I’ve officially used up everything I know, so I’ve returned to reading. Today, I spent my morning hopping back and forth between an excruciating memoir of Siberian deportation and a novel about emigration. When the former became too painful to read, I switched to the other, then back again.
The former is an amazing story. A girl of fourteen was deported with her mother and brother to a settlement in the Russian Arctic. There were no trees and no shelter when the deportees arrived. They slept under fishing boats and in tents made of American flour bags until a barge loaded with American supplies arrived.
A new theme is starting to emerge in my research that I hadn’t anticipated: America in Siberia. The deportees who travelled northward with the young memoirist were convinced that they were being transported to America. Where did they get this idea, which from our perspective now seems crazy? And this one group was not alone in its delusion: another band of exiles was so certain of its salvation that they threw their work clothes overboard, reasoning that these would be unnecessary in the American land of plenty. They perished shortly thereafter at the mouth of one of Siberia’s rivers.
In comparison to the hardships the people of these stories underwent, I realize that my grandmother was lucky. She lived not in a treeless permafrost region, but on arable and forested (if mosquito-infested) land. While climate maps show that the Arctic settlement only saw four months a year of above-freezing temperatures, my grandmother could expect seven. That fact alone probably doubled or tripled one’s chance of survival.
But she too told anecdotes about American products reaching Siberia. What is the significance of the crumbs of the free world — Stalin’s ally — reaching the frozen heartland of oppression, I wonder. What is the link between wartime America (whether in the form of delusions and dreams, flour-bag tents, or unaffordable canned goods) and Siberia?
It’s a connection I intend to explore.
[Photo: Lena River Delta in Siberia, aeroculus]
