Beautiful. And I loved hearing the voices of your father and uncle, the Russian, your interactions. So appreciate you grappling with the difficult questions.
Thank you, Holly! I'm biased, of course, but I do love listening to that interview. I wish I would have done more at the time, since there's unlikely to be another chance. But I feel lucky to have had that one.
This is so beautiful Antonia, and that gorgeous photo at the end is so heartwarming. I loved reading this and learning more about your family history and your thoughts many important things. Thank you for sharing x
Thank you so much, Kelly. It's so nice to be able to share these ancestors with people. They have meant a great deal to me, though I never met my grandfather and my grandmother only twice. 🧡
Your writing is so visceral—like I can feel my hands scooping soil, tucking in potato halves. I don’t have the capacity to garden right now, and so reading these words that I can feel with my body is such a gift. (I just finished A Walking Life a few days ago, and it’s so lovely how words that came from the margins of a walking life—from bodies unable to walk—were woven into the center by the final pages. Start with longing. My body hasn’t found it’s way into a garden, or the walking pilgrimage I’ve always thirsted for, or the marching alongside other bodies to demand a better world, or weekly reception into a community more expansive than church— but I feel the longing tickling my limbs. I can start there and let my body show me what is accessible here, now).
I keep thinking about your grandmother planting potatoes, how conditions that feel to my imagination like the end were not the end.
I'm kind of in an adjacent state myself these days. There are phases where it's all I can do to open a window, much less walk to the mailbox. I kind of think (not just kind of) that our species in general is at the beginning of a very long trajectory to getting to know our bodies again, along with the planet and one another. This last year my "walking" has just as often involved sitting by running water doing absolutely nothing, or what looks like nothing. 🌊👣
This is so good. I think there is something about personal memories and the way they weave into families, somehow particularly of big events that many of us know something of historically but not from our own experience like the Leningrad siege your family lived through, that touches all of our hearts deeply. It brings them to a life that is quite different to the intellectual life on the page (have you read Anthony Beevor…wonderful).
While reading it, I didn’t listen to the audio because I wanted to read the words. I’m going to listen at some point but I need to give the images you show with words time to settle.
And, then, I had a strong reaction to the photograph at the end…as if I knew these people and loved them as my own. And, of course, I don’t. But you do, and the power of your writing about them, and the subject matter of the period, somehow entered my mind to the extent that the photograph had such immediacy and all I could think was how beautiful they were.
That means a lot about the photograph, thank you! That photograph is so expressive. A copy of it hangs above my desk and I look to it, to them, for guidance often.
I haven't read Anthony Beevor! But your comments remind me of your own writing and how we draw on history, different and varied histories, to tell all kinds of stories, and inspire us to look back into past times -- like Kate Atkinson's World War II-era novels, come to think of it! Thank you.
Hey, I get the looking at the photograph for a kind of guidance…a support…. I think it’s one way we keep our memories alive, and perhaps a form of immortality (for a few generations). I mean, now we, your readers, have seen the photograph and something additional to your writing of them has entered our lives. I do think that’s very beautiful, in its way.
As does using histories in the way you mention. Cool that you mention Kate Atkinson. I think she is a wonderful writer…I think her work is so true to herself and to the stories she writes; it isn’t as if she doesn’t craft superbly because she does (look at Life After Life for a brilliantly constructed novel), but I think it is that her authorship doesn’t shout out for any attention to herself at all: her commitment to the story is total. I think that is a really wonderful, and seemingly fairly rare, thing for a reader to find in fiction.
What a wonderful characterization of Atkinson's writing, and it explains to me why I enjoy it so much. She doesn't shout for attention to herself, you're right, and it's something that has always kept me interested in her books, that total commitment to story. I didn't know why I kept her on my shelves until you said that!
Beautiful, beautiful. The birds and vivid images of your garden and compost and lupine. And the rich story of your family - the audio was wonderful, thank you so much for sharing it with us. My grandparents both speak so very little about the past (and they were never refugees fleeing war!) I’ve taken notes, but never audio. The idea of your grandmother fleeing with her two small children (and her own mother?) and then trying to feed them all on a plot of potatoes is both chilling and inspiring. It makes me long for ancestral teachings on food cultivation and care - I need a babushka!
The photo at the end is so sweet. Her smile (the family resemblance!) in the midst of so much struggle. Such synchronicity after your comments on my last post 💗
Thank you! And you're right, synchronicity. Maybe our grandmothers really are trying to remind us of some things. I sometimes joke that "I'm the Jewish grandmother I never had," mostly because I only met mine twice but seem to have inherited at least the urge to feed people all the time 😂
It's one of the few things I find a smartphone super useful for, is taking it out to record whenever an opportunity arises. I'm lucky in that my dad in particular loves telling stories. I need to record more of my stepmom's. Her experiences, and her family's, were so different, and just as compelling.
It is bleak! I liked Anna Reid's book better because it was more about everyday people's lives, whereas Salisbury's was a lot about troop movements. But either way you look at it, there's no great uplifting stories. The realities of starvation are inescapable.
Not sure I'd get to a history of Russian nationalism very quickly!
A world where survival is recognized as an inherent right I fear would take everything to happen. I once read that an apocalypse could be viewed as a good thing to allow humans to start over and improve themselves, and sometimes looking at this world, I sometimes cannot help but agree.
Paradigm shifts involve a lot of upheaval, at the very least. Good to have people looking out for the others while the ground shifts beneath us all, and to remind us that it's possible to do things differently, and with care.
I thought immediately of Miller Williams’ poem about the Hermitage paintings during the siege of Leningrad. You may be familiar with it; if not, here’s a link:
That is incredible and I've never read it before! That reminds me that somewhere out there is a documentary I haven't watched of two people who lasted out the Siege of Leningrad protecting a seed depository in the city. I watched a trailer and it looked really good but I think it's a Russian film and hard to find. Thank you.
Thank you for sharing this. The closest stories I have, but that remain close in my mind, are my grandmother's and great-uncles' from the Great Depression. When the oldest reached a certain age, his father forbade by great-grandmother from feeding him, and he foraged wild greens (when she couldn't sneak him fried potatoes.) Then they went off to war.
Whew. That's a hell of a story, Tom. Thank you for sharing. Makes me think of Willa Cather's novel "One of Ours," though of course that was WWI. There was no foraging of greens in there, but there was a lot of food struggle when the main character was boarded with families in France. Food is such a weapon, though.
I love buckwheat, but I plant it as a cover crop, to fix nitrogen and compete with the Bermuda grass in my little quarter-acre plot. I don't think I've ever managed to harvest any. I mostly buy it in soba noodle form. Sometimes I can sneak a little into pancakes.
Your bit about people not knowing what to do with potatoes reminds me of a story my dad told me about a similar situation during the Depression (which lasted longer in rural areas). When the feds started handing out free grapefruit, the country folk tried every method they could think of to cook it, including frying it, and never really came up with anything good.
I hadn't heard that about grapefruit, but it makes sense. I can remember the first time I ever had a kiwi fruit. I had no idea how to eat it. You've also reminded me of this weird situation in late-1990s Russia, when you could buy bananas everywhere because someone was black-market bringing them in from Finland, where they were subsidized food.
There's a native buckwheat grass here that I've thought of using as a cover crop. I keep trying to figure out what's the best cover for where I live, that won't be invasive (for some reason vetch isn't recommended but I can't remember why). I'm most tempted by lentils but then might feel compelled to try to harvest them and feel guilty for not doing so because they're a pain!
Those conversations you share are so moving to listen to Nia, so beautiful and poignant. I will never not be stunned at the contrasts of this world--of starvation and violence, reckless, needless abundance and indifference in the consumerism of this country. I will think of your grandmother as I plant new herbs in the small garden we muster up here, how much the soils we til and plant hold within them. 💜
Me, too, Freya, me too. ❤️🩹 I will be thinking of your garden and herbs and all the healing we can do if we're given the support to do so (or even if we're not).
Nia, I am so deeply moved, teleported over to Leningrad under siege, felt and saw the people rationing and working and starving to death, I am with you when you stood at the city cemetery venerating the dead and my eyes are filled with tears for your grandmother’s bloody hands. Alas can we even demand for a world where people don’t have to bleed for survival?
I loved the voice memos of conversations between you, your uncle and father- such lovely intimate space - truly a treasure. I giggled along with your uncle when he said he worked on his babushka’s instructions- such beautiful details of a life that seems so far removed from our modern nuclear set ups. And women with kerchiefs on their head selling sunflower seeds in a cone and smell of cucumber in stairwell - such nuanced and beautiful memories of what St Petersburg meant to you.
This essay was like opening a box of rare chocolates from your ancestral treasure trove. The more details you unfolded, the more I wanted. And also I forgot to mention but survival during Bengal famine was also closely related to harvesting of potatoes which were not a staple in Bengali diet until the British arrived. I think it has to do something with potatoes being a resilient crop - like you said maybe someone might still be harvesting babushka’s potatoes in the Ural mountains.
Sigh. So much beauty and connection in here. I am gonna treasure this essay. 💜
Swarma, I too thought again of you and your latest essay while reading this. 💜
Nia, what a blessing to have those recordings. Thank you for sharing them with us. This is such a powerful story. It's a reminder of how these narratives of famine and starvation keep on repeating. Our ability to create scarcity out of abundance knows no bounds.
I'm really lucky my family were available, and mostly remain so, at least in the case of my parentals. The interview with my uncle is only about an hour and a half, but I have a whole stack of tapes from when my older sister and I interviewed our father in 2005. It's hard to get the audio off because my tape recorder is so old the belt is going!
I'm sitting here thinking here that I have my grandfather's notebook from the end of the Great War, but really nothing from my parents about their experiences in WWII, as apart from an anecdote or two, they didn't really like to talk about it. But then I'm realizing that I, born in 1951, am likely closer to your father's age than to yours. So perhaps my children, who I guess then are not that much younger than you, should be interviewing me! Well, at least they'll have my writing!
I'm wondering if you ever caught this essay by Jane Ratcliffe an inherited war trauma?
I hadn't read that one before, John, thank you! I've read a lot about intergenerational trauma and epigenetics (there's a fair bit about that research in my book) and often think of it in myself, but then I think of it in so many more people, ongoing, all the time, as we see in front of us every day right now. How many generations would it take to heal?
It also made me think of "Nella Last's War," which I was just recommending to someone yesterday. My in-laws gave me that book -- my mother-in-law grew up outside of London and can remember bombs dropping, though her memories of food rationing and the first time she ever had eggs are more vivid.
Yes, we can see it being repeated all around us, and here at home too with so many veterans suffering and passing it on.
Thanks for another book recommendation, Nia! 📚 I just ordered "In my Grandfather's Shadow", a look at intergenerational war trauma from the German side. One of my mother's anecdotes was of "liquid stockings", as silk was reserved for parachutes.
I agree these are testaments of the ongoing suffering that wars and conflicts ensue. I am sure potatoes are somehow getting connected to the story of survival of Gazans under the current inhumane circumstances as we speak. I really pray they find a way out.
Swarna, I thought of you often when revising this, of your own families history of upheaval and the fleeing of war. But I didn't know about the potatoes during the Bengal famine, wow. There's a strange connectivity in this small earth apple; I thought of the Irish famine, of course, too, which was blamed on potato blight but was really due to absentee landlords taking all the other food out of the country.
I think you would enjoy my uncle. He has such a quiet, steady presence, and intelligence, and humor. I've walked for hours with him around St. Petersburg as he told me stories of my father's and his childhood, and never found it hard to understand despite my poor Russian. He's an engineer, too, but he and my aunt spend weeks every summer harvesting berries and mushrooms in the woods of northern Russia, and he fits both lives in some easy, gentle way.
What if all the memorials of the world were to the starved, to those sacrificed for others' hunger for power and land, instead of to generals and battles? 💞
Earth apples! Haha! I am trying to imagine living in a time where we are all struggling to figure out how to eat potatoes and writing experimental journals regarding our findings. Another reason to be grateful to the ancestors- the plight they endured!
I already love your uncle and I didn’t even meet him. I think my father and your uncle could have been really good friends. My father had many Russian friends who too were engineers at the steel plant of the small industrial town I was raised in. I still dream to visit St Petersburg someday, if and when peace prevails. I will carry my father with me, he can see through my eyes. And I will carry you and your stories in my heart all the time. I love how you speak Russian even if your knowledge of it is limited. Imperfections are beautiful!
Your final question- the power of it and how it breaks my heart and demands me to be a better person despite the brokenness of this world. I wish we could remake all the monuments in honour of all those who have suffered and starved in wars. I hear they are doing something similar in Scotland by bringing down the statues of all previous slave traders!
In German they're called "erdapfeln" (or "kartofel") -- "earth apples"!
I think so much of your father, too, and the Russian people he knew in the town you were raised in. So many criss-crosses between us, like ley lines of experience.
I didn't know that about the statues in Scotland -- that's wonderful to hear! I've been thinking a lot about this question. I've waded into the digital Shoah (Holocaust) archives kept in Tel Aviv to find my surname, and wonder now what it would take to get a similar honoring of Indigenous peoples around the world who've suffered at the hands of colonialism. Or even just near where I live, where the cases of forced starvation and massacres are well-known and barely over 100 years old. It couldn't take *that* much collective energy to find true, visible, ways of honoring people who've suffered in that way.
I agree, it wouldn’t take that much collective effort specially given that USA is country very systematic about record keeping and documentation. But the problem is in the lack of intention to even care about sentimental recognition of people who have been systematically starved to death , isn’t that what Chris La Tray keeps reminding us of all the time- of the lack of intention?
You are igneous in finding out new ways of thinking about the land and its people Nia. I am sure you can set a wave in motion when you have time.
It's often true. Chris and I live in the same general region of Montana (it's a drive of 2 1/2 hours between our towns) and end up in a lot of the same places, though usually not at the same time. I do think that it's hard to gauge how much intention there is for the things that really matter to us because so many of the people I see who *do* care about these things are too taken up with, say, daily news reports on Donald Trump's trial(s). When I look at all that energy given to something they have no control over--none of us do--I think a lot about how it could be redirected to change lives right in front of us where we live -- a place that sorely needs that kind of attention!
It's a lot of what I do in my day to day life outside of writing, talking with like-minded people locally about giving more of their energy and attention to where we live and issues like this. We're outnumbered by conservative people here but we're by no means powerless. (Though for an idea like this, it should really be led by what affected communities want, not by what some random white woman thinks might be a good idea.)
I've only been trying to get people to care about where they live and direct their actions there for 20 or 30 years, shouldn't take too much longer, should it? 🫠
Ok first of all - you are not a random white woman - you are Antonia Malchik. You are lover of local ecosystems and carer of the land (doesn’t that sound like a cool medieval introductory title like in fantasy novels). What you think and with whom you share these ideas matters more than you know. In fact you are already setting the atoms in motion by pulling people’s attention back into the local issues from macro like Trump’s trial. And yes I agree that for an idea like visibly honouring the starved, it is the affected community which should be in centre of the discussion.
20-30 years is as long as it is short and sometimes we get fixated on the final outcome but doing the work is most important thing and you are already been doing it for so long! This why I adore you, because you aren’t afraid of doing the work despite the results.
I too had no idea about the role of potato in the Bengal famine. The Highland potato famine was part of what pushed my Scottish ancestors off the land. I planted seed potatoes a couple of weeks ago. A warm week followed by a wet week has them off to a good start. I'm trying purple majesties this year.
A beautiful piece of writing. And I love the photo of your grandparents! My mother's side is from Russia/Poland area, although her parents clearly marked Russia as their country of origin on the census records. She certainly loved Borscht and made it often.
The borders of that region shifted so often I imagine it's hard to tell where someone was from sometimes, especially in the Russian Empire era. My grandmother was originally from near Belarus, and my grandfather from Ukraine. But I'm not sure what a census would have shown.
Oh, Antonia. This is so beautifully written, which such important questions. This sentence struck me: "What is currently called Russia is a vast land where many different peoples have lived for thousands of years, and yet the story of the land and peoples is still dominated by the mythologies of a nation shaped by an aggrieved sense of inherited exceptionalism and a constant grasping for something more." I had to re-read, to make sure you were writing about Russia and not the US. I think that until/unless people with an aggrieved sense of exceptionalism can release that (and their mythologies) and stop grasping for something more, we are never going to have a world in which some don't have to bleed to meet their needs for survival. I'm so glad you included the photo of your grandparents, so we could see that smile. So she could be real for us in a different way.
I had to do the same, pause the audio and scroll down to read it. I guess it applies to the whole human race, that exceptionalism, or dominionism. As you say in your afterword, the only way out is through. People will tell me I'm tilting at windmills, but I agree we need change at the root.
What a lovely comment, especially about my Babushka, thank you. It's my favorite photo of the two of them, it feels like it brings to life so much of what I've been told about who they were.
And yes, totally agree -- that aggrieved sense of exceptionalism is not a phenomenon limited to any one nation, culture, or people (I think it's important to remind ourselves of this), and it's one of the biggest things that needs to change. 🧡
Beautiful. And I loved hearing the voices of your father and uncle, the Russian, your interactions. So appreciate you grappling with the difficult questions.
Thank you, Holly! I'm biased, of course, but I do love listening to that interview. I wish I would have done more at the time, since there's unlikely to be another chance. But I feel lucky to have had that one.
Nia, thank you 🙏🏻 as always
Thank you, Greg. 🧡 I got Wild Service, by the way! Looking forward to reading.
This is so beautiful Antonia, and that gorgeous photo at the end is so heartwarming. I loved reading this and learning more about your family history and your thoughts many important things. Thank you for sharing x
Thank you so much, Kelly. It's so nice to be able to share these ancestors with people. They have meant a great deal to me, though I never met my grandfather and my grandmother only twice. 🧡
My pleasure. I never met my maternal grandmother as she died aged 42 the year before my birth, yet I sense her presence with me so often x
My grandmother died 2 days before my first child's birth. That presence is really meaningful. 🧡
This is such a moving, beautiful and wise essay, Antonia. Thank you.
Gratitude, Jeffrey, thank you!
Your writing is so visceral—like I can feel my hands scooping soil, tucking in potato halves. I don’t have the capacity to garden right now, and so reading these words that I can feel with my body is such a gift. (I just finished A Walking Life a few days ago, and it’s so lovely how words that came from the margins of a walking life—from bodies unable to walk—were woven into the center by the final pages. Start with longing. My body hasn’t found it’s way into a garden, or the walking pilgrimage I’ve always thirsted for, or the marching alongside other bodies to demand a better world, or weekly reception into a community more expansive than church— but I feel the longing tickling my limbs. I can start there and let my body show me what is accessible here, now).
I keep thinking about your grandmother planting potatoes, how conditions that feel to my imagination like the end were not the end.
I'm kind of in an adjacent state myself these days. There are phases where it's all I can do to open a window, much less walk to the mailbox. I kind of think (not just kind of) that our species in general is at the beginning of a very long trajectory to getting to know our bodies again, along with the planet and one another. This last year my "walking" has just as often involved sitting by running water doing absolutely nothing, or what looks like nothing. 🌊👣
Doing nothing is it’s own return to the body.:)
My goodness, yes it is.
Hey Antonia
This is so good. I think there is something about personal memories and the way they weave into families, somehow particularly of big events that many of us know something of historically but not from our own experience like the Leningrad siege your family lived through, that touches all of our hearts deeply. It brings them to a life that is quite different to the intellectual life on the page (have you read Anthony Beevor…wonderful).
While reading it, I didn’t listen to the audio because I wanted to read the words. I’m going to listen at some point but I need to give the images you show with words time to settle.
And, then, I had a strong reaction to the photograph at the end…as if I knew these people and loved them as my own. And, of course, I don’t. But you do, and the power of your writing about them, and the subject matter of the period, somehow entered my mind to the extent that the photograph had such immediacy and all I could think was how beautiful they were.
That means a lot about the photograph, thank you! That photograph is so expressive. A copy of it hangs above my desk and I look to it, to them, for guidance often.
I haven't read Anthony Beevor! But your comments remind me of your own writing and how we draw on history, different and varied histories, to tell all kinds of stories, and inspire us to look back into past times -- like Kate Atkinson's World War II-era novels, come to think of it! Thank you.
Hey, I get the looking at the photograph for a kind of guidance…a support…. I think it’s one way we keep our memories alive, and perhaps a form of immortality (for a few generations). I mean, now we, your readers, have seen the photograph and something additional to your writing of them has entered our lives. I do think that’s very beautiful, in its way.
As does using histories in the way you mention. Cool that you mention Kate Atkinson. I think she is a wonderful writer…I think her work is so true to herself and to the stories she writes; it isn’t as if she doesn’t craft superbly because she does (look at Life After Life for a brilliantly constructed novel), but I think it is that her authorship doesn’t shout out for any attention to herself at all: her commitment to the story is total. I think that is a really wonderful, and seemingly fairly rare, thing for a reader to find in fiction.
What a wonderful characterization of Atkinson's writing, and it explains to me why I enjoy it so much. She doesn't shout for attention to herself, you're right, and it's something that has always kept me interested in her books, that total commitment to story. I didn't know why I kept her on my shelves until you said that!
Beautiful, beautiful. The birds and vivid images of your garden and compost and lupine. And the rich story of your family - the audio was wonderful, thank you so much for sharing it with us. My grandparents both speak so very little about the past (and they were never refugees fleeing war!) I’ve taken notes, but never audio. The idea of your grandmother fleeing with her two small children (and her own mother?) and then trying to feed them all on a plot of potatoes is both chilling and inspiring. It makes me long for ancestral teachings on food cultivation and care - I need a babushka!
The photo at the end is so sweet. Her smile (the family resemblance!) in the midst of so much struggle. Such synchronicity after your comments on my last post 💗
Thank you! And you're right, synchronicity. Maybe our grandmothers really are trying to remind us of some things. I sometimes joke that "I'm the Jewish grandmother I never had," mostly because I only met mine twice but seem to have inherited at least the urge to feed people all the time 😂
It's one of the few things I find a smartphone super useful for, is taking it out to record whenever an opportunity arises. I'm lucky in that my dad in particular loves telling stories. I need to record more of my stepmom's. Her experiences, and her family's, were so different, and just as compelling.
I like the way you weave together the personal, the theoretical and the historical.
I tried reading The Siege of Leningrad, but it was too bleak!
My friend gifted me a history of Russian nationalism, titled Lost Kingdom, which remains unread.
It is bleak! I liked Anna Reid's book better because it was more about everyday people's lives, whereas Salisbury's was a lot about troop movements. But either way you look at it, there's no great uplifting stories. The realities of starvation are inescapable.
Not sure I'd get to a history of Russian nationalism very quickly!
A world where survival is recognized as an inherent right I fear would take everything to happen. I once read that an apocalypse could be viewed as a good thing to allow humans to start over and improve themselves, and sometimes looking at this world, I sometimes cannot help but agree.
Paradigm shifts involve a lot of upheaval, at the very least. Good to have people looking out for the others while the ground shifts beneath us all, and to remind us that it's possible to do things differently, and with care.
I thought immediately of Miller Williams’ poem about the Hermitage paintings during the siege of Leningrad. You may be familiar with it; if not, here’s a link:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47104/the-curator
That is incredible and I've never read it before! That reminds me that somewhere out there is a documentary I haven't watched of two people who lasted out the Siege of Leningrad protecting a seed depository in the city. I watched a trailer and it looked really good but I think it's a Russian film and hard to find. Thank you.
Thank you for sharing this. The closest stories I have, but that remain close in my mind, are my grandmother's and great-uncles' from the Great Depression. When the oldest reached a certain age, his father forbade by great-grandmother from feeding him, and he foraged wild greens (when she couldn't sneak him fried potatoes.) Then they went off to war.
Whew. That's a hell of a story, Tom. Thank you for sharing. Makes me think of Willa Cather's novel "One of Ours," though of course that was WWI. There was no foraging of greens in there, but there was a lot of food struggle when the main character was boarded with families in France. Food is such a weapon, though.
It is. I'm glad more people are growing some of their own food.
I love buckwheat, but I plant it as a cover crop, to fix nitrogen and compete with the Bermuda grass in my little quarter-acre plot. I don't think I've ever managed to harvest any. I mostly buy it in soba noodle form. Sometimes I can sneak a little into pancakes.
Your bit about people not knowing what to do with potatoes reminds me of a story my dad told me about a similar situation during the Depression (which lasted longer in rural areas). When the feds started handing out free grapefruit, the country folk tried every method they could think of to cook it, including frying it, and never really came up with anything good.
I hadn't heard that about grapefruit, but it makes sense. I can remember the first time I ever had a kiwi fruit. I had no idea how to eat it. You've also reminded me of this weird situation in late-1990s Russia, when you could buy bananas everywhere because someone was black-market bringing them in from Finland, where they were subsidized food.
There's a native buckwheat grass here that I've thought of using as a cover crop. I keep trying to figure out what's the best cover for where I live, that won't be invasive (for some reason vetch isn't recommended but I can't remember why). I'm most tempted by lentils but then might feel compelled to try to harvest them and feel guilty for not doing so because they're a pain!
Vetch is definitely invasive here. I've spent the spring pulling it out before it can go to seed.
Maybe it's time for lentils ... they grow well in Montana!
Those conversations you share are so moving to listen to Nia, so beautiful and poignant. I will never not be stunned at the contrasts of this world--of starvation and violence, reckless, needless abundance and indifference in the consumerism of this country. I will think of your grandmother as I plant new herbs in the small garden we muster up here, how much the soils we til and plant hold within them. 💜
Me, too, Freya, me too. ❤️🩹 I will be thinking of your garden and herbs and all the healing we can do if we're given the support to do so (or even if we're not).
Nia, I am so deeply moved, teleported over to Leningrad under siege, felt and saw the people rationing and working and starving to death, I am with you when you stood at the city cemetery venerating the dead and my eyes are filled with tears for your grandmother’s bloody hands. Alas can we even demand for a world where people don’t have to bleed for survival?
I loved the voice memos of conversations between you, your uncle and father- such lovely intimate space - truly a treasure. I giggled along with your uncle when he said he worked on his babushka’s instructions- such beautiful details of a life that seems so far removed from our modern nuclear set ups. And women with kerchiefs on their head selling sunflower seeds in a cone and smell of cucumber in stairwell - such nuanced and beautiful memories of what St Petersburg meant to you.
This essay was like opening a box of rare chocolates from your ancestral treasure trove. The more details you unfolded, the more I wanted. And also I forgot to mention but survival during Bengal famine was also closely related to harvesting of potatoes which were not a staple in Bengali diet until the British arrived. I think it has to do something with potatoes being a resilient crop - like you said maybe someone might still be harvesting babushka’s potatoes in the Ural mountains.
Sigh. So much beauty and connection in here. I am gonna treasure this essay. 💜
Swarma, I too thought again of you and your latest essay while reading this. 💜
Nia, what a blessing to have those recordings. Thank you for sharing them with us. This is such a powerful story. It's a reminder of how these narratives of famine and starvation keep on repeating. Our ability to create scarcity out of abundance knows no bounds.
I'm really lucky my family were available, and mostly remain so, at least in the case of my parentals. The interview with my uncle is only about an hour and a half, but I have a whole stack of tapes from when my older sister and I interviewed our father in 2005. It's hard to get the audio off because my tape recorder is so old the belt is going!
I'm sitting here thinking here that I have my grandfather's notebook from the end of the Great War, but really nothing from my parents about their experiences in WWII, as apart from an anecdote or two, they didn't really like to talk about it. But then I'm realizing that I, born in 1951, am likely closer to your father's age than to yours. So perhaps my children, who I guess then are not that much younger than you, should be interviewing me! Well, at least they'll have my writing!
I'm wondering if you ever caught this essay by Jane Ratcliffe an inherited war trauma?
https://janeratcliffe.substack.com/p/what-will-we-do-for-fun-now
It was very relatable for me.
I hadn't read that one before, John, thank you! I've read a lot about intergenerational trauma and epigenetics (there's a fair bit about that research in my book) and often think of it in myself, but then I think of it in so many more people, ongoing, all the time, as we see in front of us every day right now. How many generations would it take to heal?
It also made me think of "Nella Last's War," which I was just recommending to someone yesterday. My in-laws gave me that book -- my mother-in-law grew up outside of London and can remember bombs dropping, though her memories of food rationing and the first time she ever had eggs are more vivid.
Yes, we can see it being repeated all around us, and here at home too with so many veterans suffering and passing it on.
Thanks for another book recommendation, Nia! 📚 I just ordered "In my Grandfather's Shadow", a look at intergenerational war trauma from the German side. One of my mother's anecdotes was of "liquid stockings", as silk was reserved for parachutes.
Tell me you've read "82, Charing Cross Road" ... !
I agree these are testaments of the ongoing suffering that wars and conflicts ensue. I am sure potatoes are somehow getting connected to the story of survival of Gazans under the current inhumane circumstances as we speak. I really pray they find a way out.
Me too. 😢
Swarna, I thought of you often when revising this, of your own families history of upheaval and the fleeing of war. But I didn't know about the potatoes during the Bengal famine, wow. There's a strange connectivity in this small earth apple; I thought of the Irish famine, of course, too, which was blamed on potato blight but was really due to absentee landlords taking all the other food out of the country.
I think you would enjoy my uncle. He has such a quiet, steady presence, and intelligence, and humor. I've walked for hours with him around St. Petersburg as he told me stories of my father's and his childhood, and never found it hard to understand despite my poor Russian. He's an engineer, too, but he and my aunt spend weeks every summer harvesting berries and mushrooms in the woods of northern Russia, and he fits both lives in some easy, gentle way.
What if all the memorials of the world were to the starved, to those sacrificed for others' hunger for power and land, instead of to generals and battles? 💞
Earth apples! Haha! I am trying to imagine living in a time where we are all struggling to figure out how to eat potatoes and writing experimental journals regarding our findings. Another reason to be grateful to the ancestors- the plight they endured!
I already love your uncle and I didn’t even meet him. I think my father and your uncle could have been really good friends. My father had many Russian friends who too were engineers at the steel plant of the small industrial town I was raised in. I still dream to visit St Petersburg someday, if and when peace prevails. I will carry my father with me, he can see through my eyes. And I will carry you and your stories in my heart all the time. I love how you speak Russian even if your knowledge of it is limited. Imperfections are beautiful!
Your final question- the power of it and how it breaks my heart and demands me to be a better person despite the brokenness of this world. I wish we could remake all the monuments in honour of all those who have suffered and starved in wars. I hear they are doing something similar in Scotland by bringing down the statues of all previous slave traders!
In German they're called "erdapfeln" (or "kartofel") -- "earth apples"!
I think so much of your father, too, and the Russian people he knew in the town you were raised in. So many criss-crosses between us, like ley lines of experience.
I didn't know that about the statues in Scotland -- that's wonderful to hear! I've been thinking a lot about this question. I've waded into the digital Shoah (Holocaust) archives kept in Tel Aviv to find my surname, and wonder now what it would take to get a similar honoring of Indigenous peoples around the world who've suffered at the hands of colonialism. Or even just near where I live, where the cases of forced starvation and massacres are well-known and barely over 100 years old. It couldn't take *that* much collective energy to find true, visible, ways of honoring people who've suffered in that way.
I agree, it wouldn’t take that much collective effort specially given that USA is country very systematic about record keeping and documentation. But the problem is in the lack of intention to even care about sentimental recognition of people who have been systematically starved to death , isn’t that what Chris La Tray keeps reminding us of all the time- of the lack of intention?
You are igneous in finding out new ways of thinking about the land and its people Nia. I am sure you can set a wave in motion when you have time.
It's often true. Chris and I live in the same general region of Montana (it's a drive of 2 1/2 hours between our towns) and end up in a lot of the same places, though usually not at the same time. I do think that it's hard to gauge how much intention there is for the things that really matter to us because so many of the people I see who *do* care about these things are too taken up with, say, daily news reports on Donald Trump's trial(s). When I look at all that energy given to something they have no control over--none of us do--I think a lot about how it could be redirected to change lives right in front of us where we live -- a place that sorely needs that kind of attention!
It's a lot of what I do in my day to day life outside of writing, talking with like-minded people locally about giving more of their energy and attention to where we live and issues like this. We're outnumbered by conservative people here but we're by no means powerless. (Though for an idea like this, it should really be led by what affected communities want, not by what some random white woman thinks might be a good idea.)
I've only been trying to get people to care about where they live and direct their actions there for 20 or 30 years, shouldn't take too much longer, should it? 🫠
Ok first of all - you are not a random white woman - you are Antonia Malchik. You are lover of local ecosystems and carer of the land (doesn’t that sound like a cool medieval introductory title like in fantasy novels). What you think and with whom you share these ideas matters more than you know. In fact you are already setting the atoms in motion by pulling people’s attention back into the local issues from macro like Trump’s trial. And yes I agree that for an idea like visibly honouring the starved, it is the affected community which should be in centre of the discussion.
20-30 years is as long as it is short and sometimes we get fixated on the final outcome but doing the work is most important thing and you are already been doing it for so long! This why I adore you, because you aren’t afraid of doing the work despite the results.
On potatoes.
I too had no idea about the role of potato in the Bengal famine. The Highland potato famine was part of what pushed my Scottish ancestors off the land. I planted seed potatoes a couple of weeks ago. A warm week followed by a wet week has them off to a good start. I'm trying purple majesties this year.
Potatoes are our common root! 🥔
Yes the root and the link is uncanny in all three of our stories! Purple majesties! Sounds magical! Wish you a healthy harvest John💜
A beautiful piece of writing. And I love the photo of your grandparents! My mother's side is from Russia/Poland area, although her parents clearly marked Russia as their country of origin on the census records. She certainly loved Borscht and made it often.
I too love borscht! And make it often. 😋
The borders of that region shifted so often I imagine it's hard to tell where someone was from sometimes, especially in the Russian Empire era. My grandmother was originally from near Belarus, and my grandfather from Ukraine. But I'm not sure what a census would have shown.
Oh, Antonia. This is so beautifully written, which such important questions. This sentence struck me: "What is currently called Russia is a vast land where many different peoples have lived for thousands of years, and yet the story of the land and peoples is still dominated by the mythologies of a nation shaped by an aggrieved sense of inherited exceptionalism and a constant grasping for something more." I had to re-read, to make sure you were writing about Russia and not the US. I think that until/unless people with an aggrieved sense of exceptionalism can release that (and their mythologies) and stop grasping for something more, we are never going to have a world in which some don't have to bleed to meet their needs for survival. I'm so glad you included the photo of your grandparents, so we could see that smile. So she could be real for us in a different way.
I had to do the same, pause the audio and scroll down to read it. I guess it applies to the whole human race, that exceptionalism, or dominionism. As you say in your afterword, the only way out is through. People will tell me I'm tilting at windmills, but I agree we need change at the root.
What a lovely comment, especially about my Babushka, thank you. It's my favorite photo of the two of them, it feels like it brings to life so much of what I've been told about who they were.
And yes, totally agree -- that aggrieved sense of exceptionalism is not a phenomenon limited to any one nation, culture, or people (I think it's important to remind ourselves of this), and it's one of the biggest things that needs to change. 🧡