"Between St. Petersburg and Europe: One woman’s story 1/2"
I who write this text is a granddaughter of a family that fled Russia in the times of the Russian Revolution (1917).
The text tells how hard it might have been for a grandchild for Russian emigrants, if that is the reason for this kind of a messy life. Our family fled because they were in danger to be killed (by the Bolsheviks). This is a story of a emigrants in first and second generation.
There is some thinking about the meaning of your real nationality and being able to have your real nationality. For many people the roots are cut, the language the family used has changed and people feel rootless. It is difficult to feel rootless when times get hard and you don’t have work any more or money to sustain your living. The nationality that you have on paper and the feeling of your belonging to some country may not match. So one thinks about the meaning of your real, correct nationality. And what about if you could suit better some other society?
There is the feeling of being in a wrong place that you cannot get rid of.
What nationality you are really if you have roots for example from Russia, Ukraine or Poland, Sweden, Germany and France. Do you have a different way to talk and do you have a different body language than the local people that are in fact your countrymen and you couldn’t call them anything else as you are born in the same country. But will you become discriminated because you give some different signals than most of the people in the society where you live.
The family members carried a lot of information, stories and experience that they didn’t tell their children as they thought it was dangerous. There were hidden secrets and feelings, you could feel something but the facts and real stories about what happened was not told to the children. All this ended in some kind of identity crisis when the Iron Curtain fell. It is about strange things that have happened but that don’t have any explanation that I could find. You may regard the things told as real or fantasy!
My text tells about relations between young people that never lead to anything (e.g. marriage). It says something about abortion, that has become so widely used in the society of today. It deals with suicide that is something that too many people commit in this society. It has been stated in studies that in general there are more suicides among men that have emigrated.
The text is about unemployment, being without any roles and the fact that nobody needs you to anything. You may ask if a person with some kind of emigrant background even in second and third generation carries a higher risk to become unemployed and an outcast of the society despite of a high school degree. You may ask if a person with some even distant emigrant roots are more often discriminated than others. Or is the discrimination probably because of the belonging to some old social class that don’t exist any more, but still works invisibly like a glass wall between people. And we are now living the time of “working class heroes” all over. Those stories are not any more any success stories, but people with such background have widely been recommended in different occasions on behalf of people belonging to other classes that maybe have been discriminated. An example is a job of a teacher that needed to have a book of some certain political party in order to get the job. There are people who still remember their roots among the Reds and have not forgot. And who were the Whites? The falling of the Iron Wall has put all kind of ideas to people’s minds and there seems to be a lot of things that they want to find out about their own personal history. For example people are interested in Karjala area and some even talk about having it back . In all this an emigrant grandchild can become very unsure and start to look for the roots of her own family history that are cut.
Some people cannot research their genealogy as the roots are cut and there is no information available in ordinary places. When that is the case you have to try to find something with other methods what ever they are.
I however found some tiny things that tells something, but what. I was almost throwing them away already as useless and they are hard to understand and it’s difficult to find any correct information about those. However I found similar things on the Kremlin Museum websides, Russia. However finding some information also creates the feeling of fear. People from the east or somewhere are moving here as neighbors and you don’t have any idea about what people they are and where do they come from. However they seem to be rich and move to live into more expensive houses than the local people. What language do they speak – Russia or what? Even that is something I cannot decide when I hear them speak. There is nobody – no specialist – you could ask anything of. You just have to accept the modern development and the very rapid change in the society.
As a grandchild to some emigrants it would be interesting to travel to some places that I have heard my grandparents talk about. Somehow people carry memories of their living places in their minds and they create security. But an grandchild of some emigrant have nothing but roots that are cut. And during my whole lifetime I lived as if there was nothing on the other side of the sea outside my home. And then suddenly a whole new world opened and there is a city with about five million people living only about 350 km from us. And suddenly you understand that that is the world even you yourself belong to. However you don’t know if that world is hostile and dangerous for you or if it would welcome you today. Whom could I ask? In many countries you even get the nationality of that country if two of your two grandparents are from there. So could I have the Russian nationality? Could I have a double nationality?
