My great-grandfather's name in a best-selling historical novel - a footnote hinting at tragedy
A couple of months ago, annanov told me how, while reading a historical novel that featured composer Dmitriy Shostakovich as one of the POV characters, she suddenly came across a reference to my great-grandfather. She talked about how shocking, how surreal it was to suddenly see it pop up on the page, to point where she almost did a double-take - but there was no mistaking what it was.
As people who’ve been reading this LJ for a while know, my great-grandparents (on my mom’s side) were friends with Shostakovich. And when my great-grandfather, an officer at NKVD, was declared enemy of the people, he was shot, and my great-grandmother was sent to a labor camp. And, decades later, that legacy came back to haunt my grandfather and his brother (it wasn’t the only reason why they wound up tortured and sent to a labor camp, but it sure as hell didn’t help).
Shostakovich tried to appeal on my great-grandmother’s behalf. And, when Grandpa Roma and Grandpa Slava got out of the labor camps, he stayed in touch. But I was as surprised as my sister was that some Western novelist ever discovered that connection, let alone referenced it.
This was something that I meant to look into. All I knew was the title - “Europe Central” - and literally nothing else, other than what my sister told me. Chicago Public Library’s collections are pretty extensive, and I was confident I’d be able to find the book there. But it kept on sliding down my list of priorities.
Yesterday, many American small businesses took part in Small Business Saturday, an initiative designed to encourage people to shop small and shop local. Here in Chicago, one of the participating businesses was Unabridged Bookstore, which was offering 10% off on all books.
I didn’t go in intending to buy “Europe Central." I just wanted to do some browsing, maybe get a Christmas present or two for my siblings. But as I approached the cash register, I was thinking about supporting small local businesses, how I had just a bit of extra money and how Anna mentioned that, a reference to our great-grandfather or no reference to our great-grandfather, it was a pretty good book. So I asked of they had a book by that title and it turned out that they did. And, a few minutes later, I was carrying out what turned out to be a pretty hefty paperback (752 freaking pages, not counting the very extensive bibliography and the afterword).
Naturally, reading it in order was out of the question. I read through the Shostakovich chapter around the time period my great-grandparents were arrested, and I found nothing. But I trusted my sister, so I decided it have to be in there somewhere.
I almost resigned myself to actually reading the whole book when I wound up flipping through one of the later Shostakovich chapters. Four letters - NKVD - caught my eye. I flipped back, read, and kept reading…
Unlike my sister, I knew that it was coming. But even so… saying that seeing two simple words on the page was a shock seemed like a gross understatement. All the sudden, it was as if the entire world went white. Like I blinked out of existence for just a second. And then I stared at the page, a sentence simple in its quiet brutality.
They carried off his NKVD contact V. Dombrovsky and liquidated him.
It took me a few minutes to find my emotional bearings. I was at a coffee shop, and I wound up chugging an entire mug of tea. But once I started to get my bearings, I had two thoughts.
How an important chapter in my family history, two generations of family suffering and the trauma that impacted the generations beyond, were reduced to a single sentence. Not that I fault author William Vollmann. The sentence is part of a paragraph describes Shostakovich’s worsening political situation, just one of the many incidents that showed his friends and loved ones get killed or sent to the labor camps. In the grand scheme of things, my family tragedy is just one the millions of tragedies that much of Russia still refuses to fully face. Yet, at the same time, my great-grandmother is missing from the narrative entirely, and she left a more lasting impact on Soviet culture than my great-grandfather ever did.
And, like my sister, I wondered how Vollmann ever came across that bit of information. The bibliography explains how he got a lot of facts (and where he changed things around to suit the narrative), but it’s silent on this one.
Now, Europe Central sits on my shelf, waiting to be properly read from beginning to end. And I suppose that those of you who read the book, and those of you who haven’t read the book but read this post now know that one of the victims of Stalin’s regime mentioned in the book was more than just a name on the page. That he had a family, kids, grandkids, great-grandkids, even two great-great-grandchildren.
Maybe it would make the name a little more real for you.