Survivor's guilt: Another refugee crisis ... hits home

Sometimes I can't get out of bed because I get wrapped up in the confluence of my reading, my writing, and my thinking. 

It was one such morning. I needed to get up, I had an appointment at 10. It was important.

It's importance, however, conflicted with my need to keep working through images roiling in my mind.

It started with one more headline about refugees being smuggled into Europe, about Germany turning the other way because of a current election, about Macron in France perhaps opening up.

But It was the following lines that hit my eyes:

Thousands more have been stranded in Serbia…

But the migrants themselves told USA Today they don’t want to stay.

“I tried to leave Serbia 17 times,” Jawad Afzali, 17, an Afghan refugee in Belgrade told the newspaper.  “Every time, they bring me back here.”

My mind drifted back a couple of years to 2015, when my brother Alex and I were visiting my Cousin Goga in the heart of Belgrade, staying in a hotel near his apartment, across the road from the train station, next to fields teeming with homeless refugees.

Alex and me with my cousins in their apartment in Belgrade.

Near an apartment I had often visited as an infant, over 60 years ago, when my family still thought we were safe, when they didn't yet know that being refugees was soon to be in our future again.

An apartment where my cousin had grown up, raised his family, made a successful life for himself. Where divergent histories played out within one family.

The nearby apartment in Belgrade where my family lived when I was born.

My thoughts crept back another year, to when Alex and I had visited Trieste, where we had lived in a refugee camp of old army barracks as children.

On that visit, in 2014, in addition to our first visit together to the memorial for that camp, we spent time in an abandoned dockland, a port driven out of business when the Iron Curtain crashed and East Europeans had free access to the West, no longer needing to sneak into Trieste to shop for those desired Western goods. That abandoned port was home to hundreds of Afghan refugees, and we talked to young Afghanis playing soccer in a makeshift field.

With Afghan refugees, 2014, in an abandoned dockyard at the port of Trieste, now in Italy. When we lived there it was a United Nations protectorate, still being fought over by Italy and Yugoslavia. 

And then my mind went back almost 100 years to 1921, when another infant landed in Belgrade, a refugee who had fled his country, Russia, on a crowded ship and spent months in a tent camp on a Greek island on his way there. The same island, Lemnos, where Syrian and Afghan refugees were now living in tents. And the parallels kept multiplying, threatening to choke me, my eyes leaking, my survivor’s guilt mounting.

That final infant was my father, but Belgrade was the end of his family's journey. Serbia was their safe asylum. Or so it seemed, for the next 30 years, until that safe asylum grew unsafe.

My Russian grandfather's grave, in Belgrade, restored by Vladimir Putin as part of a new push to reclaim the Russian Orthodox Church globally.

I'm beginning to understand why I'm struggling with the story I'm working on about my recent travels. Understanding why getting almost arrested in Iran led me to just a hint of understanding about my father's experiences in Belgrade is one thing. Writing about it is another.

Христос Воскресе!

Христос Воскресе!

"Oh! It'sNadia, Helen's goddaughter," Victor whispered to me as one more person barreled into a room already full to bursting. The table had been carefully set for around 15 people, the elders and youngsters already exiled to the sunroom, and still they poured in. Helen had been careful to specify it was not an open house, but my cousin and her husband are a focal point for a tight Russian community, and it was, after all, Easter Sunday.

They had sung midnight mass in the Holy Virgin Cathedral on Geary, leaving at 2:30 in the morning, long before the service was over. Son Nick had gotten home around 4:30, but a friend from a church further south said their service continued till past six. I vaguely remember this inverted form of boasting about the length of those interminable services.

Vic sat next to me, savoring his first meat in seven weeks, after a serious Lenten fast. A banking executive and serious salmon fisherman, he was telling me about his new passion for singing. Soon I was watching a video of a robed figure standing in a dark church surrounded by kneeling penitents, his deep tones echoing around the interior of the large onion-domed edifice. With little formal training, he was evolving into a soloist and clearly enjoying an experience he still found terrifying. "You're out there all alone," he said, "there's nobody to lean on."

Cold rain continued it's destruction of our long drought, but every woman under 60 was dressed for Palm Beach—rather than San Francisco's Ocean Beach—in skimpy sleeveless dresses patterned in spring flowers. 

"I decided to wear this more sedate outfit," said Helen, "when I realized it would be cold and raining." An elegant form-fitting sleeveless sheath of pink lace delicately played with the tops of her knees and pulled your eyes down to shapely ankles where spring wildflowers burst forth in creative heeled sandals that could have been an Easter outfit in themselves. I gave up on trying to imagine the racier alternative she had passed up and shivered in my long-sleeved outfit, grateful for the little black under slip that kept my middle toasty.

The room was bursting with family news. Nick had finished his first day on a new job that filled his face with a bounding joy I will remember for a long time. Daughter Kat was studying for her GRE, applying to Cambridge, planning a move across the Atlantic, where a new future was beckoning. 

I realized Nadia was the daughter of the sister of someone I had gone to Russian school with—of course—and listened to a plan to retire early from a stressful career as an ER doctor, buy a multimillion dollar yacht, and sail the seas. Their phone showed the yacht that triggered this dream on a recent trip to Malaga. They explained how it would solve the problem of traveling with their dogs better than the current trailer that had trouble crossing oceans. I idly wondered about the cost of maintenance, but the husband emphasized that he had worked on car and bike motors since he was a kid and could handle anything that came up.

I know that Vic is starting this morning singing at yet one more service in the church, one I am considering joining as I watch a heavy mist blanket the bay and enjoy my private Kulich, the Russian Easter cake that Helen graciously bakes for me every year. I think she has finally exceeded the best I have tasted from either of our mothers.

Христос Воскресе! Christ has risen! 

I am blessed to share their celebration in this tiny but wonderful manner.

Dr. Freud and Siri

Dr. Freud and Siri

When you try to use Siri with the wrong alphabet she might swear at you. I accidentally left the English alphabet on my keyboard while trying to dictate in Serbian for my cousin and would like to share the result.

"That's not a faggot ass" she started, when I dictated words that mean "I don't know what else to tell you."

Another nice sentence was: "good night sick as shit" when I said "kod nas se kaže" or "we sometimes say."

It's not the only time she's done it. I will just try another random sentence here:

"Goodness bother you very kinky shit," she writes, as I dictate"kod nas padaju velike kiše" or "we are having a lot of rain."

I don't swear very often, certainly not while speaking to Siri, and never in Serbian—which I learned from my mother, who never swore and taught me a very moderated version of that language. I don't know why Siri does this. It's a bit disconcerting. When she doesn't understand she assumes I'm swearing? Why not loving kindness?

As I write this another thought enters my mind. Is this what it sounds like to all of you when I speak Serbian? What did my grammar school teachers think I was saying to my mother when I translated their words for her? Oh dear.

This effort was all in a good cause, mind you. I just learned that my cousin's grandson was born on their Christmas Day, which falls on January 7, in Belgrade. I was trying to dictate a congratulatory reply to the note. 

"I am very happy" or "Ja sam jako zadovoljna" came out as "Yucca some sod the wedding."

Well, sod you too, Siri. 

No, I take it back. Thank you, Siri. I have enjoyed our conversation immensely, but I will be more circumspect in my future keyboard selection.

I've had enough!

I've had enough!

I am tired of being served defeatism for breakfast, lunch and dinner. One month of that diet is enough.

I am being barraged by the most cynically intense disapprobation of every action of our president elect. Yes, I greeted the mind numbing news of his election with uncontrollable tears. Yes, I am still grappling with the complexity of the issues that allowed a country—my country—to elect a comic book ogre to the highest position in our land.

But now instead of reading news I believe I am observing a chilling exposé about the future of news coverage. An existential debate over the very word news itself. This feels like less of a story about the election of Trump than about the death spiral of responsible media. We need to stop letting it drag our emotions and beliefs down the drain with them.

Now—when it's too late for responsible coverage of the election—now they are playing Chicken Little, forecasting the sky falling in on our heads. Fuck that. We have four years to get through. A combination of optimism and pessimism is required here. This moment requires the aspiration to believe that America will survive and prosper. This moment requires our undivided focus on that effort.

The people who voted for Trump want a better future. So does everyone who didn't. And while we may not agree on the means, I suspect we would all recognize the goal were it to materialize.

The majority of the people in this country are not radical in either direction. But we are all terribly frustrated. Our congress needs to figure out how to serve that majority. Surely today more than ever is a time for the middle to coalesce—for the rational Republican and Democrat leadership to align in a powerful and unique opportunity. A fear of lunatics in power can hopefully do what nothing else could've accomplished.

Let's stop wasting valuable time. We need to plan, coordinate, and discuss our future. To create partnerships and coalitions. To reach across the aisle and find common ground. Congress allowed itself to be gridlocked for most of the last presidency. Here is an opportunity to move forward in a different manner. Democrats can show that tit-for-tat is not the way to govern our country; not a way to be great; not a way to lead. 

Dealing only in negatives is a position of weakness. It's just ranting while fleeing the field of combat. We are too good for that. Dealing from positive choices is the way to move forward—and the positive choice is to focus on what is important to us and how we galvanize the support to articulate and realize that vision. One issue at a time. Pick the one you care most about. Make a difference.

Spending—no—wasting precious energy on crap like guessing future actions of various cabinet appointees rather than helping to steer those actions is a self-defeating, frustrating and debilitating waste of time. If we continue listening to the press we will soon have a depressed nation all on Prozac.

"The magazine Trump doesn't want you to read! Subscribe to Vanity Fair."

Now there is an advertisement to make you stop and think. It was the line that finally made me say: Bullshit. Enough.

Let's move forward by concentrating on what we want, not who we hate.

Diving into the deep

Diving into the deep

The Moken—or Sea Gypsies—of Myanmar elusively led us on a seemingly random chase across constantly changing seas. Searching for the gypsies of the waters, we finally understood that the Moken had found a new hideaway. They and their one-time way of life were buried in plain sight—on land—the last nomadic boat abandoned over ten years before. 

Gypsies by nature are vagabonds, nomads, people who shift their homes when the environment forces a change. For thousands of years these people, of whom maybe 3,000 now exist, wandered in the Andaman Sea among islands that lie off the coast of today's Myanmar and Thailand. They had long boats with woven palm frond covers to sleep under, and a deft way of leaping, spear first, from the bow into deep waters to reemerge with a fish for the next meal. In monsoon, they would move on shore and harvest the natural bounty of plant life, particularly coconut and a form of betel nut.

Over time, boundaries and governments interfered, as did large motored fishing boats coming from far away to their rich waters. The tsunami in 2004 ruined many boats and structures, although the story of these people's ability to forecast the crushing wave and flee to higher ground is apocryphal in the area.

It's not the first time outside forces shaped the direction of Moken lives. The very name Moken means "drowned in the sea" in their language, and it seems the original people were driven from land by the kingdom building Mon. The Mon were the famed tribe of artists and architects that all current cultures here lay claim to, fighting over a heritage more sophisticated than most. But at the edges of that culture were people, unable to keep fighting for their territory and too restless to adapt, who escaped to uninhabited islands and waterways, beyond the awareness of those building their empire on shore.

Their current evolution will lead to an unknown future. In Thailand tourism is changing the face of their world, but we saw no tourists in our travels in their Myanmar homeland. Most of the men went off to fish in long tail boats powered by propellers. Women rowed closer to shore to set their nets. And there were signs of boat building, including the traditional burning of the bottoms.

We traded drinks for fish with a small fleet of boats resting in a secluded inlet, waiting for the large ships to come purchase their catch and restock their ice. Children rowed out to greet us as our sailing schooner neared shore. And young men were happy to demonstrate their deep diving technique, spear in hand.

As I flew home on election day, I learned upon arriving in Tokyo that I too was leaping into deep uncharted waters.

The future foreseen

The future foreseen

Looking for old family photographs, I find a package of mementos of my own business career, saved by my mother. My young face is on magazine covers, business advice columns in the Minneapolis paper, in a Forbes magazine. 

An old newspaper quotes 'the only woman keynote speaker' at a conference I do not remember attending as saying "she expected people would find in a few short years it was more economic to read the newspapers off screens rather than printed on paper." 

It takes some research to figure out that the newspaper and conference are both in Australia. The date is just weeks after my wedding in September of 1982. Some 35 years ago "Ms Amochaev spoke of merging technologies which would result in screen-based telephones with special interfaces to access databases, such as telephone directories, and do home banking, teleshopping and other transaction processing. Telephones and computer terminals would become the same tool."

I remember that we had to postpone our honeymoon, and that our first year of marriage resulted in about three months together because we both traveled so much for our jobs. I do not remember speaking at this conference, and certainly not this very prescient forecast of my favorite device, the iPhone. But sometimes life is stranger than fiction.

I found every letter I wrote to my parents as a young woman living in France, every postcard sent from travels around the world. My life is laid out in detailed notes written in Cyrillic Serbian—a language I would have denied ever writing in had the visible proof not been sitting before me.

I also found a letter sent by my parents to the Russian scout camp at Bucks Lake. My mother is sad to tell me there are no airplanes to Quincy, California, so she has sent the mysterious black felt I requested by surface mail. My father complains that we don't write— Camp is two weeks long after all—and insists we send a note to my cousin Helen at 333 18th Avenue—an address burned into my brain from childhood. I idly wonder if my cousin, when going through her mother's things in that same apartment 50 years later found a letter from me dated August 1962, surely some years before she herself could read.
 

Introducing Tania Romanov

The birthing process for a human child takes about nine months. An elephant gestates for almost 2 years, the longest in the animal kingdom. Trying to find an appropriate metaphor, I move on to the inanimate. 'The biggest, baddest equipment' list includes a 31,000,000 pound bucket-wheel excavator, selling for $11 million. This device moves enough dirt daily to fill 100 Olympic size swimming pools, but can be built in three years or less. In China, a new city can be populated in that time. 

And all I am trying to deliver is a book that in printed form will probably weigh less than a pound and in digital will fly through the air and land on your device adding no weight at all. 

Its sweep—three generations of women facing exile and displacement in the Balkans over the last hundred years—is not trivial. But still. The original incubation for this book was a mere month. That's how long it took me to complete the first version.

The resulting Word document was so huge and unwieldy it took me a year to learn how to do the first rewrite. How do you comprehensively edit something that takes 12 hours to just skim quickly? And how do you backtrack when you're heading the wrong way through a maze of partially completed re-edits? And how do you learn which well-meant feedback to incorporate and which to ignore?

All this is a preface for the news that my book is nearing completion . . . Or at least completing its sixth or seventh or eighth rewrite . . .

Now, I am thinking about publishing more seriously. I have two publishers interested in working with me. They are very small publishing houses and I am trying to sort out the difference between working with one of them and self-publishing. 

Having spent the last few years learning how to write, I am trying hard not to get sucked into spending the next three years learning about the incredibly explosive changes in the world of publishing. A fascinating subject in its own right.

But this week, that study led to a very important step in my process.

I learned that presentation is incredibly important. That the cover design of your book is absolutely key. The inside layout, the number of pages, the quality of the paper. Everything matters.

Imagine my dismay upon learning that the author's name itself is just as crucial. "If your name is hard to pronounce or spell, you will drag down your readership . . . It just might be the final nail in the coffin for your work." Lacking a good name, the author is encouraged to just find a better one.

And I of course have lived all these many years with Amochaev.

I call my friend Judy to commiserate. "It's not fair that you have this great name of Hamilton." I say. 

"Uh, oh. I do understand." she replies. "It took me four years to learn how to pronounce your name, Tania." I think she was trying to be helpful. "Why don't you try your married name, Hahn?"

"Well there are many ways to misspell that . . . Han, Haun, Hawn . . .  "

"Besides," I continue. "It's not particularly relevant to my writings about Russia and the Balkans."

"What about your mother's maiden name?" She asked.

"Marinovič?" I say, hesitantly.

"That's worse," she says. "What about her mother? Your grandmother?"

"I can just imagine what you're going to say about that." I say. "It's Rojnič."

"Oh . . ."

"Oh my God!" I say "I've got it!"

And so I do. I have it. I have my perfect name.

I remembered my next book, the one about my father. It starts out with my grandmother cursing her own mother-in-jaw. My grandmother. A grandmother whose memory I mostly reviled until that very moment. 

Daria Romanov. 

Romanov. 

ROMANOV!

It just so happens that my grandmother shared her family name with the ruling dynasty of Russia from 1613 until 1917. The dynasty that her family fought to protect until the day they had to flee their country shortly after the murder of the last Romanov tsar. A dynasty even the new tsar, Putin, is apparently considering resurrecting.

And so a new author was born. After a gestation period of many years—or just moments.

Tania Romanov.

Walking my way

 

Walking my way

You grow up bemoaning your foreignness. The parents and relatives speaking broken English with awful accents. The funny clothes your mother sews for you on her Singer. A brother called Sasha sent to school in short pants on his first day. The derogatory "off the boat" references. The taint of being from the land of the "dirty Soviet Commies." Having to go to Russian school. Being born in Yugoslavia, your mother speaking Serbo-Croatian to you, a place and language no one else has ever heard of. The math professors working as janitors. Christmas showing up on January 7...

And then slowly it becomes "in" to have a heritage. You learn other languages easily. Your husband revels in the stories he hears at tables full of foreign dishes, sitting with old refugees sharing great stories. 

Meanwhile, both your homelands disintegrate in radically different ways. Who are you when your country of birth changes every time you renew your passport?

And now you sit at a table in Slovenia, in the ex-Yugoslavia, a few miles from Italy and the refugee camp where you spent your early childhood, basking in a glow that reaches deep into your soul. Hands reach in a toast proposed and echoed by voices known from birth, others gained through your life history, some as recently added to your life as a week ago. But all closer in spirit and full of more warmth than you ever imagined life could contain. 

The waiter, embarrassed by his bad English, hears your accent and suddenly he's your friend and you learn he's Serbian, with a Moldavian/Russian wife called Tania. Of course. 

Thank you, Zora and Tolya, for a heritage so complex and rich that tears roll as I remember you. A toast to you, my parents who walk with us. 

"На здоровье!" "Živjeli!

Samburu Softening

Samburu softening

I sit deep in a Samburu hut which is built of twigs, old cloth, ripped cardboard and random debris because the current lack of local grazing area has pushed the cattle too far away for dung to be feasible as covering. The head of the family sits watching me. His face closed, he observes without any affect or emotion. 

From the outside, the four foot tall structure looks tiny, but inside there are three areas, and a cook fire in the far end of the entry. The couple and babies sleep in one cattle-hide lined compartment, young people in the other. The men rest their heads on triangular pieces of wood, but a woman my age confesses to the pillow I spy in a corner. 

The women have built the home, clean the area, tend the goats, cook the food, bear and care for the children. The men sit in deep, serious discussion, debating matters of state. Yet they are the rulers of the roost. 

Light from the entry turns the regal face before me a beautiful tone of deepest bronze, and lights it so I can use my phone. I show him his portrait and feel a slight thaw. Then I flip the camera to selfie mode and place it in his hand. He stares at it, shifts it about and finally sees his own face staring back. I gently reach for a finger on his other hand and feel the muscles release. Together, we push the large white button, but our jerky motion moves the focus. I try again, then push the playback button. His face eases a bit more as he looks at his image. 

Soon he has the concept, and is satisfied with the results. He grins hugely when reviewing, but prefers a serious self image. A baby wanders in and is soon part of his scene, followed by a young child. Now the doorway is blocked by observers, but it's hard to explain why it is now so dark he cannot shoot, and the crowd is too thick to clear. 

The chief stands up and walks off with my phone, bestowing a view of the image on his court. He is beaming when he returns the device, and holds my hand for a long moment as I say "Lesere," in farewell. 

"Ashoalei," he says, the word I have just learned means thank you in Samburu. 

Tania

Himba and Herero

Two groups populate the remote northwest part of Namibia near the village of Purro, and trite expressions like "chalk and cheese" come to mind in describing the Himba and Herero. They share dark black skin and an apparent common ancestry, and the two groups peacefully coexist in this barren desert land. But it would be hard to mistake one for the other.

The Himba live in tiny rounded huts built of twigs and covered with cow dung and random bits of cloth. The Herero favor tiny rectangular houses much smaller than a typical trailer—also made of dried cow dung. The Herero, however, have found a Christian God and a church sits squarely amid their structures. 

It is their dress that leaves you breathless in its diversity, although both groups are incredibly classy in their garb.

The Himba wander nearly naked, breasts glowing and legs bare. Their butts are covered with wonderful brown furry strips of domesticated stock—primarily cow or the quirky looking goat-sheep. Their legs and arms are covered in metal bracelets and their necks wrapped in layers of necklaces made from bits of polished ostrich eggs and porcupine quills. Everything—skin, hair, and leather covering—is deeply soaked in a red powdery layer made by scraping a stone the color of dried blood—called an okla—on rough rock. This lends them an otherworldly glow as well as protection against sun, insects, and body odors. 

The Herero, taught by the nineteenth century missionaries to forsake their lewd nakedness, wander this same barren desert land dressed as if Alice in Wonderland grew up into a perpetual tea party with the mad hatter. Ruffled voluminous skirts cover bellies whose ideal form, I was told, is the hippo, preferably well rounded to demonstrate wealth. Jewelry is minimal, but head-dress seems mandatory. Imagine a visit to Ascot in high season, preparation transposed to a remote desert milliner's. The frame that forms the shape to meet a lady's fancy is a coat hanger lifted from milady's dresser, and instead of birds perched on blond locks you get a form of cattle horns perched over glowing black cheeks. Colors are bold, patterns vibrant, and designs seem unchanged from the days when the Christians arrived and the Victorian style still flourished.