Reflections on the Pain of Losing One’s Country
by Alexandra Grabbe
In 1977 Pomerica Press published part one of my father’s memoir titled Windows on the River Neva as an eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution. The press promptly went bankrupt, foiling plans for distribution. My father Paul Grabbe resumed what seemed like a never-ending attempt to commit his life to paper. He remained very disciplined about it, even into his eighties, retreating to his study after breakfast to describe living in Denmark from 1919 to 1923. He also wrote about his adventures in the United States, where he eventually settled on Cape Cod.
Dad typed slowly, with two fingers on a 1938 Underwood. I can still hear the clatter of the keys, the way the machine dinged at the end of each line, the click, click, click when he rolled the paper up by hand to read over each new paragraph. He worked extraordinarily hard, devoting time every day to writing. After his death at age ninety-seven, I found the rough drafts—seven boxes of them—stored in the attic. The title was Émigré, 95 Years in the Life of a Russian Count. Once I had pieced together the full manuscript, I decided to publish. I did so for a number of reasons. First and foremost, respect for the literary effort that went into all those typewritten pages. Secondly, historical content. My grandfather was a close aide to the tsar, and scholars are still fascinated by daily life in pre-revolutionary Russia. Thirdly, uniqueness. Few memoirs of the full immigrant experience exist.
In 1982, a reporter from the Cape Cod Times interviewed my father about Windows on the River Neva. He told the reporter future volumes would show what it was like for a European immigrant to adjust to the United States. Revolution had made him an outcast, forcing him to flee, leaving his country behind, like the Syrian refugees we have seen on the evening news. Dad left Russia in 1919, at age seventeen. His family was fortunate to escape to Denmark, since his father’s name was on a hit list.
Dad got a job as a clerk at an international company in Copenhagen and managed to talk his boss into sending him to Estonia. While there, he took a trip to the border, where he realized, for the first time, how much he missed his homeland:
I at once recognized the sights and sounds of a provincial Russian town: signs written in Cyrillic lettering on every storefront, on bare walls, on dilapidated signposts; buxom women in colorful kerchiefs behind their vegetable stalls; horse-drawn droshkies, plodding along. And everyone was speaking Russian. I paused in front of a store window to listen to passers-by.
‘Where’s the frontier?’ I said to a man who seemed to be a schoolteacher.
He pointed to a nearby hill. ‘On the other side, there’s a strip of land several versts wide. We call it No Man’s Land.’ He smiled sardonically, glad to share his feelings with a stranger. ‘It separates our country from the land of the Bolsheviki.’
I climbed up to the summit where I sat down on a fallen tree trunk. The day was overcast. Marshland extended to the east. In the distance, I could make out a wooded area, the frontier. Even as I strained to see it, my mind raced beyond those woods, 100 miles east to Petrograd, my birthplace. For quite some time I sat there in the mist and gazed straight ahead, motionless and silent.
Back at the station I noticed a railroad car on a siding. ‘Is that part of the train returning to Reval?’ I asked the stationmaster.
‘That’s the private car of Maxim Litvinov, Commissar for Foreign Affairs. He has to wait for a locomotive to take him to Moscow.’
I glanced at the railroad car again. He could go back to Russia and I couldn’t. In his eyes, I would be an enemy of the people. As I reflect on the intense distress I felt that day, I now realize that the loss of one’s country can be one of life’s greatest sorrows. Exile, I’ve learned, is not emigration. It’s not something you choose voluntarily, such as a different place to live. It means being expelled from your homeland to live elsewhere, accepting from then on the world of a stranger, becoming someone who must always grope to understand a culture not his own.
We can watch the refugees from Syria on television and be moved by their plight, but we cannot understand the horror of being uprooted unless we have lived it ourselves. Few of us realize what it means to become a refugee. To start over with nothing. No friends, no money, no home. No belongings. Limited knowledge of a new country. Inability to speak the language of that country.
Pavel Alexandrovich Grabbe came to the United States in 1923. It was a period when the “American Dream” drew immigrants from all over the world. His first jobs included a waiter in a tuberculosis sanitarium, a dishwasher, a gold-miner. In Hollywood, his savings ran out, and he almost starved. In San Francisco, he spent six months working as a pallbearer. He devoted all his energy to survival, teaching himself English on the hour-long trolley ride to Cypress Lawn Cemetery. Despite the hardship, he persevered and gradually rose in society to attain a Grade 13 in the federal government, pretty good for an immigrant. Marrying an American helped with integration.
The cover of Émigré features a photo of his key collection, keys that he carried from New York to Denver to Los Angeles, then back to the East Coast where they ended up at the top of a bedroom closet on Cape Cod. I chose this image for its subtext. My father held on to the hope of returning to Russia for years. I don’t think he accepted the idea that he would never see his country again until 1944, the year he met my mother. She helped him come to grips with the loss of his country. The Bolsheviks interrupted his education and appropriated his family home – Boris Pasternak describes a similar appropriation in Dr. Zhivago, when Yurii Andreievich returns to his wife’s estate in the Ural Mountains and discovers Bolsheviks have seized the main house. The same thing happened to Dad’s home in St. Petersburg. The thirty-seven room apartment was divided up in order to accommodate several families. The Bolsheviks may have been able to seize his apartment, but they couldn’t crush his spirit.
Later in life, after glasnost, people asked whether he planned to return to Russia. He said no. Such a trip would be too painful.
I’d find my home occupied by strangers. It’s unlikely that they would know my family name. I would probably want to avoid certain parts of the city, like the Moika Canal, where my uncle was stoned to death. There is something else, too, besides troubling associations. I know all too well that losing one’s homeland leaves a wound that is slow to heal. To return might open it, a risk I do not intend to take.
The world has changed since my father’s journey one hundred years ago. He became a citizen in 1934. Although his immigrant story is one of success, he never got over the loss of Russia. Today thousands of Syrian refugees seek a new life far from home. I hope that when the civil war ends, they will be allowed to return to their native land, a choice my Dad never had.
Alexandra Grabbe is the author of Wellfleet, An Insider’s Guide to Cape Cod’s Trendiest Town. Her recent work has appeared in The Washington Post, Better After 50, and The Offbeat. She is writing a novel about a French Resistance fighter.
by Alexandra Grabbe
In 1977 Pomerica Press published part one of my father’s memoir titled Windows on the River Neva as an eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution. The press promptly went bankrupt, foiling plans for distribution. My father Paul Grabbe resumed what seemed like a never-ending attempt to commit his life to paper. He remained very disciplined about it, even into his eighties, retreating to his study after breakfast to describe living in Denmark from 1919 to 1923. He also wrote about his adventures in the United States, where he eventually settled on Cape Cod.
Dad typed slowly, with two fingers on a 1938 Underwood. I can still hear the clatter of the keys, the way the machine dinged at the end of each line, the click, click, click when he rolled the paper up by hand to read over each new paragraph. He worked extraordinarily hard, devoting time every day to writing. After his death at age ninety-seven, I found the rough drafts—seven boxes of them—stored in the attic. The title was Émigré, 95 Years in the Life of a Russian Count. Once I had pieced together the full manuscript, I decided to publish. I did so for a number of reasons. First and foremost, respect for the literary effort that went into all those typewritten pages. Secondly, historical content. My grandfather was a close aide to the tsar, and scholars are still fascinated by daily life in pre-revolutionary Russia. Thirdly, uniqueness. Few memoirs of the full immigrant experience exist.
In 1982, a reporter from the Cape Cod Times interviewed my father about Windows on the River Neva. He told the reporter future volumes would show what it was like for a European immigrant to adjust to the United States. Revolution had made him an outcast, forcing him to flee, leaving his country behind, like the Syrian refugees we have seen on the evening news. Dad left Russia in 1919, at age seventeen. His family was fortunate to escape to Denmark, since his father’s name was on a hit list.
Dad got a job as a clerk at an international company in Copenhagen and managed to talk his boss into sending him to Estonia. While there, he took a trip to the border, where he realized, for the first time, how much he missed his homeland:
I at once recognized the sights and sounds of a provincial Russian town: signs written in Cyrillic lettering on every storefront, on bare walls, on dilapidated signposts; buxom women in colorful kerchiefs behind their vegetable stalls; horse-drawn droshkies, plodding along. And everyone was speaking Russian. I paused in front of a store window to listen to passers-by.
‘Where’s the frontier?’ I said to a man who seemed to be a schoolteacher.
He pointed to a nearby hill. ‘On the other side, there’s a strip of land several versts wide. We call it No Man’s Land.’ He smiled sardonically, glad to share his feelings with a stranger. ‘It separates our country from the land of the Bolsheviki.’
I climbed up to the summit where I sat down on a fallen tree trunk. The day was overcast. Marshland extended to the east. In the distance, I could make out a wooded area, the frontier. Even as I strained to see it, my mind raced beyond those woods, 100 miles east to Petrograd, my birthplace. For quite some time I sat there in the mist and gazed straight ahead, motionless and silent.
Back at the station I noticed a railroad car on a siding. ‘Is that part of the train returning to Reval?’ I asked the stationmaster.
‘That’s the private car of Maxim Litvinov, Commissar for Foreign Affairs. He has to wait for a locomotive to take him to Moscow.’
I glanced at the railroad car again. He could go back to Russia and I couldn’t. In his eyes, I would be an enemy of the people. As I reflect on the intense distress I felt that day, I now realize that the loss of one’s country can be one of life’s greatest sorrows. Exile, I’ve learned, is not emigration. It’s not something you choose voluntarily, such as a different place to live. It means being expelled from your homeland to live elsewhere, accepting from then on the world of a stranger, becoming someone who must always grope to understand a culture not his own.
We can watch the refugees from Syria on television and be moved by their plight, but we cannot understand the horror of being uprooted unless we have lived it ourselves. Few of us realize what it means to become a refugee. To start over with nothing. No friends, no money, no home. No belongings. Limited knowledge of a new country. Inability to speak the language of that country.
Pavel Alexandrovich Grabbe came to the United States in 1923. It was a period when the “American Dream” drew immigrants from all over the world. His first jobs included a waiter in a tuberculosis sanitarium, a dishwasher, a gold-miner. In Hollywood, his savings ran out, and he almost starved. In San Francisco, he spent six months working as a pallbearer. He devoted all his energy to survival, teaching himself English on the hour-long trolley ride to Cypress Lawn Cemetery. Despite the hardship, he persevered and gradually rose in society to attain a Grade 13 in the federal government, pretty good for an immigrant. Marrying an American helped with integration.
The cover of Émigré features a photo of his key collection, keys that he carried from New York to Denver to Los Angeles, then back to the East Coast where they ended up at the top of a bedroom closet on Cape Cod. I chose this image for its subtext. My father held on to the hope of returning to Russia for years. I don’t think he accepted the idea that he would never see his country again until 1944, the year he met my mother. She helped him come to grips with the loss of his country. The Bolsheviks interrupted his education and appropriated his family home – Boris Pasternak describes a similar appropriation in Dr. Zhivago, when Yurii Andreievich returns to his wife’s estate in the Ural Mountains and discovers Bolsheviks have seized the main house. The same thing happened to Dad’s home in St. Petersburg. The thirty-seven room apartment was divided up in order to accommodate several families. The Bolsheviks may have been able to seize his apartment, but they couldn’t crush his spirit.
Later in life, after glasnost, people asked whether he planned to return to Russia. He said no. Such a trip would be too painful.
I’d find my home occupied by strangers. It’s unlikely that they would know my family name. I would probably want to avoid certain parts of the city, like the Moika Canal, where my uncle was stoned to death. There is something else, too, besides troubling associations. I know all too well that losing one’s homeland leaves a wound that is slow to heal. To return might open it, a risk I do not intend to take.
The world has changed since my father’s journey one hundred years ago. He became a citizen in 1934. Although his immigrant story is one of success, he never got over the loss of Russia. Today thousands of Syrian refugees seek a new life far from home. I hope that when the civil war ends, they will be allowed to return to their native land, a choice my Dad never had.
Alexandra Grabbe is the author of Wellfleet, An Insider’s Guide to Cape Cod’s Trendiest Town. Her recent work has appeared in The Washington Post, Better After 50, and The Offbeat. She is writing a novel about a French Resistance fighter.