This is a photo my husband took for me in the men’s bathroom of the Busch Stadium:
That stadium is very cute. I would have loved to visit it if baseball were not so excruciatingly boring. They sell hot dogs and sauerkraut, which would make almost anything tolerable. Not baseball, though.
This is such an odd thing to put in a men’s bathroom. It sounded absurd the first time I read it.
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Sort of vaguely apropos, when I was in B-pest I was looking around a large flea market with all kinds of weird stuff including a lot of flotsam and jetsam from WWII and the communist period.
Anyhoo, at one point I overheard an American lady* expounding in detail to a Hungarian guy she was there with about what was wrong with some antique piece of furniture.
Sometime later I happened to see him pointing to portraits of Hitler and Lennon hanging next to each other (not sure if the juxtaposition was on purpose).
“Yeah, yeah”, she said not stopping “Marx and Lennon!”
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Interesting article by a woman who came to the U.S. from Ukraine:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122347/i-brought-my-daughter-war-torn-ukraine-america
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This is a very good article, thank you! Immigration is always a very serious trauma whose consequences one will be shouldering for as long as one shall live. People would do well if they remember how traumatic the experience is for the children, especially since it’s not their own choice.
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Immigration is a dislocation, obviously. But in the linked article, I’m not sure how much of the kid’s initial reactions to life in New York City were due to the fact she was in a safer place and therefore could have delayed reactions to being separated from her parents and war and her school being disrupted. From her mother’s report, it seems like she adjusted amazingly well. It probably helped that her mother had immigrated as a child and therefore was sensitive to how this experience might affect her daughter. Plus she says her daughter actually got sick less in America than she did before she immigrated.
I always wonder how traumatized one can be if you can’t remember. I “immigrated” before I mastered object permanence so I have no idea. On the other hand, I have family members who did immigrate as school age children, some did so twice. It’s not something we talk about though, and their parents were not apt to call psychotherapists.
I think experiences like these are like seeing ripples from a huge rock thrown into a pond after it sinks to the bottom — you can see the waves much further from the source. I’d check back later to see.
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Kiev is perfectly safe. It’s much safer than New York, actually. And a much more comfortable environment for a child. The references to “war-torn” Ukraine in the article are misleading because it begins to look like the child was removed from the war zone or something. The war zone, however, is very far from Kiev. Kiev is a very safe, happy city with tons of festivals, tourists, etc. Last week, for instance, there was a sex festival where people learned about sex and celebrated sensuality in a city park.
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“War torn with regards to ” Kiev sounds like a Putinite talking point.
I had the impression the author was a Russian (her family had moved from Moscow to Paris?) temporarily in Ukraine when she freaked (kids wearing Ukrainian shirts?! EEEK! and bolted to the safe hole of the US.
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The first comment on the article saying as much because only children of Communist party officials were allowed to leave the country. Perhaps the kid’s issues in Kiev have to deal with her mother’s transmitted anxiety? It’s not like the kid can really evaluate how valid her mother’s fears are as a preschooler.
Plus she seems to have an unusual amount of resources for someone trying to paint herself as a refugee.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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