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Carrying Her Story with Me
Katya Apekina
Several years ago, I was flying to an art residency in Wyoming on a very small plane and started to hyperventilate. Mid-freakout, I realized that I wasn’t actually scared of flying. This fear was my mother’s. I’d seen her on countless trips, clutching her armrests, terrified. But was I myself scared of flying? No. As soon as I understood this, the fear disappeared.
After my daughter was born, I found myself thinking about what I was passing down to her — my weird sense of humor, my soft teeth, my delight in eavesdropping, my curiosity about other peoples’ stories. I also began to think about what had been passed down to me. Were there aspects of myself that I saw as my own but were in fact stowaway traits from my ancestors?
Seeing my daughter grow has inspired me to explore my own story. When she turned three, I was brought back to my experience, at that age, of immigrating with my mother and her parents from the USSR to America. It was 1986; my grandfather was dying and needed open heart surgery, something he could only get in the United States. My grandparents were refuseniks — denied permission to leave the Soviet Union and fired from their jobs as marine biologists. My mother and grandmother went on a hunger strike, and eventually my mother, her parents, and I were able to leave. My father wasn’t.
In Boston, I learned English and “assimilated” as best I could, but I was filled with uncertainty, not knowing if I’d ever see my father again, not remembering what he looked like anymore. It felt endless but within a year, he arrived. Growing up, I would not have described the immigration, or the severance within my family, as “traumatic,” but having a daughter that age made it easier for me to finally acknowledge and process those difficult feelings.
Growing up, I would not have described the immigration, or the severance within my family, as “traumatic,” but having a daughter that age made it easier for me to finally acknowledge and process those difficult feelings.
As a teenager, I watched my grandmother learn to type so she could write her memoirs — about growing up in Poland, the murder of her family during World War II, and how she had survived by escaping to Russia on foot and continued to survive in the Soviet Union as a Jew. For many years, this file sat in my computer, unopened. I was scared that if I read her painful story, I would carry it forever. It was only after she died, on the night of her funeral, that I finally opened the file. As I began reading, I realized that I had already been carrying her story with me for my entire life. It was not something I could avoid, but I could trace its effects on the generations who came after her — something I try to do through fiction in my new novel, Mother Doll. I stayed up late reading my grandmother’s memoirs. Then I began to translate them so that my daughter would be able to read them one day, too.
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Nothing Vanishes from History Without a Trace
Ruth Madievsky
There is a particular brand of dark humor that binds Soviet Jews together. When my grandmother describes the Siege of Leningrad, she claims, deadpan, that she witnessed people chasing each other through the streets with forks and knives. My grandfather used to cheerfully pronounce that, when all was lost, at least you could make moonshine from a chair leg. After my other grandmother died after a short but brutal illness in 2015, my grandfather sat shiva by covering their mirror with a beach towel featuring two cartoonishly hot women in thongs. This was the tea I was steeped in. So, when I wrote my debut novel, All-Night Pharmacy, I couldn’t imagine exploring intergenerational trauma in a way that wasn’t funny. For us, nothing was so sacred as to be off limits.
I was born in Soviet Moldova and immigrated to Los Angeles as a Jewish refugee when I was two. The horrors of state-sanctioned antisemitism were not something I personally experienced, yet they still affected me. My great-grandfather was murdered by the KGB, possibly because he taught Torah in his basement. My father had to serve in the Soviet army in order to earn one of the few spots in medical school that were open to Jews. Perhaps this explains, at least partly, why I struggle with anxiety, why my parents’ disappointment feels like a medical emergency. Why I wrote a darkly comic novel about two sisters contending with addiction, urban loneliness, and the weight of the past. And now, here I am in Los Angeles, eating mediocre waffle cake I picked up from the post-Soviet deli with the mean cashier, reflecting on history from my safe little desk chair.
When I wrote All-Night Pharmacy, I couldn’t imagine exploring intergenerational trauma in a way that wasn’t funny. For us, nothing was so sacred as to be off limits.
In Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, Svetlana Alexievich writes, “What happens between two people at night vanishes from history without a trace.” I wrote All-Night Pharmacy partly to preserve my family lore, which I feared was at risk of being lost. But after writing the novel, I no longer believe such things can in fact be lost. They might disappear from consciousness, sure. Future generations could lose out on the opportunity to know those who came before. But I’ve come to understand that historical traumas leech into the bones of those who come after. Nothing vanishes from history without a trace.
Katya Apekina is a novelist, screenwriter, and translator. Her debut novel, The Deeper the Water, the Uglier the Fish, was named a Best Book of 2018 by Kirkus, Buzzfeed, Lithub, and others, was a finalist for The LA Times Book Prize, and has been translated into Spanish, Catalan, French, German, and Italian. She is the recipient of an Elizabeth George grant, an Olin Fellowship, the Alena Wilson prize, and a Third Year Fiction Fellowship from Washington University in St. Louis, where she did her MFA. She has done residences at VCCA, Playa, Ucross, Art Omi: Writing, and Fondation Jan Michalski in Switzerland. Born in Moscow, she moved to the US when she was three years old and currently lives in Los Angeles, California. Mother Doll is her second novel.
Ruth Madievsky is the author of a bestselling poetry collection, Emergency Brake (Tavern Books, 2016). Her work appears in Harper’s Bazaar, Guernica, Literary Hub, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is a founding member of the Cheburashka Collective, a community of women and nonbinary writers from the former Soviet Union. Originally from Moldova, she lives in Los Angeles, where she works as an HIV and primary care pharmacist.
