incredibly high praise.
And as far as the election -- huge, obviously, for everyone who has been and is going to be affected by suffering. But one of the books I've turned to a lot since reading it earlier this year is Nick Acherson's "Black Sea," about the history of the Black Sea region. There are thousands of years of oppression, wars, brutal invasions and takeovers, all largely forgotten now by most of the world. Yet the people within those times loved, laughed, and suffered just the same.
The words, "enemy of the people" and "undesirables" caught my eye. I've heard this kind of rhetoric emanating from the villainous lips of a certain American politician who craves wealth and power, and who yearns to hold the highest Office in the Land in order to pursue them both. And speaking of red lines, it seems there is no line, red or otherwise, that this miscreant and his sycophants are not willing to cross. The question is...what is that red line for the rest of us? We are about to find out.
Thank you for including the voice of your father.
I think about this all the time, as language and ideas and even empathy is weaponized.
Thinking of you and yours as we make our way through this week, Kenneth. And the rivers of our region, the trees and mountains, that still manage to sustain our spirits.
Thank you, Nia. I have goosebumps. “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?” Thank you, as always 🙏🏻❤️
Thank you, Greg.
Your writing follows a line of reason and decency that points to better places. I hope we can find them.
You are always so perceptive and thoughtful, Jeffrey. I hope we can find them, too, both close to home and at large.
You and Sarah Kendzior are giving me backbone right now. Reading the two of you, powerful women, I feel my resolve strengthen in the face of massive anxiety and grief. Thank you.
That is high praise, Rebecca! I don't read Sarah all the time but she has been giving me courage and strengthening my spine for years, with her constant reminders of what Missouri has been trying to fight for far longer than much of the country.
I hope you've found something beautiful today.
"Find your red line." Thank you for sharing your father's wisdom and his voice, Antonia.
Thank you so much, Holly. I'm going to be leaning on him more than ever now. I still wish, in times like this, I could have known his mother more.
Compelling writing Antonia! 👏 As you wrote about moral red lines, I thought of Alexei Navalny. I wrote a tribute to him and others of his type here:
https://bairdbrightman.substack.com/p/alexei-navalny
Thank you for sharing! I recently read the biography of Navalny, "Dissident." Even more relevant now as I write after the U.S. election, and wondering what gave Navalny his courage -- and his wife and daughter too, now, as they continue his work. It takes a tremendous amount to continue what he did, even before he knew they were trying to kill him, much less after.
The courage is extraordinary. For some, doing right is more important than life itself. Hard for us mortals to fathom.
It really is.
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.
Always there with the great points, Mike -- there are far, far too many people who refuse to acknowledge or respect others' red lines. "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" says a whole lot about problems of humanity at ever level of existence.
One of my "someday" projects is to write a biography of Jacob & Anna!
Did you ever read Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon," a kind of dystopia in the realm of 1984 and Brave New World? I think the "there are 4 lights" scenes originated in that book, though I haven't read it since I was a teenager.