A language myth?
In the sudden fury over illegal immigration, we have been hearing complaints about Spanish-speaking aliens who aren't immediately learning English, and how terrible it is for government and commerce to accommodate these people. "When my ancestors came to this country, the first thing they did was to learn English," I've heard many times.
Although I'm sure that was the case with many immigrants, I doubt it was typical. I think assimilation requires more than one generation. Take my mother's family, for example.
My great-grandmother, Agnes Pickasz, came here from Poland in 1911 with her young children. This photo was taken in New Haven, Conn., about seven years later. That's my grandmother, Jane, 16, and her brother, Edward, 15. Agnes lived in this country for 50 years and never learned to speak English. She didn't need to. Throughout her life in America, she lived in Polish neighborhoods, worked for Poles, shopped at Polish stores, went to Polish churches.
Jane and Edward learned English quickly, however, because they had to. Although they were also surrounded by Polish speakers, they attended public schools where only English was spoken. Throughout their lives, they communicated in both languages.
My mother, growing up in a Polish household, could understand Polish but could not speak it. And I grew up knowing no Polish at all. So, it took four generations for our language to disappear. This, I think, is a typical story. 7/24/2006
No, CIVIC Arena
To the wiseacre who commented on the hockey piece, citing it as another example of distortion:
When hockey was hockey in Pittsburgh - 12, 15 years ago - the place in which the Penguins played was called the Civic Arena. Mellon had not bought the naming rights to the arena at that time. 7/21/2006
When hockey was hockey
Ten, 15 years ago, the Civic Arena was a great place to be on a winter night. It wasn't just that the Penguins were a winning team for a change - many of their fans had been with them from the darkest days of defeat.
There was, in those days, a camraderie among the fans. Many were season-ticket holders who sat in the same seats, year after year. They got to know each other.
The crowds then were sophisticated. Oh, sure, they were often raucous, obscene and childish, but they knew hockey, knew the game, knew when they had to raise the roof to back their team, knew when to cheer sarcastically, knew how and when to recognize an outstanding effort on the part of the opponents.
That crowd isn't there anymore. They've priced them out. Oh, you can still get into the Arena for less than $20, if you want to sit up in the last rows, too far away to really see the action. I would still go and sit there if the atmosphere was like it used to be. But it isn't.
Now, most of that crowd seems to be business people entertaining their out-of-town clients. You go to a game now and you're startled by the deadly quiet at times. These people don't know enough to wait until a break in play before getting out of their seats or back into them. They don't know hockey, and it's not nearly as much fun to be there anymore. 7/17/2006
For all seasons
Based on life-expectancy statistics and my own family history, I figure I passed the halfway mark in my journey about 15 years ago. That means that I can now see the tunnel, but not yet the light at the end of it.
On Saturday, we had gone to a ball game with friends. Saying goodbye late that night on the street outside their house, we remarked on the beauty of the night, how warm and perfectly still it was, not a leaf stirring in the sycamore canopy above us. "I just love summer," our friend said.
How fast time tumbles by, now that we've seen so much of it. Seems just a few minutes ago we were putting out the porch furniture, and in no time we'll be putting it away for winter. How many starlit nights like this are left to see? Better appreciate this one; grab this moment and store it away, take it out again and admire it when the wind whips snow dust under the garage door.
I love summer, too, but also the other seasons. Even on these hot nights I think of wading through a river of oak leaves, feeling the bite of the autumn wind from the northwest numbing my knuckles. I recall the squeak of snow under boots in the driveway, a ring around the moon visible through the bare maple branches. I smell the new buds on trees on a March morning.
I'm saving all these moments, saving them to keep me company in the darkness of the tunnel. 7/11/2006
Scarlet Sails, conclusion
Although meeting Lena, and particularly my last sight of her - running away from me and back to the orphanage - have consistently intruded upon my consciousness, I never gave much thought to how Scarlet Sails Rehabilitation Center came upon its curious name. Three years after my visit there, however, I suddenly stumbled across its origin, and with that discovery a new significance to all that occurred there.
A friend who knows that I enjoy reading literature in Russian, which I have difficulty finding in this country, occasionally shops for me at university book sales and flea markets. While thumbing through one of these gift books, an anthology of Soviet-era prose, I was startled to find a short story titled "Aliyeh Parusa" - Scarlet Sails.
The story was written in 1922 by Alexander Green - the pen name of Alexander Stepanovich Grinevsky - and there is no doubt this tale inspired the name of the place where Lena would grow up.
Green wrote about a child who frequently ran errands for her father, a toymaker. One day, the girl is sent to a shop in town with a basket of toys, one of which is a boat with scarlet sails. While crossing a stream, she decides to put the boat in the water and follows it along the banks of the stream deep into the forest. She becomes disoriented and frightened, but presently the forest opens to a clearing and a sandy beach by the sea.
She runs to find the boat and soon spies it - in the hands of a strange man who is examining it with fascination. The man - a magician and storyteller - tells the girl her fortune: Someday a real ship with scarlet sails will arrive, and on it will be a prince who will ask for her. And he will promise to provide for her all that she needs, all that she has ever desired.
The child runs home and tells her father of the encounter and asks him if this fortune will be hers. He tells her that it indeed may be true. But he laughs, then thinks to himself about how many men may come asking for his daughter, that many of the sails will be soiled and the sailors impudent. The last line of the story translates as: "But you'll see scarlet sails, all right."
This story is commonly read by school children in Russia, and indeed is a fairy tale, on one level. I am sure that Lena has read it. But like much Russian literature, it comes in layers of meaning. The second layer of the story is an allegory of the Soviet state. The little girl is assured that she need not fear, that the Soviet leader (the prince) and his ship of state would provide for her and her generation.
But deeper still in the strata of the story is a sad truth of the human condition. The father knows that he will lose his daughter someday when another man comes into her life. The man she chooses may be a scoundrel; she will not realize this but instead see him as her prince.
Lena is a teenager now, most likely still living at Scarlet Sails, the place that is supposed to provide for all her needs. I think of her often; think of her intense gaze as she stood in the lane after the sun shower. Did she think I was the prince who had come to take her away? No, it wasn't that at all.
Now I understand. I was the fortune-teller, the strange man on the beach who told her about the future, that someday she would have a little girl of her own. Like the little character in the story, she just needed to know if what I had told her was just meant to amuse her, or if it was really the truth.
THE END 7/10/2006
Scarlet Sails, Part 9
Tatyana Ivanova and I walked away from Scarlet Sails Rehabilitation Center and down the lane to wait for our ride, dodging puddles as we went.
"I think Lena has plenty of emotion," I said, "but I can see that she does have trouble expressing it."
"She is recovering," Tatyana said. "She is bright and may have a future, but I must tell you that the chances are not good."
"What I don't understand, Tanya, is how she could completely forgive her father for abandoning her, for leaving her with that awful mother of hers. I mean, that man is responsible for her being here."
Tatyana smiled weakly and shook her head. "You should not condemn this man so completely. You do not know how difficult his life has been.
"I know something about her father," Tatyana continued as we reached the end of the lane. "I've talked with his doctors at the veterans' home. You know, he was in Afghanistan for only 20 days before he was injured. He was in a convoy going through the mountains, riding in an armored car. They came across a disabled Russian tank far from the road. From a distance, it looked like the crew was sitting beside the tank. Dmitri Kulagin and some of the other soldiers walked toward the tank, and soon they saw that the crew was all dead, that four of them had their heads cut off. The enemy had arranged the corpses, seated in a row, with each holding his head in his hands. When Dmitri saw this, he turned around and vomited on the ground, and that is when the bullets began to fly. He was hit in the back of the leg, and another bullet went through his back into his lung. The other soldiers with him died, but Dmitri Kulagin was rescued.
"The doctor says he cannot escape this vision, that it haunts him day and night."
Our car arrived, but Tatyana, who had just lighted a cigarette, signaled the driver to wait a moment. I heard footsteps clapping along the lane and turned to see Lena sprinting toward us. She stopped a few yards away from us and stood there, motionless, staring at me with an intensity that caused me a chill.
What does she want? I thought. Did she expect me to take her away from this place, to take her home with me? She continued to look at me with cool, gray, unblinking eyes. No, that wasn't it. She seemed to be waiting for me to tell her something more.
I stepped toward her, squatted and said, "Goodbye, Lena, for now, but I'll be back next year, and perhaps by then..."
Before I could finish, she had turned and run back toward Scarlet Sails, feet flapping and arms waving.
(Tomorrow: the conclusion) 7/7/2006
Scarlet Sails, Part 8
"Homework," I thought I heard Lena say.
Puzzled, I asked, "Domashnyeya rabota?"
The faintest trace of a smile appeared above her little chin, amused by my horrible American accent.
"I love going to school, and I love doing my lessons," Lena said. "I wish I could have more homework."
I asked her why.
She fidgeted, frowned, hunched her shoulders, searched for an answer. "It makes me feel important. And if I do well in school, I will get a good job."
We talked about her school and her teachers, and about the routine of her life at Scarlet Sails. Then Tatyana Ivanova came in and sat in one of the ridiculous chairs. She wore spike heels that in that position brought her knees nearly to her chin. She listened for a while, helped me interpret what Lena was saying, and then said to her, "Tell him about your father, Lena, about the time you found him." Turning to me, she said in English, "This was at a hospital for veterans, for soldiers injured in the war in Afghanistan."
"We went to this place to sing songs and recite poems. Sometimes we do this for old people also," Lena began.
"As we were singing a song, I was looking at the men. Some of them had no legs or arms. One of them had no nose or ears. And then I saw my father, sitting in a wheelchair."
She spoke with the voice of a hardened adult, recounting the story in brief, emotionless, unstressed sentences.
"When he saw me, we looked at each other very hard. And I ran to him - I didn't care about the song - and he put his arms around me. When he held me, I remembered him. From when I was little. We both cried. I was so happy to see him."
"She is permitted to visit him now, once a month," Tatyana interjected.
"I want to be a good student so when I grow up I will have a good job, and then I will take care of my father," she said.
I tried not to show my surprise. Or was it disgust? Her father had hardly taken care of her. He'd abandoned her. When she grew up, would she continue this cycle, marrying a man like her father, who would choose vodka over everything else?
"I think someday you will have a good job, and you will meet a good man, and you will have a little girl of your own," I told her." And she will be lucky to have a mother as good as you." 7/6/2006
Scarlet Sails, Part 7
That Scarlet Sails had been a kindergarten two years earlier was obvious. In the morning I met with 14-year-old Denis in what they called the library, a common room where children read, did their homework and played board games while seated on miniature chairs at miniature tables. I guess it was the three or four shelves of shabby, dog-eared books that gave the room its name. Most of the books appeared to be left over from the room's previous incarnation, and the Cyrillic alphabet primers and picture books seemed of little use to the present occupants, all of whom were age 7 or older and able to read.
Denis couldn't recall much about his early childhood, his family life. His first clear memories were of the orphanage in Murmansk in the far north from which he had come a year earlier with the assistance of an aunt. He wouldn't tell me about that place, only that he was glad not to be there.
Denis looked no older than 11. A lifetime of malnutrition will do that to a child. His voice was raspy, the result of respiratory problems he'd always had. That was not surprising, particularly in Novokuznetsk, where steel and aluminum mills pump great, billowing clouds of gray and orange into an atmosphere that is trapped by a ring of mountains surrounding the town.
Like all of the boys at Scarlet Sails, his hair was cropped close to his skull. His flattened, fighter's nose gave him a tough-guy look, but his demeanor was gentle, although as emotionless as Tatyana Ivanova had warned me. He avoided eye contact as he talked about his life - he liked being at a place where you could attend school on the outside, play games and celebrate holidays - and his ambition to study medicine someday. As he talked, I tried not to think about the possibility that Denis will never have an opportunity to do anything other than join the ranks of those men who, from respiratory illness or alcoholism or both, die on average at age 57.
Later, Tatyana and I and some of the staff of Scarlet Sails ate lunch in the director's office, after which I returned to the library. Outside, the sun was shining and rain falling simultaneously, and silhouetted against the window was the form of a young girl, seated at one of the tiny tables, her head resting against the glass, her hands tucked under her thighs.
"Lena?" I asked as I approached her.
She looked up at me with cool, gray eyes. "Da, Lena," she answered quietly, and continued to study my face with the intensity she might have devoted to watching an inchworm crawl along a branch.
I sat in one of the little chairs opposite her, opened my notebook and returned her penetrating gaze.
"Tell me what makes you happy," I said. 7/5/2006
Scarlet Sails, Part 6
I met Lena in June 2003, not by chance but rather by design.
I was working for a humanitarian organization at the time and had been visiting orphanages in that region of central Russia for several weeks, assessing their needs in anticipation of shipments of donated goods.
Tatyana Ivanova, a social worker, was assisting me in my visits. It was Tatyana who told me about Lena and about her experience in taking the child away from her mother. Tatyana was the woman with the high-pitched voice, the one who took Lena to Teremok. I had wanted to get to know a few of these orphans, to hear their stories out of their own mouths, and Tatyana had suggested that I meet Denis, 14, and Lena, 10, at what would be the eleventh and last orphanage of my assignment.
The previous weeks had been emotionally wrenching. I'd visited a wide range of homes and rehabilitation facilities charged with the care of the lame, the sick, the retarded, deformed, unwanted, neglected and abused - what seemed like a discarded generation of Russians. All these places shared some common circumstances: They were all severely overcrowded; all were nearly devoid of medicine or medical equipment; few children were being adopted, with the exception of healthy, infant girls by foreign couples; but all were well-staffed by dedicated people.
After 10 orphanages, I had a pretty good idea of what clothing, furniture and equipment were needed; however, the kids still remained a mystery to me. How did they feel about their plight, their future? What did they think of their mothers and fathers who died and left them to this or had lost their parental rights? Did they think about being adopted? What did they dream about? Were there creative thoughts, perhaps even hopes, in those shaved heads?
"You must understand that some of these children have no emotions," Tatyana told me. I didn't understand, asked her to explain.
"They are neither happy nor sad. They feel no pleasure, no sorrow. It is as if the shock has become permanent. You should know this when you talk to them. Understand that they do not experience normal feelings. Life for them is trauma."
Lena had spent several months at Teremok in Obachevo before being sent to a rehabilitation home on the edge of the city of Novokuznetsk, where she would be able to attend a regular public school (she had proved to be an exceptional student). It was at this place that I met her and heard her tale. The home had previously been a kindergarten but had closed as a result of Russia's ever-declining birth rate. Like all the other facilities, it was overcrowded - 80 children in a facility meant for 50. But it was distinctive because of its odd name: "Scarlet Sails." 7/3/2006
Scarlet Sails, Part 5
Night had fallen and the doctor had just about completed his weekly rounds at the Teremok Children's Home in Obazhevo when he was asked to look over the newest arrival.
In the examining room, a tiny creature lay shivering in her underwear on the enameled table, her hair still wet from the delousing shower. He heard her quiet sobs and from across the room asked her: "Are you crying because of the smell of the bleach, or are you simply frightened?"
He approached and placed his palm on her forehead. "Don't be frightened," he said. "I won't hurt you. I'm just going to look at you very carefully and give you some medicine, and soon you will feel much better."
He began with her feet, examining the toenails, feeling her arches and around her ankles, then moving on to her knees, noting a few, small open sores. Eight years old, he figured, small for her age, malnourished. She grimaced and twisted as his fingertips depressed her belly and under her ribs. He felt her glands, looked into her ears, eyes and mouth, moved his fingers over the back of her neck and head. Vitamin D deficient, he thought, possibly anemic.
The doctor asked her to lie on her stomach, then pressed the disc of his stethoscope onto her back, listened to the patter, noted the yellowish bruises. Beaten occasionally, he thought; ignored regularly.
What had become of this country, he wondered. In just a few years, the health-care system that had treated everyone had collapsed, and now he was seeing diseases he had never seen before, childhood diseases of a hundred years ago, scurvy, rickets, tuberculosis. And then there were children with AIDS, and what was next, polio?
The director of Teremok entered the room as the doctor painted forest-green medicine onto Lena's sores. "Get this child something warm to wear," he said without looking up. "Feed her often - lots of milk and fruit. Make sure that she plays outdoors and gets plenty of exercise."
"She can't stay here long," said the director. "There are too many here already."
"Where else will she go? Don't be a silly old woman. Do you think yours is the only overcrowded orphanage in the oblast? I've seen them all, and they're all like this."
